mirror blues

What if we've just been cruising in the wrong direction all along? I can't believe this hasn't even crossed my mind until now.

Not that there is a direction, but I don't remember ever turning back, either.

Turning in circles, yes, perhaps, especially after the recent shock - in fact I'm not quite sure if we aren't indeed cruising all the way back now;

(as much as multi-dimensional browsing can allow any sense of direction, conscious or not.)

But it's the first time in I don't know how long that I even challenge - not my direction, but - a true consciousness of the possibility of inverted directions, acknowledgement and redemption of a wrong choice.

Doesn't really matter - I don't know where we're going anyway. 

But yeah, it would be nice to see some familiar ground again, and say (and hear) "Hey, Marcus, haven't we been here before??", ("I believe so, Sir"), and float on in peace, at least knowing that my sense of belonging (to somewhere, anywhere) isn't lost.

So ironic that after so much seeking, I now find comfort in knowing that I might be covering past ground in the opposite direction.

light

Something extraordinary happened today. We were cruising at low speed through the dark velvet curtains in a sleepy lethargia fueled, no less, by a powerless feeling of abandonment, as a bright flash inadvertedly lighted the right half of the space ahead and the whole ship shook like hit by the falcon jab of an outter-galaxy cyclope, waking me up from my semi-conscious state of oblivion and leaving me eagerly turning the ship in circles and circles and circles trying to find the source of this disruption.

We turned and turned, Marcus, for the first time in many many months, sitting next to me, his eyes open in eager antecipation for what there might be - whatever there might be -, monitoring the again dark horizon in search for another sign, in silence, both of us, sharing finally, after forever living in two sides of a single wall, a moment of common understanding, until the enthusiasm wore down and no light was left other than the beeping red alarm of overheating engines.

Marcus returned to the bunk from where he had been woken up - he never saw the light, in fact - and I poured myself some more tea and held on tight to the controls, moving on, certain, now, that, however far we might be from salvation, we are not alone, no matter what.

I fell asleep soon after, and the Ship moved on, randomly; in the early days, I used to feel anxious to let it loose drifting aimlessly around the unknown, but have since learnt that steering it towards a black multi-dimensional horizon is as good as leaving it to itself. In fact, I could sleep all day and still reach places as good as this emptiness, but there's only so much rest your body needs, and I'm no different, so I hold on tight to the machine, on my waking hours, albeit no longer convinced that my judgement plays any role in our fate.

I hope I'm awake when the next flash hits us, like I was today, because, if not for anything else, it proves me right, and Marcus wrong, and I'm the Captain of this junk, after all, and once the Captain looses his faith, we'll both just rot in despair.

Onwards, then, towards the next light.

cruising the night

Some days, brighter thoughts cross my head. Not all is always dark in my inner reaches, even if there's no match to outter Space's gloom. Safe for a couple of stars that shine bright enough to remind us we're not yet condemned to infinite void, we've been navigating a fireless sky for as far as I can remember now.

We've been in darkness for a long long while, almost total darkness, but I'm alive and burning like an incendiary advent candle gone mad and spread over the whole crisp pine wreath. I'm am burning burning burning with the thought that new, overwhelming, almost indigestable brighter days are to come. It doesn't get blacker than black. How empty of hope can you get? Only so empty. There's always a fire lit somewhere, if not where you are.

I should know better than take things for granted, of course, and that there's a fire somewhere doesn't mean I'll ever be able to pilot this Ship there within the timeframe of my own life. We're rotting in our stagnation, Marcus and myself.

But what to do? Each hint of light in the endless spacial horizon is an exaltation to the motionlessness of our dimming hope, and am I to blame if I still believe the next light can be the last I ever see in front of me, before I step into it and I'm just surrounded by the blissful bath of rebirth, and never again have to seek for that burning candle in the dark, because there will be dark no more?

Yes, I should know better, but that doesn't mean I know better, so when a light shows up, I light up myself, and call Marcus and debit my overbearing enthusiasm, and I believe it all over again. He,  as expected, won't do more than nod and say "Indeed, a light, Sir", and return to his little room after a short bow, because he believes no more in salvation but I, I revolve, I burn and burn with the hope that this is finally it.

I push the handle even further, I force the engines, I stretch this Ship forward, until...

Well.

