The Drop

You know the smell. You don’t know the smell, do you. Why would you. The smell of the inside of the hood is like- it’s damp, feels as if the gross, heavy fabric is weighing down into your face, plodding as if it just came in from the rain, and moulding into the small creases and battered skins of your cheeks, your mouth with its arrogant pleasures, your eyes just tickling the grains of its material with your lashes, fast as a hummingbird, while you try to keep them defiantly open, so you can feel, and taste the oncoming death that has been assigned to you, assimilating its face and yours into a Roman death mask of an Emperor.  But you’re no Emperor, are you. Or are you.

How would I know about the smell anyway? I guess the answer is that dreams are real, aren’t they. The day, the night, naked in your bed or drowning at your desk in a mass of terrible grade B, blank stares barking and walking around you, not even so frightening as sharks, since you’re not dying anytime soon, your blood remains on the inside and you’re not going anywhere, are you.  Or are you.  We have all dreamed of our death, and resurrection- it’s just all in how you read it. Most people don’t read. They are all wearing various hoods of their own; stagecoach robbers who don’t want you to know who they are. Running through a haunted house in the dark and shutting your eyes…this is their life. And they love it, the poor bastards, don’t they! You ask most people to explain a daily ritual or task or some benign process (people love their processes) that they have been made to do, become, are annoyed by, and they will tell it to you step by step, with military like detail…"I have this cup of coffee like this, in this cup, at this time, with the special spoon I like to stir it with..."  [leaving out the bottom half of that, something along the lines of “when I drink the coffee, I am not there. I am slipsliding down the mud in my brain banks, thinking about how I shitty I feel when they treat me that way, how like a fat, unwanted child, how ruined in the heart the hours of my day cause me to be, the coffee, the grind, the taste, the dampness cascading and coating my throat and my wants like a hood, waiting in the dark for the switch to be pulled up, gently and completely…”] They never tell you about that last part. Talking straight up ratios: the outer life for most people is about 1:7 or 1:8, minimally, against the inner life…problem is, the inner life has layers too. Hard to rise above the chatter, into the reeds where the wind plays at them, shaping into notes, and through it sounds your own voice, your own song, the one you don’t let anyone listen to. It lies in wait, hiding under the garbage in your personal streets for you to go to sleep, and for your dreams to start. Once that film gets rolling, under the moon or the streetlight taking its place in amber, anything goes. It dusts itself off, hangs out with the whores, the ones who meld with the visiting missionaries, each teaching the other that both reading words of verse about the blooming of your heart takes its place equally alongside the want to be held at the hips, and fucked like an animal. It’s all allowed in the book. The book we are all writing inside. Some of us keep cage doors or old fashioned keys in between the pages, and the chapters...sometimes you have to close one and start anew, but- the plot is Not the story, and the story allows for all things under and over Heaven, where air becomes atmosphere and you can be all those things.  Most people don’t figure out that they can do it here, on this side of things. Their DNA, or their family histories or resonant emotional states hold them down, else some kind of religious bucket list, or one of the scientific mind, telling them they Must be This Way and live This Life, because…..they never get past the because a good deal of the time.  Swimming far out is scary. It is. There is Always another wave coming, and they use each other to build, to rise, sometimes knocking you on your ass and tearing off your protection and your sense of control. You can see them in triangular fashion, constructing empires against you, but at the same moment, your fear takes hold and something in you is elated, is excited and you can’t pretend they’re not turning you on with their majesty, and power. Dive into the middle of them, right at their heart line, and you will be ok.

