tempura prawns

To have been told “I love you” by you could well be, for me, the highlight of my life, the best feeling, the best peak on my feeling graph, in the way that the Chrysler building might not be the tallest building in the NY sky but is the best, the most exquisitely spired, or the way that Hank Aaron’s career home-run total is not the highest but the best, the one that signifies the purest greatness. So improbable!  To have met you at all and then to have been told in your soft young voice so soon after meeting you: “I love you.”  And I felt the mystery of being that you, of being a you and being loved, and what I was, instantly, was someone who could be told “I love you” by someone like you. I was, in that moment, new; you were 19; I was 22; you were impulsive; I was there in front of you, with a future that hadn’t yet been burned for fuel; I had energy; you had beauty; and your eyes were a pale blue, and they backed what you said with all they hadn’t seen, and they were the least ambitious eyes I’d known, the least calculating, and when you spoke and when they shone, perhaps you saw the feeling you caused. Perhaps you saw too that the feeling would stay.

This is the story I’ve tried to tell. Guy exists. Father mother sister brother. Oh pretty stars, oh bastard moon I see you watching me. The trembling years leading to sex, the trembling sex. Death as garnish. Death as male lead, female lead, death as a cast of thousands. God in, on, as, with, to, around, because who knows because. All the while feeling air’s a quilt of tongues, that spaces between words are more articulate than words. It’s not like you’d hope, that anyone can make sense. Look around you, let your ears breathe deep — almost no one does. Have another drink. When they throw us out there’s a place down the street that never closes, after that we’ll climb a fire escape and praise the genealogy of light. The Big Bang sounds like what it was, the fucking that got everything under way. That love was there from the start is all I’ve been trying to say.