Between the Forceps and the Stone

I’m travelling in some vehicle, though it may not be, strictly speaking, a vehicle, for the ground beneath me is only vaguely familiar and the speed at which the thing is moving is only tenuously related to the sense of motion I have within it.

And yet the sensation is unmistakable: forward, toward something, somewhere, nowhere, and I am inside of it, held by it, bound to it as I am bound to all the motions of time that have, by sheer force of repetition, become my life, my being, my living breath, and I don’t know why I’m in this thing, why I’m sitting here at all, but I know I am and I know it is no longer a choice, no longer a thought, no longer a question, for that is what life does, it answers all the questions by insisting they are never asked in the first place, they are only felt in the marrow, in the bones, like a sickness, or a long and beautiful ache of inevitability.

How we mistake motion for change, and how, too, we mistake distance for progress, when all we’re really doing is moving through the same small, delicate frame of existence, caught in the slipstream of our own thoughts, caught, too, in the vast, unyielding stillness that we mistake for meaning.

I’m sitting in some café, then — an image of sitting, I suppose, as we always find ourselves seated somewhere, as though it were a requisite position for the quiet assembly of our thoughts. It’s a place for the mind to pause, to breathe in the air that smells faintly of coffee, of earth, of something older and deeper than what one might choose to name it. The conversation is muted, an arrangement of silences, punctuated now and then by the clink of china, the murmur of voices, the scattering of crumbs as we nibble at our lives like sparrows at breadcrumbs. What do we say, after all, when we are so deeply involved in the act of existing, so entangled in the movement of the world, that it is almost impossible to pause and question it? Yet here I am, somehow, seated in this café, observing, watching the snow — the delicate, hesitant snow that falls outside the window as if it were unsure of its purpose — gather in soft, fragile layers, like the feelings we forget to express, like the love that never quite finds its way out.

My coffee is cold and I don’t care about that either, because the silence between me and the others at the tables does not need to be filled with anything more than the noise that’s already there, which is none at all, but somehow still full — full with the weight of all those unsaid things, all the things that could be said but aren’t, all the ways we might spill out our lives in a hurry only to find that the act of spilling does not, after all, make it any more real.

I feel myself, not as a person but as a defect, a defector from the petty wars, a member of some small, invisible war that no one else knows they’re fighting, that no one even notices, that shell shock love away, and this war is the war of love, or what passes for it, or what used to pass for it before it became something you could just leave behind or step away from like you would a jacket you forgot you were wearing or a hat you didn’t know you had. There is comfort in that, you know, in the leaving, in the melancholy, in the surrender to what’s too small and too petty to matter, to the small suffocating wars that have no point except the fighting, the endless, meandering fight when there’s no need to explain.

And I see it now, how all those little wars — the ones we’ve fought and lost and won and forgotten — are nothing more than a way of pretending we’re alive, of pretending we’re here and that we mean something, and the meaning, if there ever was one, is buried beneath layers of what we don’t say and can’t say, not to the other, not to anyone, because there’s something about it, something about us, that keeps pulling away, like a thread that comes loose but never unravels, just hangs there, hanging in the air like the mood of a sky that can’t make up its mind, clouding over, clearing, threatening rain and then just as suddenly turning blue in this moody sky today, and we, in our possessive coupling, me and you, we hold it all in, not knowing how to release it, how to let the words spill from our mouths like water from a broken glass or like blood from a wound we were never meant to have but received anyway, and so we sit, and we wait, and we stay silent, and it is just as natural, and it is just as impossible, as the sky today, as the air in this room, as the snow that floats down outside the window and swirls in lazy, perfect circles as though it knows it will never be anything but what it is.

There is no need to make sense of it, these things that you and I suppressed. It is, simply, like the weather, the cold of winter seeping into the bones, the heavy, unmoving sky that threatens but never quite breaks open, waiting, waiting for something to change that we might never see.

And in the stillness between us, between all of us, I feel something of myself in everyone, in their faces that reflect mine in ways that no one ever wants to admit, in the way they look down at their hands when they don’t know what to do with them, in the way they try not to look at me too long and yet can’t seem to look away, just like I can’t seem to look away from them, and we are, each of us, standing just at this moment of the world, wondering if we’ll fall, wondering if we’ve already fallen and are just too afraid to see it, and yet somehow, for reasons I can’t fully understand, the snow falls, gathering like bolts of lace that thread themselves into the world’s great ballroom, waltzing on a ballroom girl, where none of us know the steps and yet, somehow, we’re all moving together, in time, in place, and we’re all dancing without ever knowing the music that plays behind it, and it plays, softly, like strains of Benny Goodman coming through the snow and pinewood trees and settling over us like a blanket that doesn’t warm but somehow still comforts, if comfort is what you can call the slow dissolution of everything into nothing.

You know it never has been easy, whether you resign yourself to the world’s indifferent sway, or whether you decide, in your arrogance, to travel the breadth of extremities, or whether you choose to take the safer path and stick to the straight line that promises nothing except a more immediate kind of forgetting, and here are two people, a man and a woman, sitting on a rock, not looking at each other, and maybe they’re going to thaw, maybe they’re going to freeze, but it doesn’t matter, not really, because all of us are like that, frozen and thawed in some impossible combination that no one will ever understand, least of all ourselves, and the woman’s hand brushes against the man’s arm and I swear, I feel it, the tremble, the slightest touch of a stranger, as if that touch could be a lightning bolt that splits the world wide open, and maybe it does, but not for me, not for them, because the tremble, the shaking, the trembling in my bones is nothing but the faintest reminder of all the ways we move through each other without ever really knowing we do, and how can I ever trust this? How can I trust myself in this, in the chaos, in the cold and the warmth of it, when all I know is that no one’s going to show me everything? We’re all like ghosts, floating past one another, each so deep and superficial, not seen, not known, not remembered, only felt in the most fleeting of moments, only ever understood in the way we touch, in the way we fail to touch.

And the markers in the graveyard, the granite tombstones, are just stones. Just dead things, placed in the earth as if that could mean anything, as if it could stand for anything but the quiet recognition that we all came from dust, we’re all heading back to dust, and the only immortality we’ll have is the one we scratch out for ourselves in the margins of the world, chicken stratching for immortality, in the ways we try to mark our place even as the wind blows it all away, and I look at myself and I see nothing but the ghost of what I was, and I look again and it’s still there, only now, it’s a little less, a little smaller, a little less sure of itself, like the wax of the candles in the church, the way they melt slowly, patiently, with no urgency, with no particular desire to be anything other than what they are, and I think, maybe that’s the point — maybe that’s all there is, white flags of winter chimneys waving truce against the moon in the mirrors of a modern bank from the window of a hotel room.

I am a defector, I suppose — though that word, “defector,” seems too grand, too dramatic, for what has happened. We’re only particles of change, I know, I know, orbiting around the sun. Perhaps it is more a soft retreat, a gentle withdrawing into the self, a quiet departure not from the world but from the noise of it. I have learned to listen to the silence, to live within the silence of these moments, and to recognize that love, in its vastness, in its complexity, is not a battle but a surrender. A surrender not to another, but to the quiet of one’s own heart, to the quiet of all that we can never truly know. And so I sit, and I wait, not for anything but for the world to continue as it always does — moving, waiting, holding us in its soft embrace, and perhaps, at last, when we are least prepared, travelling in some vehicle, sitting in some café, a defector from the petty wars until love sucks us back that way.