Some days, brighter thoughts cross my head, be it amidst total darkness or faced with the hint of a new light. Today, in darkness, I know that as far as I'm able to pilot this bloody thing, I'll do it, and I will find a goddamn way back to Earth or any liveable environment, and if I don't, then I'll die trying, until the very end convinced that I'll manage to find my path.

bright tomorrow

 

We'll build sand castles and call them our little magic town

and patch shells on the grainy walls

(of our shanty castles)

and say, to passers-by,

"oh, those are the windows"

Confused, they'll walk on

and find us silly

in our fantasies;

unfitting, in a world of concrete

we'll shrug our shoulders and build on

(there's still so much sand -

we can build an empire!)

but wall upon wall

we lose our way

within our city of castles

and soon we leave, too.

it's cold -

what good are sand walls

against the evening wind?

abandoned, our little town of magic castles

(with empty windows)

is swept by the evening tide

and fades

in the salty apocalypse

of the waning sandpatch

 

Elegia Amoris

 

I sometimes think I see her shaping up between two stars.

It's rather distressing, because I'm well aware that she'd never be floating around in Space - and even less so dressed in that white dress in which I last saw her - but I do see her at times, she's right there in front of me, just beyond the big front window through which the whole wide Universe relentlessly offers itself to my Ship.

No need explaining to myself that seeing her shaped as a constellation is nothing less than my slow decline into madness, because, in reality, when I excitedly point her out to Marcus ("Look, Marcus!! She's here again!") and he patiently warns me "Sir, it's not her. This is a constellation, Sir. I have never seen it before myself, but that is not a woman, Sir, women don't go around dancing in between stars, as much as you wish they would, particularly..."

"...particularly if I once loved them, Marcus, and was dumped like garbage; yes I know, I know, this can't be her. She'd never come back. Fuck. And how could she be there? Oh no, oh no, Marcus, she's gone again, you are right, you are right."

So, I was saying, when I do point her out to Marcus in my half-ached delirium, she's as crystal clear as she ever was in my arms, and I can't ignore the rather obvious fact that all of this actually happens in the backbones of my head - that fine membrane that separates Memory from Reality playing tricks on me time and time again. And it's only Marcus' condescending taps on my ecstatic shoulder that bring back to me the logical skepticism of Reason that I am supposed to exercise, and whatever was left of Her then finally fades away in the dark skies.

But then Marcus goes back to his bunk, and as soon as he does so, she shapes up again, and by then I know already that she can't possibly be outside the Spaceship, so I convince myself that she's inside, oh man!, inside, I convince myself that what I'm seeing is her reflection on the glass window, and that she's right there behind my back, watching me steer the Ship towards the Unknown and patiently waiting for me to turn my head around, in order to give me that wide, proud, merry, lily-white smile of hers and ask me "what's up?" before kissing me once again.

We met at a time when I was a young, adventurous air force pilot and she was one of those gorgeous middle-class big-city girls that were graced with endless energy and even more ambition for a stable marriage with a loaded guy, even if they pretended very well to desire exactly the opposite. A loaded guy!!.., I mean, even if I were to have made it big in flying fighter jets, (as oposed to ending up steering this junk in a lost mission towards a long forgotten objective), I could never - ever!, for fuck's sake - have afforded to keep her, but

I just fell for her that Summer, that long, dry Summer that felt like Spring, I totally and uncontrollably fell for her, and that's it,

so I gave her grand illusions of a life on the road in between air force bases and paradise islands, the life that I wanted for myself and that I thought would keep her away from her stupid class-climbing ambitions; but of course the illusion was on ME, she was never illusioned by any of my crap, and as soon as she found out that we'd start splitting the restaurant bills once I'd realized that she could actually afford her own half instead of spending it all on make-up, she just disappeared,

like that,

gone like the dust traces of this Spaceship, just evaporated within the big big city, lost to me like I'm lost to Life now - both her, then, and me, now, gone from sight and touch.

And I know now - much better than I was able to discern then  - that she was nowhere close to the woman that I needed, she was just a gold-digging, well-lived, ladder-climbing, materialistic little thing, but - even now! - I remember the beautiful, thrilling, self-aware, monopolizing and everything-else-wiping charm she had, and that joy for life, and the way she made me feel special - not just for being with her, but for making her feel special to be with me, too.

Oh, man, we clicked, we did, but WE'd never work, and she found that out sooner than I was able to set my alarm clock, so one day I woke up to an empty bed and a goodbye note that I never found (because she never wrote it),

and even now, years and years later, even now, when I see her between two stars, even now I'm just not able to admit that it's not her out there, that it's only my head telling me that I miss her and I lost her, and nothing more than that, other than that I'll potentially miss her forever, or at least as long as I meander around Space; because there's nothing else to do out here than reminisce, and Love is such a sweet sweet memory, even when it failed,

so in those nights when she shows up, I don't turn around anymore, I just sit there and steer on and on, and all along there she is behind my back, looking at me through her own reflection, not quite as she used to because reflections aren't as real as flesh, but real enough to keep me going for a little while longer.

