Lines come to mind
That her taste was exquisite became one of life’s facts. Everyone else paled in comparison. So, he followed fashion compulsively, read the food section, thought about clothes and restaurants, and none of this had ever been his concern. He went to elaborate measures to interact with her, even managing to have dinner in the country and then drive back with mutual friends, but she joked about a lover she was dropping. This went on and on.
An interest in fashion persisted, kept alive by a few writers. He abandoned the food section for HTSI and Konfekt, imagining the lives those women led, which reminded him of his childhood. The models were sometimes striking. The ads had them too, but Konfekt cleaved to an imagined reality, as he thought of it, his imagination overlapping its reproduction of a life he extrapolated from a long-ago that lived on in his Kodachrome memory.
His life was divided into repetitive phases: detached wonder; attachment; and detached regret and its side effects, watered down over time like the pandemic virus. The schisms were less pronounced, if schism was the right word for the sundered nature of his life, like losing a limb (or did it just go to sleep?). Static jostled him and restarted it all, but first detached wonder returned with its unanswerable questions. Is it not better not to slip into attachment? But “not to slip” was also a line: sliding in regardless.
All the particulars came back to mind in this state. He could read the ads or Konfekt with the impunity print affords, images to be read into, and this was possible now in real life, this non-attachment, finally grasped due to two decades of walking meditation through delusion’s gamut. Taken as directed, particulars were the senses in the rough order of their accrual. Life also has them, of course, but he paid more attention when in love.
Impunity was the reigning delusion, immunity only coming later and then tentatively at first. But he was immune, he felt sure. Yet every last breath of desire stirs despite the aging of its object, he saw, as she walked on in front of him. Still, the impulse stayed in the world of detachment. “Only coming later” was a possible line, with its hint of deferral, although on occasion he never came at all. Another of life’s facts, but could he bank on it, like clairvoyance? “You tie one hand behind your back as you don’t think it’s fair to others otherwise,” the psychic told him. In this life, hubris was a risk.
A line would come to him that he carried until he could sit down and write. He never knew when this would happen, but this was true of everything. They say that dementia is constantly being surprised, but this is also normal life’s wonder floating through or his walking through it. A line would come and he would write a poem, to be reconsidered in stages. When he gathered his poems, they asked their main question and he was unsure how to answer it or, more accurately, his answers varied.
When they were wet, they wanted him for as long as possible, so they went on and sometimes he eventually came and other times he didn’t. Each came memorably, but attachment came with it.
Konfekt condensed the rituals of eating and talking to print feature length. His imagination ran with it, stretched it out. He considered how they’d move once they’d had their fill of this pictured “rest.” This was closer to “real life,” if not quite as exquisite as her red hair and blue eyes in the ad.
