The Divine Farce (LeapLit)

by Michael S.A. Graziano

Then again, sometimes my soaring philosophy meant nothing to me, and I thought, like Hemlock, it is what it is. It isn’t heaven, it isn’t hell, it’s simply where we are, and it stinks. It stinks literally. It stinks and it hurts. And the people here are driving me crazy.

My own vision was the most disturbing. Death by centipede or by boiling water was nothing compared to the dread of finding new people.

I was good at hell.

none made me happy, none were as important to me as Henry and Rose, who were only faces in my mind now, remembrances. They were no better than anyone else, no more lovely than the thousand other people I saw every moment, no less filthy, but all the same they were themselves, they were special because I knew them, because I had spent enough time pressed up against them to absorb a little part of their odor and skin and blood and emotion, because they were after all my friends. I wanted them.

Is it enough to struggle in an endless cycle for the simple biological truths of food, water, sex, and sleep? I tried. I tried to be content. I tried not to feel nauseous about the failures of other people, to draw my satisfaction from the strength of my own muscles and bones. Success is selfish. I tried to relegate my friends to an idle dream. I pretended to a certain nonchalance, as if I didn’t need anyone and was quite well off on my own, but at the same time I kept an eye out ceaselessly for Henry and Rose.

If death hands you rancid shit strewn with human hair, make an escape ladder.

For the death of me, I couldn’t tell whether the place was intended to be heaven or hell. To the extent that heaven above is isolation, it seems to be hell. To the extent that hell below is a crowd, it apparently is heaven. Maybe we are condemned to an endless nagging sense of discomfort balanced against comfort, satisfaction against the itch to escape. But having escaped as far as I had, I didn’t know where else to go.

The more grandiose I let my thoughts become, the less the world made sense. The more focused my thoughts became on the specific, on the mundane, on the pragmatic, the more of the mystery I understood. That in itself was a paradox worth considering.

Now I am the strange mad creature of the ceiling. Obsessed and content with that obsession. To have a purpose is in itself an arrival.