Informally, adiue.

You were suddenmotion
Stopped. a still-gliding
Realism suspended, looking
Down and smiling. My own tongue's
Tentative steps across a tightrope, looking
Down,
Overly aware of infinity,
and tornadoes,
Of Allocution(s)
-pilingontopofoneanother-
Accidentally tripping hopelessly
over and over and over again,
Covered in salt and spit,
losing speed, but flooding,
spilling all over the world and asking:
What if you were supposed to be a second language?
"Je vous aime, aussi," You said,
And the world evaporated
into brilliant and small
Forgettable recollections;
always spinning,
always laughing,
Always.

And still–
You never lost your balance.

I lost my balance.
I fell.
I looked back and watched
As you got smaller and smaller
Until I couldn't even recognize you anymore.

You took a more convincing fall off that rope
(But don't think
I didn't see your legs shaking before.
Don't think I didn't see you
Lose your balance),

And while now,
Years later, you are trying again to walk across that string, I would very much like to close my eyes and forget
that I was
ever in a position
to look down at the world
and smile.

Why

I just tried to write a poem.
Fuck poems.

Significance

The sun exploded. It exploded with no hesitation. There was no forethought to it, certainly no afterthought, and absolutely no regard whatsoever for anything else in the solar system. There was a "Geeze, is it hot enough for ya?" shouted somewhere in the middle of a city, by a man of no significance, to no one in particular, and then the earth turned black like a marshmallow fallen into a campfire.

That morning, in a kitchen, just before being turned to cinders, Kelly Henderson held a frying pan under a stream of warm water in her sink to clean off the egg residue leftover from her breakfast. More than anything, Kelly wanted to learn how to salsa dance. She wanted to know what it felt like to move suggestively in public, to lead with her hips, to capture the attention of a room full of strangers. There was a flash and Kelly fried faster than her eggs.

Salsa dancing now exists nowhere in the universe because the sun exploded.

Elsewhere that day, Simon Sherman, a man who enjoyed the fact he had two first names, whistled along the sidewalk while he walked to get his morning coffee. In the midst of his stroll, he recited the only French phrase he knew to himself in his head. Je vous pense tout le temps, he thought, over and over, hopeful that he might catch a certain young lady's attention that day. There was a distinct sound, a pop, the same kind of noise a small bubble blown out of gum makes when it expands to quickly, a precipitous explosion of heat, and the girl (Eileen Anderson was her name) was no longer around (nor was anybody else for that matter) to find out how much he thought about her.

Because the sun exploded, French currently exists in only two other places in the universe.

A young girl named Lizzie woke up that morning with the vague notion that it was going to be an odd day. Having lost her grandmother to lung cancer earlier that month, Lizzie had formulated a shaky comprehension of the concept of death, though it was full of holes and abstractions. Before her Grandmother passed, she had pulled Lizzie tightly into her arms, squeezed her with what little strength she had left and whispered, "I'll miss you, my Lizzie. But don't be sad. I've been so happy with my life."

Lizzie was under the impression that as long as you were happy, death was really nothing to worry about.

Walking into the kitchen, Lizzie discovered that her Father had woken up early to make her her favorite breakfast: French Toast. The little girl smiled and laughed and whirled and clapped her hands, and then there was a flash and then there was nothing.

It really wasn't anything to worry about.

I'm going to go crazy if I don't get some sleep soon.

Years ago (pause to think of a substantial memory), when I was (young, naive, optimistic?) more fun to be around, I had this idea that things had a way of working themselves out. If this were true, (pause to think of example) you could dismantle a wristwatch, throw all of the pieces into the air, and, when it landed, expect it to reassemble perfectly to form a fully functional working timepiece. Laying awake in bed, at this junction in my life, I still can't help but ask myself: "Where am I?"

Every time Gary showered he felt guilty. How could he not, with so many people dropping dead all over the world? The warm water that fired onto his face and cascaded from his chin down to his neck, shoulders, and legs, no longer brought relief to Gary, or a sense of cleanliness. No, now whenever Gary showered all he thought about were people in third world countries who had no clean water to drink. And then there was Gary, going and making it dirty.

But was he really all that dirty to begin with?

Gary decided he would shower less frequently.

And so it was that Gary decided to only shower every other day. This worked for a while, but soon Gary was in the habit of only showering once weekly.

But this was not enough for Gary, while simultaneously being too much. He decided to modify the way he showered as a whole. Instead of one constant stream of water, Gary would turn the faucet on only when necessary, so as to not waste any more water than he needed to. Gary would turn on the shower to wet his hair, but then would turn it off to apply his shampoo, turning it on again when it was time to rinse. Conditioner and body wash were also administered this way.

