The Velvet Underground and Talking to Tristan

I felt the evening rise, you know. It was something that just came out of me, spilled from my eyes that night. And there it was, the clouds lighter than the dark sky behind them, passing over what stars there were like ripples or waves. I had been growing tired; the way my skin crawled until I couldn't feel my own eyes, the way I saw you in every person with a nice skirt on, the direction of the wind being inexistent. Maybe I was just getting homesick, or maybe I was losing my nerve. If it was the second, then it would have been the first time in a long time. I sighed, I felt like I wanted my soul to just charge out of me, out and away from my heart so that I would stop feeling everything slip from underneath my feet. What was it anyway?

The death of my old life and my relation to all my old friends.

It was the first time that I felt surrounded by people who were so much more experienced at life and mature than I. Maybe I couldn't handle it, maybe I could just no longer bear to tell myself that the world will keep spinning on, or that I had a hundred years to do all that I wanted to do, or that all the pain I felt would be nothing but a sliver of a vague memory in my near future. I felt like a corpse shoved up against a corner of a bare room with nothing but my own mind to confront and fall in love with. Something that I could never grow into, or change to, or improve myself to. I didn't want to just sit and learn nothing, I didn't want to be content with only myself. The walls around me all felt as if they held nothing. The reason I cried was because I knew that I should be able to put meaning into them, to change their color with my mind, to smile at myself and know that it would all be alright because it's infinite, but the most sinister thing that I knew, that was keeping me from being myself, was the idea that I was wrong and had always been wrong. That I had just been tricking myself into thinking that I was beautiful enough to smile at the idea that the future is whatever I make it to be.

Maybe I knew what was inside of me, eating me alive like this, and just wasn't willing to speak about it to anyone yet.

I sighed again. I vowed from that point on to try to work out more often, eat less, and look at the sky as if it were the person that I wanted to fall in love with again. Kiss the wind as it breezed by me, hug the ground for supporting me. I had never been too great at vows, but even if I followed it a little I'd feel better, I thought. It's just hard when you can look back and know exactly what you missed and what slipped from between your fingers as you grabbed the life that you lived.

Sniffless, Silent and Solemn

"I'm sorry, but I don't know where I've been or where the time's gone to."

Everyone was wrapped up in their own plastic coating; they were sitting where their eyes couldn't shine on each other so no one could see the dark colors rise up over them like water from the deepest part of the ocean. We were letting the time slip by even though it came in waves upon waves; flashes of post cards from the times in our lives just playing like a reel in a movie theater, flipping so fast that we couldn't see the nothing in between each moment of time anymore. I was sweltering in the midday sun, the cars were zipping by, and in each one each person driving was so caught up in their own world that they didn't know that I existed. Hell, for all I knew I could just be a split second of an image in their entire world, nothing more than an abstract, unconscious, visual blur of their life. Or I could be their husband, or their arch nemesis. We were all just possibilities of relations to each other. I felt like a kid.

My eyes were still opened wide, looking at a world and wanting to see beauty that shook the sky and kissed the sun and fell in love with the earth and the water and the wind, but taking in all of the human greed and misfortune that they had never though of. We were all children constantly struggling to stay children, and the adults were constantly trying to steal it from us. It made me think about who was the first adult and why they would want to be one; the first person to want something more than childhood? All gore and all, swearing and adults killing each other, children with old faces spitting on the ground and people in jobs fantasizing about rape all day; it's so much and it tears away at the spine and makes you into something new, something that looks out with lazy eyes and speaks with a dry tongue. My idea was that I'd try to escape it all.

But to be honest, not everyone turns into an adult. The wind and sun and water and trees all escape it every day. I thought what I'd do was I'd become a deaf mute; I'd just turn away from the images of those future days and recreate them into something new, take apart the puzzle and put the piece all in the wrong order so that you wouldn't even be able to tell what the original picture used to be. It'd just be a mess of color that way, a mess of color that you'd have to piece apart yourself, look for a new image, something with a smile on it, or maybe a frown, or a hand to the sky, outside of a moving car and sound waves washing over it. So maybe when we look behind and see all the cars moving with us in our direction, we'd stop by and really join them, link hands across the pavement and we move forward. The sky might shatter, and the trees all get up and move, and it might look like a mess of color, but at least there won't be Armageddon on the horizon of the sky we look at.

No.

There'd be the rest of us, endlessly youthful, constantly dying, and unanimously conscious.