Saudade

Somebody else taught me the word, but it was you who taught me the meaning. And so I look for you -- not constantly, but often enough, more often than I might admit -- in familiar places; I close my eyes and reach out my hands, fingers spread, waiting to feel the subtle shift in time and space and what-is-real. And often it is nothing more than blind-wanderings through empty hallways -- or, not empty, but the things that fill them are less than nothing; it doesn't matter. But, sometimes -- once, twice, perhaps even a third -- I find you. Or I don't find you, but what I find is so much the very same that it is eerie; tell the same story again and again, and you can make it into something almost solid. And it is the same -- tiny details shift and shimmer and the truth is mutable, as it always is, in everything -- but, in a deeply hidden and important way, it is as exactly-same as it could hope to be.

If you have nothing to say, and you are tired and tired and so far beyond tired of walking these tedious pathways to no place in particular; if the same stories (and they are always the same stories, because the storyteller is always the same, and words have the taste of something finite in their infinity) leave you weary. If you stop saying anything at all. If people ask you why you are silent, tell you that you should speak, and this leaves you wanting nothing more than to never speak again -- it is part stubbornness, and part that special blankness that appears when something specific is asked or requested or even mentioned (What are you thinking, right now? And the only thing, once the words have hit the air, is...vast unending empty, nothing at all.) If that, then what?

(And people make you responsible -- this isn't the intent, but it is the result, you being you and things being as they are. You have this weight of responsibility, and it is tiresome, and unasked for, and the warmth and gentleness you might feel -- you do feel -- for any of them, for all of them, is tinged with something heavy; your head aches, vague. And when somebody says You understand me, what they really mean is I feel like I understand you, and you at least know how ridiculous that is, but what can you say to a fragment of your reflection in a shard of mirror?)

So all the tiny moments pile up, one upon another, like pennies; the taste of life, metallic somewhere behind your tongue. There is the happy, frolicksome puppy, the softness of its fur still a warm impression on your fingers weeks afterward. There is a dream of dead birds, and the waking up -- lost and still somewhere else inside your head, tears hot on your cheeks. There is spiced hot chocolate, smooth against the roof of your mouth. There is rain, and the hypnotic umbrella-rhythms wrapped around you, the grey half-light filtered red through your temporary shelter. There is a single, perfect pear. There is silence, and there is time for many words, and finally, finally time for sleep (and the sleep stretches out into a place beyond time). There is an evening in the dark where everything is friction and warm skin and wet welcome and the lines crossed spanned continents -- spanned eras. Reality shifts on its axis. There is midnight beside a fire in the crystalline cold, and strangers who hand you plastic cups full of cold champagne, and when you look up at the far-away sky, you can even see the stars. There are a hundred more, a thousand, a million; full pockets, piles spilling over into everything, taking up space, taking over. But.

When I find you, every time, it ceases to matter what, exactly, I have found; the actual reality -- you, or me, or someone else entirely -- makes no difference. We tell the same stories, again and again; they are a sort of conjure-trick. The facts are not important. And every time, the ending is the same.

(And every time, we wait until the next beginning.)