Stage directions for a couple in June

He says he has this fantasy that someone hates his guts but can't leave him alone. He’s dangling his feet off the side of the train platform. Everywhere, it's so green. It's so green everywhere. Down below there is graffiti on the concrete ledge: red and green and blue. White. Someone's name, or their initials maybe. A little face. You don't say anything because you have nothing adversarial to say. You try not to imagine a train blowing by right now, his fragile grandeur dissected, just eyes and nerves probably. Where would his shoes fly off to? You imagine them dancing from a telephone wire with the laces tied together.

He says he's afraid of knowing too many people, he doesn't want them to lose their worth by comparison. He says every time he speaks to someone new his self gets worn down a little bit by contact with each extreme. Eventually, you will become the aggregate of everyone you’ve known-- true average. Every person will become just a sequence of movements to anticipate and outsmart and nothing will be fun anymore (when you begin to know enough). Someday he’ll live inside forever, or he’ll only go where he knows no one else goes. Behind his back you tell your friends you think he’s the strangest person you've ever met.

Preface: Anywhere you go in the woods there is a rock wall. Really, anywhere you can go, someone has been. Mostly, if it is possible, it has been done. Out of only the two of us one of us cannot win "best in show." I like when the rock walls are so old and neglected they have grown moss, and they are so wet you can't climb them, even when you dig your fingernails in you come away with slippery clumps. You can imagine him picking the moss out of his nails with the tip of a hunting knife sitting on a plastic chair in front of a fire. I bet sometimes he just leaves it.

He says he doesn't think there's room for more than one person in the world. He says it like you will understand but I don't think he cares (obviously). There's just no room. What's it like, to inherit the world and everything in it? How does it feel to be the only one left alive after everything else is gone? Move over, let me dangle my feet too. You're just talking to yourself again.  

 

Inspired by “A Message to You Rudy” by the Specials and memories of driving around my hometown after it flooded over the summer