FRONTIER ANXIETY

let me have these two seconds picturing things  a different way 

you have no idea how much

They both had fears. John Patrick Turner heard about the trauma factory through a friend of a friend. It was like a car phone in 1982. He believed in it enough but not enough for it to be in his hands, a real thing.   He followed the instructions of the friend of a friend and went to the Greenpoint Avenue G stop at 4 o’clock in the morning on a Tuesday. He met a man in a ski mask. He knew to look for the ski mask. It was like a bad movie. He turned over a copy of his license, social security card, letter of employment, and two bank statements. The man in the ski mask said he would be in touch. It was the future. That was all it took to dismember your life partner.   * ‘I want this for us.’ Elizabeth Ellis Macfarlene breathed heavily through her mouth. When she did that it made John Patrick Turner picture her eating a slab of cake. This was an inside joke he had with himself. He liked it very much. The idea of the trauma factory was simple. This is an idea with legs, is what John Patrick Turner thought, after thinking the usual thoughts about morality and how his own would intersect with a voluntary act of violence. The business model of the trauma factory was built on the principle of disconnect. The idea was that in the future, it was impossible to love another person in a way that was real. The way a woman loved a man who came back from WWII with one less limb. Or how a man could impregnate a woman, and the two could birth a thalidomide baby and take on the world together. People in the future were different. They had a good deal of choice. And with all that choice, they were able to escape things alone. There were protocols for removing oneself from a problem. The trauma factory, through a tiered pricing model, created an unsolvable problem. It came in the form of an unspeakable tragedy that would be simulated at an undisclosed time, location, and place. From the tragedy, two people would become one. This is how John Patrick Turner got Elizabeth Ellis Macfarlane to love him in a way that made him not alone. In a way that was different, and escaped the limitations of the future.

i would like to have you very much

if i could tell you anything it would be  that i think of you  at night

There are six ways you left me. I say ‘six’ because it seems correct. But I have yet to chronicle the six ways. There is no inventory.  When you start to watch yourself change it happens like a band-aid. Like pain that wasn’t that painful but is already gone. It’s the sense that everything you’ve understood as happening is already behind you. This is what death is, but also what it means to be young.  The older I get the less things exist as themselves. It’s all metaphor and symbol and meaning. Making it that is wrong. It’s some kind of sin you can’t take back. When I first lost someone I thought I’d fall apart. I didn’t fall apart. I made up things. I talked the way I wanted to talk to make myself believe I was the kind of person that was grieving. I don’t know if I was that person. I don’t know those six ways.

I want to look at every tumblr that ever existed, said woman. Let’s look, but I will not look, really, said man. But I will sit there while you look. And just like that, woman looked, and man did not. Except a few seconds later man looked and woman did not not. Man and woman switched off looking and not looking for the next thirty-five years. They did not die as quickly as they thought. They held hands only part of the time they were together. This is the end, said woman. Are you looking, said man. 

It was the day before the end of the world when John Patrick Turner revealed his Netflix account password to his long-term girlfriend and confidante, Elizabeth Ellis MacFarlane. John Patrick Turner woke on Sunday cold and sad. He saw the face of Elizabeth Ellis MacFarlane and he was less cold. He touched her arm while she was sleeping. He traced the outline of a star on her right shoulder. He waited for her to stir. When she did not, he became sad. The password is, he said. You know the password, is the thing, he said. Elizabeth Ellis MacFarlane was not asleep. She wanted to understand John Patrick Turner from a place outside of herself, and intended to do so the way she had heard other woman speak of. So she pretended to sleep and waited to see if he touched her. When he did, she pressed her closed eyes together tightly. She needed this moment so badly, and yet if she lost this person at any moment, she would still feel entirely whole. She felt different than other women when she made things separate from herself this way. The password is your name, he whispered. Your name is always the password. You should open your eyes when he touches you, she said inside of her own head. She did not open her eyes until she felt the breath of John Patrick Turner change shape. When he fell asleep with his hand on his own face, she felt herself ending things in a single moment. She watched the end happen in parts. She saw him smile to himself and wondered if men, too, knew how to fake it. So she did not touch him. In the light of Sunday she was new and exactly the same. This was the start of their trauma.

When you are alone, you know everything about yourself except where you left your coat

(I.) It was all Is there anything more beautiful (II.) And something like There is nothing like smiling but then we forget (III.) It can only be like this for a second before   (IV.) It is not that way