It never ends well. There is no romance, not beauty, not comedy or tragedy in any saving sense. It just ends. Aaron could escape; he had a passport and wasn't afraid of flying. Even if he were, he wasn't afraid of the sea. He did have a healthy respect for the sea, if not a fear of it. But then he would destroy whatever beauty crept up around him, like a statue surrounded by a garden and at night he would trample the roses, the flowers, the ivy. He would be standing like a stone at dawn while the pigeons shat upon his head.
There are ideas that when a bird craps on you, it's good luck, but when a pigeon craps on you, or a seagull at the sea, it's just not luck. It's very likely and unpleasant, and the improbability ascribed to luck and chance just isn't there. These birds crap on things, they crap on people. Darwin might say that this is why they're still around. They're demonstrating they are not preferably edible. They're very crappy. Except to sharks, maybe. But don't quote him on that.
So Aaron made decisions and contradicting decisions. He was wary of declarations. He would stay, he would go, he would live, he would die, etc. He wasn't hungry, he wanted to eat. He quit smoking then in the morning he lit a cigarette before his eyes were all the way open. There was no progress, there was only an ever-increasing void. He cared, he didn't. Accountability was only to himself, and he kept as much of a tally as needed to ensure that he was always nearly drowning in self-antagonism. Until one day, when the signs were right, he would jettison his projects and fling himself away, leaving only the ghosts in his head of what may or may not be or have been.
Potential. If he heard it once, he had heard it too many times. This wasn't an issue. He could demonstrate to himself nearly with complete consistency that most endeavors could be undertaken and completed with unequivocal success if he approached them the right way. But he was never really sure he wanted to. Consistently at least. Fits of whimsy led him to draw references for paintings he would not complete any time soon, lists of characters or ideas for stories he would not write, and outlines for things that he would never record. It wasn't so much the talent was missing, though it was not necessarily evident either. It was the heart.
"We are adhering to life now with our last muscle — the heart." ~ Djuna Barnes
do you like robbe-grillet? for some reason i think of him every so often when i read what you write.
ReplyDeletethe paragraph about crappy birds was funny. as an aside, whenever i see a gull, a voice in my head whispers seryozha. went to the beach with my friend once and there was a gull we named that (he didn't crap on us), and it is now involuntarily assigned to every member of his race.