fuck you and your tolstoy

when i was in university and freshly single, there was a friend i set my sights on sleeping with. mostly because i knew he was easy, but partly because he was really into philosophy and i found that very attractive. he'd tell me crazy stories about sartre's life and i'd giggle and twirl my hair because i hadn't yet fully adjusted to the real world. a year prior to that we spent our days in lectures on philosophy and literature and history, listening to professors try to explain the human condition to us through a vast expanse of different mouthpieces. i had already abandoned the romance of that and buried my head in neuroscience papers on experiments with rats. he told me he was hesitant to sleep with me because our friend group was tightly knit, and i just circled the mouth of my beer glass with my fingertip and undressed him with my eyes – philosophically. 

i’ve been thinking lately about how if napoleon hadn’t had a cold they would have won the battle. about how i got fed up on homecoming and asked my friend if he wanted to come inside my house and as soon as the door locked behind us he kissed me and i was still pulling my pants up as my roommates came back inside. i always say that things happen for a reason but what i’ve been more interested in lately is how they happen – sure, the swarm of my life is guided by a few goals but small possibilities are always crashing and aligning to lead to what i experience. i’ve already seen napoleon bathe his plump, stout body and i’m not buying that his sneeze alone can fire a cannon. 

my friend and i never fucked again. like a rat in a maze i've taken many turns and detours to come to the comfort of embracing chaos, to know that the perfect conditions for every event always exist but only because it couldn’t have happened any other way. i ask god everyday to grant me the serenity to accept the things i cannot change and the wisdom to know that is everyone but me. maybe i suck my teeth and shrug when i hear your name but there's an intuition in me that the perfect storm will roll in for both of us. maybe war and peace coexist necessarily, the opposing sides of each magnet creating a space for love. the russian words for "peace" and "world" are identical – and i like to think that i can trace pictures with my fingertip in the settled gunpowder.

I had a conversation with the brick wall

I had a conversation with the brick wall today. He listened really well, didn't interrupt me, let me talk for hours. He never pressured me to talk to him, and never offended me with his words. He did what brick walls do, stood there nicely like a sturdy brick wall, and I stood there like the manic pixie I was, mouth running like a tap, knowing that a brick wall will hold you up but never be a comfortable place to lean. I know not to show too much of myself – the mortar of my soul is too soft, never drying onto someone's heart. I wonder if I haunt the walls of that brick house. Maybe the mortar of my soul is actually a muzzle-loaded cannon, firing indirectly at a short range. 

I won't see the brick wall for awhile. A room without walls isn't a room at all – just a vast expanse, which is a very vague way of describing something. But sometimes I feel more at peace in a field that stretches for miles than I do anywhere else. The brick wall doesn't want to see me cry and the blue sky is so imposing that it'll hold me for a good while. 

I had a conversation with the brick wall today and it wasn't a conversation – I banged my fists against the brick until my knuckles bled and I cursed only myself, because I chose to speak to a brick wall. But I know that kindness is never wasted, that every breath we take on this earth sustains our life and that can never be wasted either. I wrap my knuckles and vow to never keep my fists up again, because all the truly beautiful things on earth are not man-made like a brick wall – it is the primordial love that lives in the matter of our bodies like the mother that rocked us to sleep. And if one day I wake up suddenly turned into a horrible insect, I will not wonder, "how will I get to work?", but rather, "how will I hold the people I love?".