I didn't think I would live this long. I didn't imagine the day when I wasn't Spinoza alone with my polished glass spheres, when I'd sit in pajamas after two beers—when I would feel the pull of anyone else on my heart.
I'm sorry for mocking the child that lives in you. Her short hair is lovely, and it doesn't matter what bra she will wear in ten years.
I just—am I afraid? I want to be so good, I want—maybe you've seen them. There is an army of sneers. There are so many bigots in Umatilla with twisted mushrooms hearts. I have heard too many jokes—just jokes?—that made my blood boil. I want to show them that compassion and patience are enough.
I want to reach out to alienated anarchists with grimaces for those who wear ties—they're people! Their bodies are asymmetrical, their genitals are flaccid, they have the same birthmarks you do.
And I want to prove that Umatilla isn't hopeless, to show New Jersey that the South can be deep, that a skyscraper is not tall enough. I want to nail it, to kill it so you feel how lonely it can get no matter where you go, how the heart knocks against the ribcage—I have tears in my eyes and I'm keeping perfect grammar—how silly.
If I have gotten grease on your songs of childhood, have asked you what you fear, I am sorry, I just—you can be a child if you want—I don't want someone to steal it from you, even if I must ask loudly, if coarsely. There are too many children who have been robbed and now they are geysers of blood who spit blood and taste blood—beaten girls with split lips whose skin rots off. We wound without knowing—and I have failed, my god, I have failed so many times.
I will forget even this, but not completely, so whatever remains to move me, don't let me forget that I, here, just want a family again—and it doesn't mean we go back into the womb or pretend that there is no womb. There is—but a monkey's life is so much more than ramming and receiving. There is the sun, these fruits and bugs and shining pools of rain on the ground that take in the stars by night.
I just want to look down for once in my monkey life and see the stars, drink the fruit, fall asleep with you and have faith that for one night—please, just one—we have seen the very same stars. I'm sorry I don't move you, haven't suffered as you have, haven't been braver, have my limbs, sorry for my irony, like it can save anything—and even grateful for it to laugh—just once—to laugh.
Let us get good and pull us together. I know you are trying. I am sorry to the people I have been and accept my apologies from the future. I understand I don't matter: I give up my past to fill the present, to strike hard and hot and turn the earth to steel and plastic so that you have a doll to hold when you are three years old, so we have wires between North Carolina in January and wherever and whenever you are—so we see ever more, so that now we are in the puddle with the stars and that tree and its rosy fruit hanging behind us, colorless in the night, and the orange of the firelight on our furry faces. We are teenagers and will die teenagers, so let's widen the puddle—it's not a symbol but a puddle in the soil and the sun will dry it in the morning and I will forget my hands and my past and die—just to believe that you are me and I am you, that your shoulder is sore, that you are dressed in dirty clothing, your nose is running, and your parents have smoked for decades, that we are filthy and we are children and we are so, oh my god, so old—
that we have both cried and scrawled. And I look at you and it moves down into me, to the bottom of every ocean, across every sea, from seed to redwood, inside each mitochondrion humming in every cell.
We were the same cell a million years ago in some primate Eve's womb—all the same stupid, beautiful thing.
It's not a sermon, it's just me crying out. I'm not good enough, but I'm gonna try. I don't know what else to do. I'll learn to drum and dance, to fence and speak Farsi, learn what you have been, sister, mother, bacterium a billion dead, because I need to live it, every second, more and more, let me bring you in, lift you up and for one second, you are here with tears that will not leave your eyes, you are me, you are typing, I can't .. I can't end it, this is too long already, but it is so good, life, you, you, you. I can't not try every symbol I know. Please let me have been brave, have tried; let me be Clotho and Lachesis, let me be the Muses, let's just be Jesus together, let's take him down from the cross and take our turns climbing up there, and when we have all bled—but not died, he doesn't have to die, we don't have to die—then, then we can go on living, however dirty, however long we wait alone, just believe it. Let me birth you, let me cradle you as you sleep, let us get sick together, let us spend a year alone together, let us even cheat on each other together.
Let us launch a thousand ships and sail to kill each other together. You, you you you you and Eris and Jesus and every Nazi and every person who died alone of the plague, every dead dinosaur who saw those fateful comet photons and my little bird, you and me, and all of it, all of it, please.