28
The unseasonable thunder and lightning continued relentlessly. For a few minutes the paramour's naked physique, as his own, kept rematerializing more and more saliently before reverting subdued into passive darkness.
"You've never been there before, Really?"
"No, just seen glimpses of it from TV news. I want to go. Someday. Someday I will, someone will take me. Tell me what it is like."
"Hard to say. Each has his own reaction to it I suppose. I can't explain myself let alone ten million others. And when you live somewhere your habits are embedded in it There is nothing romantic or visceral: just day to day life."
"Don't you like it?"
"It has its moments, I guess."
It was a snippet of conversation copied and recopied and from it blurred in inaccuracies. It played repeatedly like a redundant song to a mind in or moving toward the void. It was a void created from fear of the loss of physical contact with this nameless intimacy whom he could barely speak with unless in semi-imagined, quasi-remembered dialogues of the mind.
"And you don't have an opinion?"
"Well, for me it's like walking through noxious clouds of car and bus exhausts and the more you walk through it the dirtier you become in everything and although you know it is not good, or know that it doesn't feel particularly good, externally, at least, it seems real and you find yourself doing more and more filthy acts to be in the heart of understanding life, becoming a true libertine. And even though enlightenment is found to be mostly endarkenment you know that you aren't pretending to live ideals taught to you out of bias and fear but the good and bad of what it really is, and appreciating it the best you can despite its imperfections. You feel the pulse of life and that from touching it, it has extended and altered you and, again, even though it isn't what you want from yourself—not idyllic or pure and it isn't what you really want to be—you know that you are not cowering within, making moral judgments on what you fear and don't understand.