This rinse cycle was successful for Gary until the winter came, when the intermittent breaks between hot water eventually led to his catching pneumonia.

Gary died.

But before he did, right before he did, mere moments, mere seconds before his neck went limp and his tongue fell loosely out of his mouth like a sock puppet on the stump of an amputee, he turned to his few remaining friends (The ones who could look past how horribly Gary smelled) and whispered, "At least now there will be more to go around." Then, promptly, he died. One of Gary's friends turned to the other and said, "Just like Gary. Always considerate of everyone else's time."

Gary wasn't buried properly and his dead body eventually contaminated a natural spring, giving an entire small town dysentery.

The End.

Hurricane Season

"If you could sum up your entire life," he said, rolling over top of her, kissing her forehead, her bottom lip, her neck, moving down to her collarbone, down over her still-damp skin, to her navel, where the girl, eyes closed, concentrated on the sound of his shoulders slipping underneath the covers, receding like an ocean, his soft lips and tongue dancing gently over her body, going farther still, she the world, his mouth a careful traveler, his hot breath a hurricane, moving south, slipping past her hips, the equator, where it was clear and warm, where everything inside of her began picking up speed, where she cracked her toes and grabbed the sheets and sighed and with a sharp breath said, "Why ruin it with words?"

Trash.

Sam was exhausted. Six months after Eric left for Chicago to pursue his acting career, she could no longer live with the burden of her constant and overwhelming loneliness. Every night its weight pressed down on top of her until it became so heavy she could no longer draw a full breath. The strain of her loneliness reminded her so much of Eric, of his heaviness, of his body on top of hers, she feared that without it there would be nothing left to remind her that love was a tangible thing.
“I miss you,” she would say, quietly into the phone at night.
“I miss you, too” he said, his voice distant and reassuring. “We’ll see each other soon. I promise.” But night after night his promise felt farther and farther away.
Sam sat up in bed one night and stared at the phone. She admitted to herself that she was lonely, but refused to present herself desperately, and decided against calling Eric. An hour passed with Sam sitting up like this, staring at the phone, clock ticking. Taking a deep breath she nodded to herself and bit her lower lip, reaffirming her own quiet contemplation. Pulling off the covers she stomped confidently to the closet and swung open the doors. She felt around blindly on the top shelf until she located an old shoebox. Bringing it back to bed with her, she opened it to reveal a small handgun. She picked it up and frowned, bobbing it to test its weight.
“Sigh.”
She hated guns. She pleaded with Eric to take it with him to Chicago when he left, but he instead insisted she keep it for her safety. Setting it aside, she closed her eyes, looking deep inside herself in search of her loneliness. When she found it, with great deliberation and care, she plucked it out.
Loneliness in hand, she bounced it up and down to test its weight. Aside from the fact it was lighter than she expected, it was a different color, too. She folded it delicately and carefully placed it into the box. Having been satisfied with this arrangement, she picked up the handgun and fitted it snuggly next to her solitary ribbon. She returned it to the closet and hopped playfully back into bed for her first restful night of sleep in six months.

With the absence of loneliness, Samantha got along swimmingly. There was noticeable improvement in her demeanor, especially at work. She smiled more, helped more, and was friendlier with her coworkers; especially their most recent hire, Brad.
“You seem lighter,” He said one day, after a group of them had gone to lunch. It should be mentioned her appetite was better, too.
“Are you saying I was fat before?” She joked, in that annoying rhetorical way all women do, in matters regarding weight and size.
“Not at all,” he smiled. “I just think you look unburdened, is all.”
She touched his arm. She liked that idea.

That night, Samantha told Eric about her day, he about his.
“I miss you,” he said.
Samantha smiled through the phone and nodded her head. A warm silence filled the line. It quickly became hot and uncomfortable. Eric cleared his throat.
“Don’t you miss me, too?” he said.
Samantha furrowed her brow. “Well, I remember you more than anything else,” she said. “But, it’s strange; I hardly miss you at all.”
Silence.
“Oh!” She exclaimed, suddenly remembering. “And I love you. There’s that, too”
“But you don’t miss me?”
“Not really.”

