Always Crush Me

some notes on devotion

What if you let the gaze of another fall upon you. Just allowed yourself to be flattened by the power of another human presence. Felt their grey eyes compressing you into a pink vision, all of you, the jowl, the breast, the forehead. What if you allowed yourself to be a wavering image that they could dismiss with a blink, or by retreating. You could try not to freak out. You could even simply say, would you like another biscuit. What if you didn’t interfere with their selection, their choice of which of your traits were desirable for the moment. What if you didn’t interfere with the possibility of their desire moving on to another such cluster of properties. You could accept this circumstance. 

Theoretically you could allow the silence to make of you its hollow. It’s willing. It’s always pleased by such allowances. Theoretically, you don’t have to resuscitate buried sentiments and throw them against the wind. You can relax as existence has the audacity to more or less leave you alone, without destroying you, leaving you quivering and confused, abandoning you to a slower expiration. You could set aside, for a moment, the mind’s dance of conjured phantasms, the ongoing charade that composes your attempt at domesticating reality.

Is devotion, in other words, to relinquish? You are not setting the agenda today. You are allowing the enfolding slate of the sidewalk, to be, meaningfully, your interior, the blue-white fluorescence. You are too soft to even have the status of an object. You aren’t even so bold as to be nothing. What is setting the agenda is the mirror, traffic, the algorithm, the mountain, or God, or whatever other name you place on eternity while you kneel or just rest on the toilet seat. You are understanding that your attempts to exert control are firing staples at the ocean. Sometimes they bob away in the way that you’d like. Sometimes they don’t.

You go to work. It’s fine. You know how to get by. It’s relaxing to let the systems take over. You’re filing reports, filling up your cool glass of water. Most of you isn’t doing much. The whole thing drives itself. Your personality is a temporary tool, currently set aside. The riverbed of blinking lights will carry you in the necessary direction. Necessary meaning what happened. The world being all that is the case. You miss New York, even when you’re in New York. You try to snap out of it, but it’s not clear where “out” is located.

In the evening, the hush of being touched. The quiet moment when you allow yourself to be held. Somehow you are not annihilated. That would almost be more of a relief. When you are kissed on the mouth, it’s almost like being digested. Or, like, metabolized. Something is continuously ripening in the room hung in muslin. Maybe you’re understanding that there is no escape. It’s just this all the time. How laughably simple that glorious tyranny is. Your words sound weird in the air. You lay back, consent to be crushed. There is the shimmering transparent fire of this being acceptable. Grey eyes watch you dress, put on your pants, adjust your hair. You vanish from sight, and thus the pantomime continues.