 

Fragments of my innocence

 

"You''ll end up hurting someone one day", she once said, my good mother, about what she perceived as the desperately selfish nature of my character, "and, after her, yourself", she then added upon a second's reflection, "and" - she finished - "once you hurt yourself with your own selfishness, you'll note there's no point in being selfish, for that ultimate self-serving trait of character will turn to serve its opposite purpose, and destroy  you instead".

She cared about me, my mom, of course, and for no one else, and that's why she was concerned about my own selfishness-induced degradation. What she failed to see is that she was the selfish one, by seeing no further than her son's suffering, whereas the reality is that my deep concern is not my own suffering (which I have long embodied and learnt to live with), but how I may hurt others, and, in that sense, it was my mother's own selfishness that created in her the idea that I'm selfish, whereas, if anything, I'm just an egocentric floater lacking all sorts of emotional stability and unwillingly hurting people here and there, and, in the process, sucking in so much of their pain that I can now barely breathe, such is the suffocating guilt of making others live in the uncertain condition of loving me.

So no, mother, NO, you were wrong, I am not selfish, if anything I'm unstable and unreliable; and focusing on myself and solving my own problems can be called egocentrism, but not selfishness, because indeed all my self-centrism has always only had the sole purpose of working myself out with the objective of one day being a better and more predictable man. So don't mix selfishness with egocentrism, and meanness with unreliability, please.

If you were alive, mother, I would tell you just that: I am not a bad man, but a good-natured one, unable to be a good influence by the sheer default of an unstable (and thus unreliable) amalgamation of genes.

And I did warn them, mother, all of them, I told them, "My dear, listen to me!, I am not to be loved, for I am not to be trusted, and thus not able to love back". But did they listen, mother? (did you ever listen?), but of course not, of course they didn't, and they fell in the abyss of their own ambition to love and change someone who, precisely because he changes, should not (must not) be loved.

That could be one of the reasons why, as much as this random floating around in Space with no end in sight drives me to chilling desperation, I don't necessarily feel sad in the driving seat of this condemned device, but rather contempt that, at least here, far away from any substantial source of human feeling, I can minimize the harm I cause, and limit it to myself and Marcus.

Given Marcus' born lack of any sort of empathy - a trait less owing to his apathic character than to an irreparable absence of reasoning capacity - this spaceship is where I could ever less harm anyone with my brute, blunt and meaningless emotional inconsequence - apart from death, of course, but death is not a noble outcome for such a lover of life as myself.

(And, arguably, my disappearance would cause more pain than relief, at least in the short-run - assuming someone still remembers me back on Earth, of course, which I actually, come think of it, highly doubt.)

So yes, I told them, "don't love me", but what did they do, the opposite, of course, and yes, yes!, I wish I could have loved them back, but I couldn't, at least not for long, so I just dismissed them, like crumbles of bread, an they never understood (like you, mother, never did either), that I was doing it for them, and that, if anyone truly deeply suffered in the process, it was me.

But that was all before, and now I'm here, driving this hi-tech wreck, and, as much as I live in the peaceful knowledge that they're all now finally exempt of the magnetic possibility of loving me, I do miss it, or them, I do miss them, the old girls in the old days, the days when, even if causing some pain (to them and myself) I could at least live the thrill of female company, whereas now it's just Marcus, chrome walls, and a bunch of stars in a dark sky.

 

of Memory as a feeble reason

 

People often ask me "How do you do, Captain..", to which I generally reply "I'm ok thank you" too early and much before they can finish their question with "..to spend so many long months in Space in that ship of yours without feeling lonely and homesick and nostalgic?", and the reason I do cut their question short with my mundane behavioral answer is because I hate to tell them all how I live of memories, of memories only, of tiny bits of things I've seen and heard and smelt, and generally felt in my times as a feeling animal, (now that I'm no more than a substantive chunk of weight sub-organically cutting its long lost way through Space), and that those memories alone keep me going, or else, living, they keep me living - living, and not going, because in fact I am going nowhere, really.

(Even though this Ship moves, or so it seems.)

Back to the memory talk, it all annoys me mainly because memory itself fools me with its fading insufficiency, up to an extent where I sometimes feel I've lost it, such is the erosion of detail in every recall of a given episode. Take Annelise's face for example. Annelise was a beautiful nordic (Swedish, in fact, Swedish, see, this is annoying: that she was Swedish, this irrelevant fact I'll never forget; but anyway, I was saying, she was a beautiful Swedish) waitress I once picked up in the middle of a busy street in downtown Gothemburg, and we ended up in her bed, a bulky, white bed with smooth fluffy pillows embracing our entwining curl as some lazy cold (but sunny) autumn morning went on carrying its business outside. And in her bed I loved her, I loved very much, oh so much, I loved her so so much, and I know I loved and I know I felt with (and inside) her such a - and my spine trembles, recalling - discharge of everything else that was before, but yes, that love is in my memory now nothing else than the knowledge of having loved her that way, because in reality I don't remember anything about her and the particular way I loved her.

