BETWEEN VOID AND BEING

This is as far as I go.

I am accustomed to intimacy by proximity.

I will pray with you, but I keep the hosannas to myself. My knees belong to me.

I will court you, but my roses draw fresh blood, yours, and the thorns, always the thorns.

I will be your confidante, but I am a confidence man on the getaway, my Packard packed.

My name is immaterial. I have forsaken the conventional hero’s journey, straying far from the circular footpath that begins with exhilarating exploration and concludes with redemption, a new me, new skin, of the earth and sky, lore. I favor existing mid arc, amongst crisis and calamity. No one writes soaring epic sagas about the middle. Go ahead, find one. I will namelessly wait as aimless authors ponder, fidget, and lanterns go black.

She was an object in a parking lot, no more than that, and I, a savior of sorts, a bearded, lean muscled monster (thank you, keto) on a mission of rescue, having pulled many—so many just like her—from Hell’s blistering grip. She was a summer dress and sandals and in distress, and I asked, are you my purpose?

I’m having a bad day. It’s all gone to pieces. Her oranges were running wild on the gray asphalt, a gummy and oily canvas, a minor world tilting, and the shambling grocery carts were loose-jointed beetles entering and exiting, entering, and exiting, entering, and exiting. Us. Me and Courtney. I may as well give her a name. It may help the story.

Courtney's flapping banner was a tattered, ruptured paper sack, and I was on my white steed, Sir Galahad, with aching hips. I climb down; armor fused to skin and bone. Here, let me help. My words, dynamite on a serpentine fuse, alight. A serpent’s tongue is also an apt description. Thankfully, you didn't buy eggs. I always add a dab of humor to the tip of my poison-tipped spear, and I am now a pygmy warrior, mixing my metaphors, eyes crossing, trying to keep everything straight. My focus often meanders on the hunt, my mind here. There. Then back. My nose samples the air. She smells raw. Does Courtney hear the gears clicking in my head?

You’re too kind.

And the trap is sprung. If it’s not too forward of me, I’d love to stay in touch—if you’d like. My name is…

I see a lovely orange under the drooping bumper of her Chevy Vega. Then I pretended not to see it. Then I don’t see it. Courtney gives me her phone number. It may as well be a fillet knife. I will arrive with a single red rose on our first date. And in a hundred tomorrow's, she will be bled white.

The second half of a man's life is made up of nothing but the habits he has acquired during the first half.

Dostoevsky, he knew, though I am not sure how he knew when the first half ended and the second began. In between void and being, he and I? I think how smart I must seem to quote a desiccated Russian writer. If I could only be a political prisoner at my worm-eaten desk, wobbling uneven legs on uneven stone, candlelight throwing shadows across sunken cheeks, and my beard a reflective white, with one tiny window to dream through, all those long, solitary nights. My Instagram profile would be fantastic if that were so, but here I sit, ignoring my therapist, and I remember a spider I washed down the sink this morning. I returned an hour later, and it was mounting the soap dish, a bar of Zest, Mt. Everest. So I attempted murder again and washed my hands.

Am I the spider or the drain? The light in my head flickers. I can almost see my way out.

How was your day?

Courtney or the spider?

Where to begin and end, in the in-between.