A clean break is something you cannot come back from; that is irretrievable because it makes the past cease to exist. So, since I could no longer fulfill the obligations that life had set for me or that I had set for myself, why not slay the empty shell who had been posturing at it for four years?

F. Scott Fitzgerald

It’s relatively easy to get rid of a real person. You can abandon him/her, kill him/her, whatever. But a ghost is much harder to get rid of. It sticks to you as a sort of spectral presence.
Slavoj Zizek, The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, dir. Sophie Fiennes

It’s horrifying, isn’t it? I’ll never get used to these constant resurrections.
Solaris, dir. Andrei Tarkovsky

Fuck zombies, I mutter to myself, fuck ghosts — fuck resurrections, fuck transmogrification, the only miracle is flesh and consciousness, the only miracle is now.  …sometimes we just need to be held, sometimes we just need to be told we are beautiful.
Nick Flynn, THE TICKING IS THE BOMB

Ours the cross, the grave, the skies. Alleluia!
Charles Wesley

Imagine the scene: a close up of clothes – striped towels and sheets, perhaps – tumbling slowly, rhythmically, in an industrial sized dryer. The camera pans wider to reveal stacks of dryers, some tumbling their contents, others like black portals into empty nothingness. A harsh, bright florescent light burns and flickers overhead. There is music, too – some awful cover of Lee Greenwood’s ‘Proud to be an American’ – coming from a TV that is bolted to the ceiling. Dancing With The Stars is on, and some former football player is doing a mambo. People sit below looking up at the TV from a bank of orange plastic chairs, their eyes wide and mouths agape at the spectacle. Someone walks out the front door and it is raining out. It’s the kind of rain that’s more like a mist than anything else – the kind that you can feel but not really see unless you look up at a streetlight from a certain angle. It’s coming in sideways.

Across the parking lot is a boy, sitting in the back of a Jeep. The tailgate is up, and he’s hunched over a book. He only has a few pages to go until the end, and with at least 29 minutes still left on the dryer, he should finish it but won’t. Some other time, he thinks, and closes the book. He has an unsettled, distracted look about him – like he is waiting for someone or something to happen without knowing who it may be or what it is he really wants to come to pass. He picks up his pipe and considers lighting it. Then he wonders if he doesn’t look like a fool, sitting in the back of his car, smoking a pipe in the Metro Laundromat parking lot. So he fiddles with his phone for a while and plays “za” on Words With Friends. It’s a double letter score for 22 points, and he knows it’s a shit move and a shit word, but he needs the easy points. He also needs to know what song is on the radio – it’s a late 20′s dixieland stomper by Richard “My Knee” Jones or King Oliver, and definitely has the old New Orleans sound with which he’s familiar. He’s a long way from that place, and may soon be going farther still. Perhaps that’s what preoccupies him. Perhaps not.

But the boy likes being here. Surely, its kind of a shithole and sitting out in the car like this leaves a few things to be desired. It’s good thinking time, though. So he thinks. And like any boy, he can’t think about much before he begins thinking about girls. He remembers the one he misses, he feels sorry about the one he’s hurt, and he longs for the one he’s not yet met. There is no conclusion to these thoughts, no easy resolution, so he chases them away by heading back inside. Maybe by now those 29 minutes have passed and it’s time to change the laundry. If not, he’ll wait and stand and stare into one of those dark portals as everything continues to spin around him.

Sabbaths, II
by Wendell Berry

A gracious Sabbath stood here while they stood
Who gave our rest a haven.
Now fallen, they are given
To labor and distress.
These times we know much evil, little good
To steady us in faith
And comfort when our losses press
Hard on us, and we choose,
In panic or despair or both,
To keep what we will lose.

For we are fallen like the trees, our peace
Broken, and so we must
Love where we cannot trust,
Trust where we cannot know,
And must await the wayward-coming grace
That joins living and dead,
Taking us where we would not go–
Into the boundless dark.
When what was made has been unmade
The Maker comes to His work.

“Where there is chance of gain, there is also chance of loss. Whenever one courts great happiness, one also risks malaise.”

- Walker Percy, “The Moviegoer”

and:

“A place does not save you. There is no place where you can flee from yourself.”

- St. Nikon of Optina

this bottle of wine
is all used up
i meanwhile at the end of my line
and the bottom of my cup
for the both of us
empty from love
moving on with a wink and smile
just as sure as the sun
is below and above

this time i swear
i will meet you where
i will rehearse my math at first
to repeat so you know i care
we’ll both lay bare
just laying there
just laying with our eyes to the sky
and our lips to a dry bottle of wine
you know its all used up

- jesse elliot

From sorry I will wipe clean the smudges left
by careless girls, frail and fearful men,
all the friends and relatives who meant well
right up until they were out of earshot.
Once it sparkles I will fill this word with pure
water and offer you a drink of contentment.

I’d like to strip the lacquer off sex, love, marriage
remove some of the high-gloss, the glare slapped
up there by Hollywood and people who believe
a home can rise from a stack of plywood, playing cards.
It is dirty work, this scrubbing, but look how the strong
and knotty grain of these words can shine.

It might take a crowbar, but if the rotting weight
of bad choices is torn away, the spots
where fear and mold have made you and me
unsure of our worth, the wall of brick beneath,
exposed and lovely in its rest,
will give us a place to hang the truth
we brought in from the rain.

And so, like a Tiffany lamp, a coin from Spain,
the silver candlesticks left by my great aunt,
I will polish up the words now tarnished
and dull from years of mishandle and abuse:
beautiful promise please human help dream
Set around the room, we will look on these words
and – knowing the price of labor –
see their marvelous worth.

- Kathryn Smith

“Then why not pick up the telephone and call her up and say, what about seeing you? Well, he could not exactly say why except that he could not. The worst way to go see a girl is to go see her.”

- Walker Percy, The Last Gentleman