And that, plainly put - and could I not be putting things plain? -, fucking kills me, so much so that I'd almost rather just not even have lived it, because as I was loving her I was loving her also because I loved the fact that I could forever recall that particular feeling! And now time is passing and passing and passing, and the details fade and fade and fade - first went the lines of her face, then her smell, then (it took longer, but also they vanished) those sopranic moans of a lost doggy she made as I stroke her steadily, then her warmth, and her tits, and the colour of her hair - and ultimately all I'm left with is with her nationality and her name; a line in a list of names. 

And I obviously love to know that I once felt what I know I felt, but it frustrates me so much to not be able to feel it again in retrospect; it loses its meaning, really, memory has such a hard time keeping the sensorial details (details?) intact that it becomes just a meaningless string of facts and figures, like a table of achievements and failures reminding me that I lived but not allowing me to recall how I actually fucking did.

So when people ask me how I do it, and although I know that, with all its faults, it's indeed memory that keeps me going (memory as a reminder, but also memory as a guarantee that I might one day feel again), I just tell them "I do feel all that and much more; being the captain of a Spaceships sucks, and it's lonely and dark out there", and I keep from them - from the people that ask - that, despite its miserable forgetting nature, memory is the only proof that me and them - the people, again, those that ask and all the others - have that we actually lived, because - and this I don't need to tell them - whatever we call "present" fades in the exact moment that it exists, given that all that we feel, really, are memories of a moment just gone past.

And the reason I keep it from them, is because, for all it has done for me, I will never do memory enough justice for the essential gift it is, and I'll end up just bitching about its insufficiencies, and I don't want people - the people, ALL PEOPLE, now fuck, stop asking me which people, it's ALL, I mean us ALL - to embitter themselves against memory like me.

Because, you see, I'm a lonely drifter, out here, and all I have on me is memory, and it's too exclusive not to become oppressive, but you all, you're out there, you can build up this exact moment and keep creating memories, you don't need (although it would be nice, I know, I know) to rely on memories to feel alive, or even, to be alive. So you can live healthily with memory and ignore that it'll fade and rot, you can actually use its beauty without even noticing its demons (unlike me).

So yeah, people (which people am I actually talking about, I wonder; who could I possibly be speaking with, apart from poor dumb Marcus?) ask me "How do you do, Captain..." and I wish - oh how I wish - that they would leave it there, the question, or, for that matter, leave themselves there too, meaning, that they would just leave me alone.

 

Monday morning blues (just sleep on)

 

Bright light the curtain's down, wake up in a maze of heres and theres, quick shower where am I, who are you, oh fuck is it monday already, why didn't you put the alarm on, coffee coffee, and on the go, can I give you a ride somewhere, "Where", I don't know how the fuck am I supposed to know, "Where did you find me?", Oh no no not this, Fine then, stay here, "And then?", just have a coffee, where's my shoes, "WHO are you?", Ah I thought you knew, this is your place after all, "My place?", It's not? so where are we, "I don't know", Neither do I, "So let's sleep some more", On a monday morning, "Yes, if there's no space there's no time", And then, what, "Now YOU ask?", I do, "Well, "then" is not necessarilly after this.", And so, "So stop worrying about the past and come sleep with me", Should I, "Yes you should", I will then, hands away, close your eyes, let me sleep, it's monday morning, "It is, yes", So is it or isn't it, "I have no idea", neither do I.

 

Crystal Skies

 

We’ve been cruising for time on end through these ever black skies. No day, no night, just dark void and the irregular pattern of star-shaped light. I can’t stop wondering what force lies beyond this colourless logic, and how many dimensions there are to this that I see. I’m not even sure we do move and in which direction, and how many directions there are. Darkness only, and stars, and us just sitting here guiding this doomed spaceship into nowhereness with the delusionary impression that there is a reason. Reason! The more we move into this numbing void, the less I trust it, reason. These empty skies full of matter that might as well not exist. For I can’t touch it, I can’t touch nothing but myself or the bare walls around me, moving walls, still walls, or walls still moving, moving through still walls of dark and bright. Matter all around me, empty matter, and I look at these stars, or, say, at that particular one right there, oh how it shines on me, bright and alive, but so far, does it really exist, and if so, how, why; and still?, or is it long gone. Huge inhumanly gigantic pieces of something, as old as all my ignorance, and still as real or fake as myself, me too, what else am I than a perishable piece of matter floating in space and knowing no more about itself than a star does of why it’s there, and where.