The entire stroll of your being consists of two narrow flights of inclined stairs. On this brief trajectory, not even the passing glimpse of your muddied visage in a puddle has been afforded to you. No awning, no display case. This is the dank living, the blind tumble. The edit seems abrupt and rushed, the dearly beloved stand about pensive and unappeased, while you make your way, up or down, it doesn’t matter. Stumbling or crawling are almost identical without destinations.
If you had but looked up from your trudging, you would have seen the angels falling through the blue air beside you. Now you are here, still, and they have shattered away. Where to, unto what, are less than a buzz in your empty bucket, given you can’t even find the mark left by your puny self stuck to the surface of the grim edifice like some tiny blemish or growth.
Ceaselessly, which is not to say forever, backtracking over so far wears out the grooves of that song, that ditty you have been, and dulls the needle too, that resonant contact in situ referred to as living, the now point in the constricting circumference of time.
You don’t like knowing you are a limited instrument, a cheap projector. No one does. Luckily, there are distractions such as boasting, envy, humiliation, gloating, deflation, jealousy, ire, and failure. The sun and moon burn the face off things, and the days go flaking away.
If you could lift your gaze to look out, you would be able to see how much space there is around you and around the bit of construction where you have embedded your tiny access problem. Breathtaking to even consider a fatal breeze startling you, dislodging you and carrying you off. Where to unto what are not even far off glinting possibilities within that inky black immensity you trundle around in. To talk of a shell would at least be to limit, to gather up some of you in jars.
And then losing your lights before even being able to address your ignoble adversary. Night on the landing. It begins again. Does it make you dizzy, all the spinning? Two things inside you have become stuck to one another. The aches are back. The hands, the hands clench and reach. Trying to express it without having it in hand. When this coming together to make a new thing occurs, it leaves a depression where the two former things had been, a space in which to rattle. It is suddenly very warm. You fidget. Your breathing becomes heavier. Nerves. Something shook loose. Drops are heard on the roof of your head. Panic at not being able to jump out of your own skin. Although it is apparently raining, a clown is not permitted to amble down the slope. Sleep evaporates on the itchy surfaces of the world.
The only return to innocence is derangement. The twilight has been disordered and won’t open. Flowers cave in on themselves, swallow their teeth, and can no longer talk. The lullabies cascade down the stairs. Pain rises by steps. When tilted aright, you only manage to hobble. When you fall, you crawl until help arrives. Darker absences punctuate these grim discoveries and reduce presence to a weak intermittent pulse, engulfed slowly by emptiness, doldrums, and rubber duckies.
Lilies smell like an infant’s feces. And there you have it succinctly, the perfect parenthesis for a human life. Between the cymbals, each day’s heat saturates and oils you, extends you compounded by frying times until, dense and tough, what survives of you is little more than a remainder, a leftover in styrofoam. As with the baby’s excrement, living pushes out what it cannot use.
Threaded by echoes, reflecting like a bouncing ball on the incessant mimicking and mocking plucked from the very air, a bitter reflex, you find yourself laid out on a small island of sediment, of gibberish gathered and packed like mud. Exposed to romping time and ravaging recollection just when you most yearn to secrete yourself into the rift in some crag, to filter down through the blind fissures of an anonymous rock.
But of all the moves, the attempt to hide was the most elaborate delusion. As if you were to try to weave a womb out of your confusion, that immense trunk that branches out to tips that scratch upon the face of disintegration itself. How many more suns will roll over this exposed plain and blast every sliver on it with light? Hide? How hide when you have lived apparent and stuck, like a coin incrusted in the mainmast of a ship? On the contrary, you have always been in evidence, part of the unraveling, like a blush, like the weakest of lies. Even after a lifetime of seduction was applied to you, was pressed on you, you were never quite convinced that you were someone. Have you forgotten that only someones can hide, presuming that some nook, some dark corner were conveniently about, that is? Rococo, you twirled and ricocheted off the surfaces around you in search of some demure retiring, only to find yourself again beneath the light, and smiling in that trapped way you do when you realize once again it is time to take up your shtick and walk out under the lights for the next performance.
Not that your dissipating and happenstance fart of a life is of any interest to anybody. Even this description of it as a sort of fleeting fanfare ennobles significantly the threadbare motivation and resources actually involved. Yours was clearly a tertiary incident at best, falling short of qualifying even as a situation, were the circumstantial nature of your this then and now to be glanced at, not to say prodded or revealed. Because even a momentary look would make whoever cared that much feel that it was already more than exhaustive enough.
Find the liberty of silence where it draws the horizon. Try to waft, try to scatter. Find the note for distant dissolving now that here has resolved itself in a fizzle. Dream yourself away in miniscule caprices. They are what fireflies are made of.
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About the Author
The son of Colombian parents, George Mario Angel Quintero was born in 1964 in San Francisco, California, where he spent his first thirty years. He studied literature at the University of California, and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Under the name George Angel, he has published poetry, fiction, and essays in English. Since 1995, he has lived in Medellin, Colombia, authoring seven books of poetry, and three books of theater plays all in Spanish under the name Mario Angel Quintero. He continues to write and publish in both English and Spanish. He is also a musician, a visual artist, and a theater director.
