I rose to the surface, then swung my port around in the direction of Gabriela’s face. It didn’t occur to me that I was repeating the same pattern which had brought me to my present lowly presence, which had actually brought me most of my suffering for my entire life, that same pattern of look, pursue, flirt, romance, eat out, and fuck. That was it. A simple recipe for torture that I had alone perfected, of course with the consent of the woman who was undoubtedly working on her own similar torture pattern, laced with insecurity and a few hours escape from boredom... “For every bodily pleasure brings joy at first, but at length it bites and destroys”...and here we were, Gab and I perched on that precipice of atomic desire, me with my cock an inch inside, she with her mouth agape and her historical, Mediterranean face aglow, her womb pulling the inevitable and perpetual part of me close...
I had forgotten what it was like, this uncertainty, this moment where a decision is both born and made...I hadn’t been this close to a major life move in nine months. And then we made it with not so much as a few words, by driving into hips, by letting go into the carelessness and coldness of these times we live in...a coward’s choice but one covered by universal love and blunder, a guarantee that there is no one who is not a breaker of rules, and that Gabriela and I had made no mistake for bright, roving observers and friends...we simply exchanged bliss and heart and we did it for at least an hour...and Gabriela could make a man feel like a sexy mother fucker... I want to say Italian Film is Great! For the women of Italy! Passion is their pose and they strike it perfect...
I have one image alone of the night and that is of the cold winter window open to the tip stars and the blue repose, while under me and with me Gabriela had her own visions and memories, probably minute details of a touch, a look, a particular breath...Women’s movements are the more shocking by contrast with the quietude of male ignorance...their convictions are by instinct, and their activities intentional and their memories exacting. The man’s spontaneous, clumsy and loose...their failures they keep to themselves and so they appear weaker...
So I left. Gabriela and I left it where it was. Which was an intense condensation of confusion misted over a shaky premise. A premise built on projection. A premise acting like a promise, already broken, already regretted. A weakness, not oral or traditional or expressed, but a convulsion of truth that would need to be ferreted come soon...but i was gone from the Centennial state and back in the orange kiss western edge of the western world...So I continued with my plans to move back to the place of my birth, continued to discuss things with a candor too simple, too palpable, and resumed fucking my ex-wife whenever I got the chance...I was a coward at best. There was the same tired old and familiar guilt, guilt for needing the cunt of my ex, guilt for not being honest with G, guilt for barely writing poems, for wearing glasses when looking into the vision of the unity of God. I was a man apart. Apart from the gilded poet fakers I worked around at the college, apart from my own season of refuge and rhythm, apart from the two women I was carnally unworthy of apart from a family...
But by god by jesus I look back now and I was not apart from the path...a path with signs now coming swift as the thunder that peals, and what I could see more clear along this trail, like a mountain fire road cut between the stands of pine and looking up like a night to see the arms and hands of them, what I was beginning to see was my own budding perfect contempt for the world, how each and every manufactured and merchandized moment, object, and thing mattered less and less...what mattered more and more to me was the annihilation of the demarcation, of the effulgence laid over each aching moment of living, like the grey dusking light coming on to snuff the pulsation of the self, the drowning blue sun, the true self, Atman, the self-effulgent witness...Like sight in the eyes, like hearing in the ears, like smell in the nose—so too love in the heart and so too, the true self in the false...
-Michael Price