Samantha fell into a deep and despairing depression. It must be recognized that a symmetry exists between all emotions. If one becomes engorged or shrinks (or in Sam’s case, disappears entirely), other emotions, when triggered, will overproduce as a means of compensation. Realizing that without loneliness she lacked the capacity to miss Eric, Sam was filled with sadness. This sadness ballooned and doubled in size to fill the spot where loneliness once belonged. It sank down inside of her with a weight that Samantha had never before experienced with loneliness. At least with loneliness, there was optimism. But her sadness was so thick and viscous it was all she could do not to think about the handgun she had neatly tucked away.
Dragging herself out of bed, she scrambled to the closet and ripped open its doors, falling to the floor to look for more shoeboxes. When she found one, she again looked inside of herself and – without the same generosity she had applied to her loneliness – tugged out her sadness and shoved it in the box. She sighed, relieved.
The alleviation was momentary.
Unhappiness inflated inside of her, three times its usual size. Samantha groaned, bloated with melancholy. Frantic, she tore through the closet for another shoebox. She jerked out unhappiness, threw it into the tiny, cardboard coffin and firmly shut its lid. Her relief was again abbreviated. She was filled with four times the usual amount of dejection.

This cycle continued into the early morning.

When she wrangled out dejection it was quickly replaced with depression. After depression she wrestled with gloominess, despondence, glumness and misery. When she ran out of shoeboxes she scrambled into the kitchen to fill her pots and pans with woes. Tightly securing their lids, she treated her heartaches like shamefully burned dinners. When she ran through her cookware, she used Tupperware containers, her laundry hamper, and vacuum bags.
As the early morning light dusted its way through her windows, Sam sat upright on the floor. Breathing heavily, she registered her surroundings. Containers stuffed with low spirits – all shapes, sizes, and colors of them – littered her apartment. There was vagueness to the clutter in front of her, and it made her feel strangely unbalanced; like someone had snuck into her body and hollowed out her bones. She tried standing. Wobbling to her feet, the soft fingers of the sunrise slowly stretched into her apartment and warmed her. There was lightness inside. Without sleeping, she showered, dressed, and left for work, elated.

“What is it with you lately?” Brad asked, squinting into the bright afternoon sun as they left the diner. It was just the two of them at lunch. “You seem light as a feather!”
“I don’t know,” Sam said, unable to keep herself from smiling. “I feel like I don’t have a care in the world anymore!” She closed her eyes and let the sunlight lap at her face.
“I don’t know how you do it,” he said. “I think it’s incredible you can live like that, ya know? You’re just, WOW.”
Smiling even wider, she hugged him. She enjoyed the broadness of his shoulders, the softness of his cheek. She wanted to hug him longer, but needed to get more shoeboxes.

That night on the phone, Samantha looked out to the street curb where she had brought out the garbage. Droplets of water formed on the black bags in the night’s drizzle, making them glow orange under the streetlight. She found this both symbolic and beautiful. In fact, everything was beautiful. Without anything inside of her to make her sad, there was nothing left in the world but beautiful things. Like Brad and his shoulders.
“I can’t tell you how happy I am right now,” she said to Eric. “I can’t find a single thing to be sad about. Everything is wonderful!”
“What about the fact we’re not together?” he asked. “Doesn’t that make you even the littlest bit sad? It breaks my heart everyday.”
With the onset of guilt, Samantha felt like she swallowed an anchor. She assumed (wrongly) that she had ridden herself of weight related emotions, but guilt differs from sadness in the way it’s self-inflicting. Without saying goodbye, she hung up the phone and clawed her way into the living room, where a new stack of shoeboxes longed to be filled with her feelings.

Unburdened by guilt, Samantha slept with Brad. There was no reason not too; none that she could think of anyway. She was free to scratch his strong shoulders, free to have him kiss her on the collarbone; free to call out his name during sex in the bed she used to share with Eric. She was curious at first as to why her love for Eric didn’t intervene with her decision to sleep with Brad, but she hadn’t taken into account that without loneliness, love has no balance. For Sam, love lost its vigor – its shine.

Everyone knows fear of loss is what makes love so strong.

After sex, Brad became affectionate with Samantha, nuzzling her neck while he whispered about how wonderful he thought she was. She enjoyed this at first, but soon grew bored with it. She took out her boredom and put it in a box. Without boredom, there was no way to contrast excitement, no way to discern between dullness and enthusiasm. To avoid Brad’s affection, she removed her own. Now, whenever they slept together, Samantha laid perfectly still; like a cold, rough brick.

Eric called. “Why haven’t I heard from you?” he wanted to know. With great ease, she told him about Brad. She went on to tell him that since she wasn’t lonely anymore, she hardly noticed he wasn’t around.
“I don’t even recognize you.” Eric cried through the phone. And while Samantha could no longer feel guilty, or sad about the way she had treated him, she did understand where he was coming from. Nodding to herself while he sobbed, she quickly scribbled down understanding onto a notepad. When the phone call was over she put it in a box and tucked it away with the rest of her collection, so it too could gather dust and grow stale.

Brad stopped sleeping with Sam after growing tired of her indifference. Sam would have removed her indifference but was indifferent to it. Eric no longer called. Love withered up and bounced around uselessly inside of her like a dry, dead fish. She casually tossed it aside one day like a tissue she had used to blot a scab with. Her relationships at work began to suffer.