She still hasn’t gotten around to changing her alarm clock. It’s been months now. She thought the sound of the waves would be a lovely thing to wake up to, but it’s a cheap alarm clock, and the waves sound most definitely synthetic, slightly static ridden, and that, along with the very manufactured click ON just preceding the sound, did not make her think of the ocean when she awoke, but simply made her thinking of the sound of the ocean as something bad, something that shook her out of her sexually supernatural dreams and told her to get up, get down on that hay coloured rug nearby and do her exercises. Her hip and ass, in tightness for some time, will thank her for it and she can continue to strengthen her center, the solar plexus, the thing that says “I need” and “I want”, along with the power that she had been feeling of late really ruminating and ascending in her hands.  The ocean instead should sink into you, surround you and let you drift off to sleep, wherein you just hear snatches of conversation, a quiet Russian couple speaking and reminding you, in some tones and words, of your parents as they used to talk each night before they went to bed, when in the bed. Your father mostly, he worked it all out when he slept. Solved the problems, created the designs and engineered the next nomadic venture.  She was glad that other than the first, she didn’t have one definitive childhood home. It made her create her own conventions and own corners to work her way around and through.  She thought this, as she sat with her own specifically ailment tailored cup of tea and whiskey at the bar, near the back. View of the door. One hooded salesman after another, reams of printing paper falling out of every orifice, each bag, rippling with insecurity and circumstance. Something like a sin about to occur at every moment. We put words and sounds on all these things and made them belong to us, didn’t we. People can’t seem to back themselves up and see that full view of the place, even for a moment or two. 

She wasn’t sure he’d be showing up. She learned to stop thinking so much about it. Sometimes she wished he would just not show up and tell her he was going someplace else instead. She didn’t really wish that, but the breath in her lungs rose too high up in her chest every time she thought the next person opening the door might be him. There was a lot of good reason for him to show up.  Many of the reasons came from his own lips, but she second guessed them the moment they left his mouth or hit the page, more likely.  She was sure of herself, and what her intuition told her and shouldn’t she be smoking at a time like this? People who smoke look a lot more levelheaded when waiting for something or someone.  Like it’s just coincidence that they happened to be sitting there, half empty glass in front of them, eyeing the door and wrapping their liquored lips around the oral vehicle of their choosing.  She felt herself, but like she had misplaced something. Not lost it, exactly. I mean, it was under safe keeping, she was nearly sure of it. But, it was as if the train was being robbed every day, and she had to re-live that every day, and he wasn’t there to tell her otherwise, or show her the big bag full up of her business, which she kindly delivered and then felt, again, as if it wasn’t invited, or needed. Just when she would give up, he would wake up for a moment out of his coma, into a half dreaming haze state, the kind where you have total and complete clarity, and show her that she should sit there, sip her drink and keep looking at the door. How late would the place stay open, she thought? Would they let her sit here all night? No word, and then so much word and flesh wrapped lovingly in the purest wool, not like the hood of brought upon death, or dream confusion or day to day defensive play.  She looked at her watch (which she kept in her bag, since she didn’t wear one – didn’t like the ticking against her skin and wrist pecking at her pulses and reminding her of someplace else she should probably be).  She didn’t know if he would ever show, ever Really show, or send the other guy again in his stead. She didn’t know just what it was he needed her to be there for, but something told her it was big, and that it mattered more than the words he used and could say.  At least she liked to think that.

She ordered another tea, without the tea this time, and smelled the sweet and dark scent of it moving down her throat. It built protection over the dampness of the execution hood. Now that she heard herself say that in the inside voice, the only one that seemed to flourish, she wondered if we had a choice in the matter, of the death and its manners. We can wear the hood that cuts us off from the pain, the struggle, the depths and the secrets that forced us (or so we think) into that electric chair (or whatever mode you prefer), or we can wear the hood, drier and more constant, as the executioner himself. Mask our weakness and individuality for a moment, and let that ax fall of our own will, as we both bow down to it and ride it, like the tallest, most formative and looming wave coming at us in droves, and whether it takes us down for a spell or dissipates into a low tide of level foam, we are our own executioners and we can choose That over night after night and day after day of the switch banishing us into the darkness of our own fears, about our selves, our wants, our contradictions and our divine likenesses, blood gushing from our loins, excuses bearing down as our heads roll, we shit ourselves, think our last dirty thought and perish. That, though, is when we open our eyes. Alive, and free. Our executioner’s identity safe from our knowledge, he recesses deeper back into us, probably to visit one of our livelier whores, right after she finishes her next chapter and changes her undies again.

"I am free right now”, she says out loud in a quiet voice. “Nearly”, she says to the inside walls again, as the whiskey disintegrates the forms of her ice and she makes it knock quietly against the sides of the short glass. She wonders if he will be wearing his hood, and if so, which role will he chose to play in the end.  Condensation forming upon the front window, a shadow moves just outside, and the door creaks open, bringing with it the slightest taste of a salty ocean breeze.