by Michael Abraham
I am leaving, and I am taking nothing.
I am leaving, and I am taking nothing, and there is a void inside me—a round, black sphere, like a planet, or like the absence of a planet where a planet should be. I am coming apart in the stress of it. I am borrowing money and time, bleeding my pride out my feet as I run from this bar to that bar to be anywhere, to be out. It is not only that I am sad. It is that I am depleted, that I have given all I can give, and, now, there is no gift left. There is no gift, as in, there is no special sense of possibility glimmering, of the impossible becoming possible through me. There was once this gift, this special sense, and now there is only its having been there, its having flown off to someone somewhere else.
***
I walk circles around this place that I am leaving, and I note all the little, special things, the daily clutter of being alive. I do not think about the time that I have spent here. I think only of leaving, of fluttering off like a moth—not like a butterfly, for I am not going off in a gay manner. I am somber like a moth. To be somber is not to be destitute; it is not to despair. There is a certain resignedness to being somber, a certain goodnaturedness. One who is somber is like falling water, carried forward irrepressibly, tinkling and shimmering as the onward pull of gravity does what it will always do, which is to draw on and downward—that is to say, to be somber is to face inevitability. One who is somber has an air about him, is better-off than other sad folks. One who is somber is like a moth. This is the best that I can explain it, the allure of the feeling that I am feeling. It is not enough to say that everything in my life is ending and starting again. That is true. But it is better to say that I am a small and fragile thing, a small and fragile thing with a certain gravitas, a certain solemnity, moving into the broader world to see what the broader world has in store, moving into the broader world because there is no choice, because it is in my nature to move. Fluttering, fluttering.
***
I don’t want to get into specifics because specifics muddy the water; they make complication where there might be the simplicity of feeling and all its affordances.
***
I think of cowboys. There is something undeniably sexy about the lonesomeness of the cowboy, a desire that roars up, upon seeing him, to hold him and let him know, for a brief moment, maybe for just a night, that there is another body in the world, and it is an open body, a body ready for population. I want to be the cowboy or the cowboy’s lover; I want to be them both. I want to tread in lonely spaces, to take as mine the wide open expanse of the earth beneath the sky. I want the jerky run of the horse over the plains, the sweat on the brow, the tightness of thirst in the throat. When I say this, I do not mean that I really want the wild west. I am too much a city boy. What I mean is that I want to know the wildness of the west inside me, that I want an unfettered freedom to move and stretch, that I want to be the cowboy and the cowboy’s lover. Leaving your whole life makes you think of cowboys. That’s just how it goes.
***
Picture a little girl with a red balloon. Picture the wind as it wrenches the balloon from her hand. Picture the way that her face twists. It does not break into a sob, but a sob hovers just behind it, waiting, waiting. She does not sob. She is a brave, little girl. Watch her as she turns her trembling face up to the pale sky, as the red balloon makes itself scarcer and scarcer to the eye. She considers for a moment that it might get trapped in a tree, wrapped about a branch, and she hopes for this, for she is good at climbing trees. But the balloon evades the trees and becomes first an apple, then a point of mere red on the canvas of the sky, then merely a tiny shadow. And then it is gone. The girl, who is wearing a red raincoat, which is why she picked out a red balloon, stands alone, staring up at the gigantic, empty sky. Watch her as we pull away from her, as she becomes first an apple, then a point of mere red on the canvas of the horizon, then merely a tiny shadow. And then she is gone. Am I the girl who lost the balloon or am I you, the viewer who lost the girl? I do not know. The question is the difference between losing what I had and losing myself in the process. I do not want to lose myself, do not want to lose this brave, red girl whom I might be. But we cannot see her anymore. She is gone, somewhere in the horizon. Her balloon is gone, somewhere in the sky. What becomes of the little, red girl? We cannot say. We do not know. Her story is receding from us so quickly, with such vengeance. Am I her, disappearing, or am I you, disappearing from her? Are these different?
It has gotten too difficult. Suffice it to say I lost my balloon, and then the background roared up to claim me. Suffice it to say I watch from somewhere else as this happens. Suffice it to say I have split up into me and me.
***
I sleep in the spare room. I wait and I wait for the time to be gone. The clock is brutal. The calendar, brutal. They stare back at me, uncomprehending, as I beg them for speed.
***
Maybe it isn’t so much. Maybe it is only the sweet patter of rain on the concrete, the blush of petrichor up from the ground. Maybe it is that first rain of spring that heralds new growth to come, flowers and ferns and other things that will find their way into the cracks in the city streets, into the little plots reserved for the trees. Maybe it is the seed and the pollen floating on the breeze, ready, expectant, buzzing with the possibility that something miraculous is about to happen, something everyday but miraculous.
Maybe I will blossom out of the rain; maybe I will be a hidden treasure in the concrete. I do not know if this is what will happen, but I know it very well might. I also know that what blossoms withers in an endless cycle. I look at my withered life, scattered like ash around me, and I reflect that this will happen again sometime, that there will be other leavings in which I take nothing and go as quick as the wind. I reflect on the everyday, how this is so very everyday, how this happens to everyone at some point. Not everything can be perfect, child, I say to myself in the dark. Not everything can work out the way it seemed that it was meant to.
***
See, I am trying to be glamorous with my sadness. I am trying to make it pretty. This is the only thing that there is left for a sad person to do, the only thing left to do for a person who’s losing everything and losing it all by choice. If you don’t take the sadness and twist it until it catches the light, until it sparkles and shines in a radiant, defiant style, it will swallow you whole and leave nothing left but the pit. I am the red girl and the cowboy and the cowboy’s lover and the moth and the water running toward the ground. I am the clockwatcher in the spare room. I am the deep nothing spinning like a planet. I am the spring rain and the possibility of seedlings. If I don’t transfigure into these things, I will lose my mind. It is only in transfiguring into these things that I can keep my dignity in the midst of my unrelenting sadness. This is perhaps because I am a writer, and writers are half-liars: they can’t merely be sad. There must be glamour to it, a glamour that is wholly made up but no less real for being imaginary. See, I am trying to survive my sadness, and the only way I know how is to twist and turn so that the light catches me and reflects me back to myself in better shapes, in little stories full of color and symbols that mean nothing ultimately.
I will do the damn thing. I will do it, and, until then, I will relish in all the glamour in bein’ sad.