“Sam’s a bitch,” Brad said. “A stone, cold bitch.”

But this did not bother her. By the time this was said the only emotions she had left to speak of were practicality and indifference. She felt it impractical to have friends in the workplace, and removing practicality seemed too impractical.
Sam went on to rent out the extra room in her apartment where she stored her emotions. She felt it very practical to do so.
“What should I do about all these boxes?” The grad-student renting the room asked.
“Just do whatever,” Sam said. She was very indifferent about it.

Sam lived practically and indifferently for some time. It made the years go by very quickly. Worrying about things or celebrating holidays or looking forward to anything seemed redundant. It wasn’t convenient and she no longer cared.

One day, Sam searched her room for a missing sock. Reaching under her bed, thinking she found it, she grabbed hold of a soft texture and pulled. It was a long since discarded emotion. Turning it this way and that in her hand, she tried to place it. It would be impractical of her not to find out what it was before throwing it away. It turned out to be worry. Once it took root deep inside her, she erupted into tidal waves of anxiousness. Her insides felt like a washing machine.
Samantha was distraught. When did she become so barren? She worried she would never laugh again. She worried she would never cry again. She worried she would never love again.
Oh God, she groaned.
She worried about Eric. She worried she would never see him again, or speak to him again, or make love to him again. Frantically, she made her way to the phone and called him. A brief conversation revealed he was engaged to be married, and very happy. Also, he would like to never hear from her again. She hung up. She worried she waited to long to reach out to him. She worried where the time went. She worried she would soon be too old to ever be in love again.
Where did her love go?
Samantha pounced on the door of her tenant’s bedroom. “Tenant!” she cried, beating the wood with her fists. “Tenant!”
She never learned her occupant’s name. She never cared to. She now worried this approach was too impersonal. The tenant came to the door.

Sam: What did you do with my shoeboxes?
Tenant: Threw them away. You’re not angry are you?
Sam: No, but I’m terribly worried.
Tenant: Maybe they’re at the dump?
Sam: Yes, that seems very practical, but I’m worried it’s too late.

At the dump, Sam took one look at the mountainous range of hot trash before deciding that diving in to look for anything would be impractical. Then she worried. Then she didn’t care. She wanted to cry, but couldn’t because she had no sadness. She concentrated hard on what it might feel like, but it was no use. It was like trying to draw a picture with an eraser.
“See anything you like?” a voice behind her asked. She turned to find a dirty man in a dirty jumpsuit, walking up to her and smiling. She looked him up in down. She worried he might try to kill her and then bury her in garbage. “You don’t look like the usual crowd of people who comes around here looking for stuff,” the dirty man said, smiling and wiping his hands off on his jumpsuit. “I’m George; I work here.”
He nodded to her. He knew better than to offer his dirty hand.
“I’m Sam,” she said, turning back to the garbage. “I’m looking for shoeboxes.”
“Shoeboxes?”
“Yes, shoeboxes. There were very important things in them and I’m worried I might not get them back.”
“Things like, Jewelry?”
“No. Sentimental things.”
“I think I know what you’re talking about,” the man said, fishing for something in his pocket.
“You do?” said Sam, turning, conscious of the fact she was supposed to feel optimistic.
From his jumpsuit, the dirty man produced a small, colorful article and rubbed it between his thumb and forefinger. He looked down at it fondly. Clearing his throat, he said: “A few years back we got all these shoeboxes. They were piling up all over the place, a big Mountain of ‘em. We thought it was a shoe recall so we opened ‘em up hoping to get some crappy free shoes. But instead it was just these textures and colors.” The man looked up and smiled. “All of these beautiful consistencies.”
“Did you find any love?” Sam asked.
“There was a box that kind of gave me that feeling,” the man said, looking up. “I mailed it to my sister, though. I thought she would have appreciated it more.”
“Can you tell me how to get in touch with her?”
“She lives in Chicago,” he said. “I think she’d be pretty reluctant to give it up. You can have this one, though.” Reaching out his hand, he handed her the material he was holding. “Sorry it’s so dirty. I found it in one of the boxes, next to this lonely little handgun. I couldn’t bring myself to throw it away; it was the most beautiful color.”

Back at home, Sam looked at her discarded practicality and worry on her floor. She tried doing away with indifference but didn’t see the point. The clock beside her bed read 11: 41 P.M., while she played with the soft texture in her hands. She decided that it was, in fact, a beautiful color. Looking deep inside of her, she carefully put it back in the spot she had pulled it from, and immediately felt the weight of it push all the air from her lungs.


-Ian Rowe