in conversation with my mind • after reading Piranesi
Dear Matthew,
Your face has returned, without its familiarity. I held your hands six weeks ago, and I felt only the coldest kind of history coursing underneath your marble skin: apathy. Do you wear this stone identity in mourning for your precious statues? A time to weep. Okay. I get it.
Will you yet laugh?
Your body walks these streets – yes, I’ve heard about your pilgrimage. What are you looking for? Your body haunts this city like your years of absence did my mind.
What are you looking for? What have you found?
I’m right here.
I know that you remember all of our adolescent footsteps. Follow them again?
Follow them.
Our first fight draws me to the window even now, and I gaze into that night a decade past:
You, standing under the streetlight with your hands inside your pockets; you, so noncommittal and unwilling to pretend conviction. More than anyone I know, you refused blind certainty. Your attitude was arrogant. It was dismissive. And I admired it. However, it was either me or you, and neither of us understood that. Then, you went away, and now you’re back, but it’s not you, and I’ve heard this one before, I’m sure. Somehow you’ve grown spiritually or something, and you don’t need this world or what it offers. You have your House. You harbor longing for it about as conspicuously as these words I howl:
Come back.
But I don’t think you stand with hands in pockets anymore. That image of you returning to me is proving less than false; it’s history. And the path you’ve already tread is already travelled. Even if you decide tonight to brave another storm, I won’t open the door…I don’t trust your eyes. The day you returned I knew, though I didn’t admit it. We huddled together in your parents’ living room, and you told us about the scientist and the amnesia. The cop. Your eyes lit up when you spoke of her, but that’s not what bothered me most – it was the crack in your choking voice when you spoke of your halls and chambers filled with your stony community. Your fingers fiddled with your favorite wine in front of you. You didn’t drink it at all. You’re full of something I can’t believe (you see, statues have never spoken with me). I haven’t seen you since that night. They say you’re here in the city, but nobody looks like you. Isn’t that ridiculous? I saw you in every passing stranger for years. And now I can’t see you at all. It seems this is becoming my choice as much as it was ever yours. If you dropped by I really wouldn’t open the door, but I can’t keep myself from leaving all the lights on. I can’t stop from hoping that you will come back. And you have come back! – as best as you can – but the House has saturated your mind. That place of immeasurable beauty – your salvation is my despair. Those rooms occupy deep space in you that I will never access.
This is all much too abstract. Here’s all I’m trying to say. Here it is, okay?
Here it is.
I once thought you were dead. And now I kind of wish you’d stayed that way.
Yours,