Tue, April 25, 2006

One day, while I was in a purple place that I visit sometimes, I ran across an old friend that I had never met before. His company filled my empty heart with a gladness that I had not felt in centuries. We talked about politics and how he likes to play with himself while he watches The Price Is Right. He is never the same twice when I visit him and he responds differently every time I ask him the same monotonous questions that interviewers have asked for decades and decades. He wears a new mask every week and even though I know I will never discover what is behind that mask, I always feel I am a little bit closer to understanding what the mask represents and why it hides what it hides.

As we make idle chit-chat he unties my shoes and braids their laces into an abstract beetle shape that seems as though it could almost talk to you. I never try to talk, though, because I am too busy trying to keep up my end of the conversation with my new best friend that I visit twice a week and yet I have never met before. I know that I am in love with him when he rests his head between my breasts and cries with a pathos that is more intense than a thousands suns beating hard against the desert sands that stoically reject their heat and return it to the world above.

He cries because of what his father said before he died, when he spoke those final words and said, "I was never more disappointed than the day that bitch you call your mother brought you into this world." He weeps on and I begin to weep with him, my entire soul landing in his hair where my fingers stroke gently against his scalp. As he sobs I feel myself spiritually attracted to his gentle tenderness, a sorrow and a grief that I can never feel because he has lived a life that I cannot even imagine, even after six months of The Young and the Restless reruns. We are one. We will never part, even though I know that next time I am here in this purple place he will not be gone but he will not be the same at all. I know he will be the same underneath but the mask will be different and I will not want him in my lap as I want him now. I want to make him know how much I need to help him, to set his broken-winged soul free where he can run naked in the pastures of heaven without regard for the past and completely free of worries and shame that haunt his daily existence in this violet hell that I visit when it becomes dark and the electricity is so great that I can hear it with my toenails and my nipples.

It is a place I always visit with great anticipation but always leave with great sorrow, even on the days when the mask is fun-loving and articulate and we run and play in the waves. I am always melancholy because I know the seahorses can't play and enjoy the lavender wonderland we can. I feel sorrow for the misfortunes of all the glycolipids that float freely but are constrained by a jail more restrictive than any man can build. And thus, I return to the world in which I am more than just a visitor, but so much less. I return to the world where I grew up, among the Pop Tarts and the cartoons and the Judy Blume novels that told me menstruation was a good thing.

Already, I want to go back.

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