Where your heart is covered in dew

Then at once there was something terrible about the sight of her body beside the sea; I feared her collapsing again, plunging into the water, God Forbid. I lowered the camera and approached her, shouting Come Back, Come Back from there. I spoke in her tongue: It is time to hit the streets. She obeyed, galloping to me and around, jumping very high in the air, landed on my back, suddenly vital, her shins cradling my groin and my press of her bony knees to my hips, her lips glossy insect wings fluttering my cheeks, moist, different than they had felt indoors. Along the shore, we walked that way, without question: A change was taking place. Restoration, I thought, never mind its origins.

Home is where someone notices you've been away

An aluminum can doesn’t absorb anything besides air, so why should I? If I can consider the possibility of surviving on nothing, then goddamn I should be able to. The possibility! Why can’t I be like a monk. Or a tightrope. Or a train. And you, you’re a man on a train platform, waiting. Just waiting. Or the guy with the camera underneath the tightrope walker, shooting up between her thighs. But now I’m the train and I’ve got news for you, Mister: It’s not coming! And the tightrope, it splayed and split down the middle and the girl came crashing down. And the monk fell asleep. So what do you do? What’s your act of rebellion?
Rebellion was lodged safely within Amanda’s pristine, tear-less folds.

Like trapped sunlight working its way out of a cave

Back in the living room she reclined, partially upright in the chair that now seemed patriarchal, a cigarette jutting beyond her wrist. She turned to face me, then kneaded the carpet with her foot. Like trapped sunlight working its way out of a cave, her voice said, Sit here.

Cross-legged, I gazed up at her. When I squinted I could see who she would be if her cheeks filled out and the grooves flanking her eyes and mouth lifted. In several of her older photos she had looked that way, Amazonian, genetically elite. Unlike the rest, her eyes were colossal. This close, her makeup was vaudevillian.

Then she started talking:

What if there were a way, some vast and magical way, like an umbrella opening, for me to show you exactly what it means, what it all means, for me to be here, next to you, communing before you, on top of you, above you, beside you, so it feels like you’re deep enough inside to touch my heart—deep enough to see the cobwebs and light fixtures fall away, so all that’s visible is bright, glimmering sunshine, pond-dapple golden sunshine, so beautiful that you have no choice but to dive right into it, going deeper than you have before, deeper than you thought was possible, in the depths required to really know me, and knowing me is at the tip of the shore of what you thought it meant to know, way far out and beyond what it ever felt like to know anybody before, because we’ve transcended the visual through feeling alone, and you know like a sudden thunderclap that inside of me is where you need to stay forever, because inside of me makes you finally understand the definition of permanence: those are the words you say to me when you’re there inside of me, in union; and I know you too, in the same way, through feeling alone, because we are people who deal in the immutable, with touch the only way to know. Do you see what I’m trying to say, I’m trying to say, I’m trying…You. You. You, you beautiful man with your big lips molded from gobs and gobs of clay. You with your steely build. You make me an ambrosiac. I could eat you. You: Who are you? My supreme rescuer? How did you find me? What are you doing here? You. How did you get your name? Your strong legs? You. Do you see what I’m trying to say?

She was breaking my balls. I nearly cried. To distract, I stood and picked her up, my darling sack of puffed rice, and carried her down the hall and through the first door on the left, which I had correctly sensed was her bedroom, and laid her down like a swath of flowers. Breaking dusk sent in spectral amber light.

She sat up, and I unwound her fabrics. Once I hit skin, I knew I wouldn’t get hard. Her body was like a sideshow. I wanted to rub my hands across her face, or give her a bath, feed her fried chicken, candy bars, fudge, candy bars dipped in fudge, homemade macaroni and cheese with the bready top, soft pretzels with salt and hot cheese and canned jalapeno peppers, white layer cake covered in macadamia nuts, elephant ears with sugar that caked under her weak nails, rocky road gelato; tuck her in to her big bed, read her a story, then tell her a story if the reading hadn’t worked, hear her reassuring breaths of sleep, then lay beside her, my hand on her stomach, and feel it grow.

