nathan > Recent Status Updates

Everything I have ever experienced is made crystalline. Nothing hurts any more. Hundreds upon thousands of moments glitter in unison, like snowflakes whose elaborate shapes are in full view. How this is possible, I can’t say. My every pain and joy, all my deep-rooted sorrows and loves, shine, not as an amalgam but as a whole comprised of distinct singularities, glowing together as one giant nebula.

Faces appear to me in my fading consciousness. Not the faces of dead strangers but of people who are living, albeit far away on the mainland. They are exhilaratingly clear. Vivid memories play out before me. In no particular order, and without context. Like a thousand dancers spilling on to the stage at once to each perform a different movement. Their bodies, suspended in their poses, shimmer like crystals.

I am trapped in the tortuous moments my own body generates second by second. I am dislodged from the time prior to pain, from the world of the not-ill.

What was it like to live with two fields of vision? I wondered. Maybe it was like this out-of-time round for two voices. Or like living a dream and reality at once.

The sea that runs alongside the one-hour stretch of coastal road had churned and frothed as if to engulf the island, the waves advancing from all sides, crests white with spume, to crash into the jetty and erupt into air.

I wondered who she had mistaken me for. Later that night Inseon would tell me how her mother frequently forgot that she had a daughter and sometimes lapsed into childishness, mistaking Inseon for her own older sister. Hearing this, I wondered if she’d assumed I was a friend or acquaintance of her sister’s.

Snow had a surreality to it. Was this because of its pace or its beauty? There was an accompanying clarity to snow as well, especially slow, drifting snow. What was and wasn’t important were made distinct. Certain facts became chillingly apparent. Pain, for one.

You tried very hard to look at her as if she was a stranger. You tried not to look lovingly at
the bridge of her nose that wrinkled when she laughed like a mischievous boy. You tried very hard not to awaken the indescribably tender feelings you
have only toward your own flesh and blood with whom you shared a childhood. You tried to freeze your heart to be as cold and hard as you could.

She was removing her make-up in front of the mirror, sitting with her back to you. For a moment her reflection darkened. Looking into your eyes in the mirror, she said, "Do you think so? But wouldn't there be people who find it fortunate to be able to do that, I
mean, to hide behind generally accepted ideas..."

Before that year was over, you once said to her in her room late at night, "I really have no idea how people can live confined within generally accepted notions, how they can endure such a life..."

A brief conversation with her, and the realm of confusion, ambiguity and uncertainty seemed, on the whole, to recede. Her words and gestures revealed a quiet strength, which made you believe that all our acts had purpose; that even when it led to failure, every attempt we made was meaningful.

I had to watch her mouth to hear her. Her bloodless lips had a purple hue. Then the blood was gushing everywhere, she said. I remember thinking I had to staunch it, but beyond that it’s a complete blank. I saw her face flicker with self-reproach.

How much can I trust my own senses?

I had not reconciled with life, but I had to resume living.

Life was exceedingly vulnerable, I realized. The flesh, organs, bones, breaths passing before my eyes all held within them the potential to snap, to cease—so easily, and by a single decision.

I don’t know what set it off, the shaking. My body seemed to be racked by sobs, though my eyes remained dry. Was this terror? Or anxiety, agitation, perhaps an abrupt anguish? No, it was a bone-chilling awareness. That a giant, invisible knife—the weight of its heavy blade beyond any human capacity to wield it—hung in the air, with me as its target. As I lay pinned and staring.

We’ll be useless, finally, like we pretty much were all along. We’ll have nothing left to do but go into the forest and write songs about women and about fucking up. How we did everything wrong and screwed up our lives, and now our children’s fathers are robots. It will be a better world, and our sad songs will echo through the birch trees.

What man in his right mind would shoot up a room full of beautiful naked women? It was like having a force field made of thongs and boob jobs.

I leaned over to look at my reflection in a puddle and threw up in it. A few seconds later, my startled face gazed back at me in a swamp of half-digested pizza.

I watched those tiny droplets fall through the yellow glow of a security light and wondered if any part of me was broken. Then I realized pretty much all of me was broken and wouldn’t get any better, and that’s why people have to die one day, to make room for a less fucked up generation.

.. whoever these people are, pantomime what they remember of the world.

My dad died of cancer three years ago. Since then, I have been “sensitive” meaning “the opposite of how men are supposed to be” because we must keep our shit together and build pergolas. I put the nail gun to my temple and pull the trigger. Just kidding.

The world is so beautiful I can barely stand it.

I want to get down on my knees and wrap my arms around her and smell the deer vagina on her skin, the warmth of the creator’s womb like a halo radiating from her existence.

I try again, this time summoning all the words in my vocabulary to explain to this out-of-my-league bartender that it’s my 40th birthday, and would she be interested in cheating on her cheating boyfriend by having sex with an assistant account manager with a regular-sized penis shaped like a Gonzo nose?

“Horse Girl doesn’t have boobs,” said Leonard. “She has nipples,” said Max. “Pink ones. They gave me a huge boner.”

How many more Hannahs did I have to love until Jesus came to the earth and harvested us like root vegetables and carried us up to heaven? I closed my eyes and waited for Judgment Day or my bus stop, whichever came first.

I wasn’t in love with her, but she was fun to hang out with, and I didn’t want anybody to die ever.

The rain felt like cold fingers trying to play the piano on our brains.

Were we haunting the world? Was the world haunting us? Would I ever be loved by someone who hadn’t abolished slavery?