Mettā/Beatitude

IMMEDIATE AND MEANINGLESS AUTOBIOGRAPHIES, PT. I:


The future is bent by noise, curving to a thin arc of distraction, my senses tuned to a frequency only registered by ballistic missile targets; the pre-dead; the heinously, preternatural 21st-century Adaptors, marauding history from behind dumb, paranoia-blind gazes.

It's about 5am. The ever-increasing sun throws my shadow up some steps that lead to yet another diner—the least tuneful and vivid word in architectural idiom--still, I feel blessed to have inherited it. Inside, multiple fluorescent light sources pluralize the ugliness in everything, but has the unique mathematical capability of dividing pleasure by halves. They are occidental guests vacationing in some prescribed blue-collar stereotype. Barbarous transients sucking marrow through straws. I feel like I can say this and you will know exactly what I mean.

It's about 5am. I'm projecting some hubristic air, like one who's just returned from a country where her currency was strong, before realizing that it's been rendered impotent by 15 hours of trans-Atlantic flight. I cough to count it, softly, aloud. Found amongst the silver: “Being in love means constructing a religion whose god is fallible.” Ripped-off from Borges, pretty sure. I'd been filching literary cues from his Babylonian men, cutting jugulars of steers beneath the complacent moon…a vermillion stomach tattoo made visible when a cape was drawn aside. Only in raw, stupid youth could one justify applying such monstrous fiction to her own life.


But I need that, you know: fiction. Easier to assume that every woman's an avatar, every man's an archetype. There's such a wide spectrum of each in this life that, for all I know, that statement might be true. But I'm different. I'm a collection of adjectives, a composite which is not immediately identifiable. I plan to talk much less, now. If not smarter than the rest, at least more prone to the diegetic. Decreasing in mass, though growing denser. Owner of a genetically Slavic tongue which hits the soft vowels of femininity like napalm. Navigating my way around all of it. Post-society/Immune to psychology. But mostly, I can't give less of a shit.