She wasn’t wearing a bra. I gasped.

Told ya, she said.

In that light her eyes were glazed over with a fine film. They were fixed on me, edgy and pleading. Shh, I whispered, and eased her onto her back, ran my hands over her stomach, concave, avoiding her child’s breasts. She huffed air the way I did during my attacks. I let my hand rest on her stark chest, and she calmed. With thoughts of the photographs that had led me there, I found the resolve to enter her.

No matter which way I tilted the album to give a different view of the herb, there were always three sprigs stemming from a sturdy center and thick buds, but oddly. They did not spread out from all sides of the stem, but rather only from the right, as though the Amaranth’s growth had been stunted. If it were planted and growing, each Amaranth would look like this, partially developed, resembling a letter “E.”

And this is the way

The album held no photos, only natural things, a wealth of plant and insect life both obscure and familiar, a careful account of Louise’s communion with the non-human world. We came to a page fitted with a sheet of paper that said, in careful script, “Amaranths.” Following it were fifty or so pages of the same pressed herb in different poses, yet always with the same four delicate sprigs stemming from buds at a sturdy center. At times tiny flowers clung to these sprigs, while at others there was only a lone bloom, a single sprig, or a bud-less center. We flipped and grew stunned at the sheer quantity of similar sights, which began to seem obscene. Judging by those waxen pages, the Amaranth was the only herb in the world.

Mirrored, it was like a number 3.

The way it hung made the Amaranth appear deformed, or at the start of a long and arduous illness. Like a half-breed its blooms gleamed iridescent through the pages, neither purple nor turquoise. The fragmented herb belonged either at the furthest depths of the sea or the summit of earth’s highest point.

Hazel asked me what they were.

Amaranth, or Amarant (from the Greek amarantos, unwithering), and applied to Amaranth and other plants which, not soon fading, typified immortality

X - O?

Our modern, "positional" number system has rendered us well attuned to that orb that stands in for nothing. It strikes a stark contrast beside the Roman numeral X, part of a system that had no place for soft, furry edgelessness, let alone a placeholder to signify the void. Although argued, Zero is said to have originated somewhere in India, in the intellectual flowering under the Gupta dynasty, about the 6th century C.E. (Roundness came gradually, though, with no traceable gooey moment of void discovery.) And so it was that an endless line came to stand for nothing.

The Amaranth, Part II

“When we perceive the end in the beginning, we move faster than time. Illumination, the lightning disappointment, affords a certitude which transforms disillusion into deliverance.”

-E.M. Cioran

XIII

I eyed my horse for a long time. Its glossy flesh-sheen merged with a wall of water at turns massive and unyielding, at others shy and meager. When the wall receded my horse stood out in stark relief on the late-day vermillion sea ether, foam lulling on its hoofs, as bones are foils to the desert sun that bleaches them. The refracting of my horse and the sea, between union and non-union, mirrored Louise in her oscillations. Even now, as I swung back around to seek her loving gaze, all I saw was Billy fidgeting on the shore: she and baby Grace had altogether vanished.

For to see Louise appear was to see her part. Her tendency to wander had made me anxious around her, always anticipating the inevitable tumult of her departure. To have her near meant presence alongside proof of non-being. To survive what struck as enduring betrayal I had no choice but to accept non-attachment over permanence, ephemeral beyond fated. Only by letting fall away such hope for continuity would time’s merciless bind dissolve.

Seeing Billy refracted my gaze, and my yearnings: instead of hurling myself into the water, to redeem my lost horse, I sought to rage at his useless guise of power, brute and impetuous as it had proven to be. His mermaid belt smacked not of the careful work of a loving woman, but of that same rank darkness of Hazel’s daddy. And so I flew from Billy, with the mania of a bat, down the shore, to Louise.

Waves that crash in the expected way

I've been thinking about chaos, how best to condition it.