Unhinged Words

So beautiful I could cry. Friendship is a mysterious ephemeral thing. We all do know from experience that no one gives us anything for nothing. All has its price. And yet sometimes, rarely, once or twice in a lifetime, someone looks at us and their heart is so brimming with compassion that it spills out through their eyes and they offer us something that no one should offer; something so good one usually keeps it all to one’s self. True love, pure love, friendship, compassion. One in the same, these many words, these many unhinged words.
The sun peeks out for a while, then the sun goes away and there is cold again and gray mists. My life again. Wondering about the story of my life, how it will read, what it will awaken in the reader. Will my life bring others to life? Or will it go out like a light, extinguished with a clap so that only empty full darkness will remain? What has been done to us? Have we really done this ourselves? Betrayed ourselves so that we are no longer free?
No longer free to live. Another unhinged word. Free. Live. They have all come undone. They all mean nothing because they refer to experiences that we have never had, that our parents have never had, that someone, dear fool, did have and bursting with it endeavored to explain, to share by virtue of oral communication, spilling pearls out onto the grimy sidewalk before pig faced orphans that grabbed them all up and snuffled them and rubbed them in sweaty hands and passed them on to a new generation of piglets.
There are still a few fools rattling around out there, a few who have had the experience and then watered at the eyes realizing that they had said compassion, they had said love, they had said discipline, responsibility, freedom, but had never experienced it until this moment. And now in this moment the word means something, for the first time ever.
Can I give you an example? Can I give it to you now in writing…with words, some of which are still empty for me, and some of which are full?
Empty full darkness that clings to us on all sides. This one life, this one moment, perhaps infinitely more complex than we realize, like the insides of a pomegranate, can it be lit like a fuse? Make it bright, dazzling for a moment so that we can see the delicate tendrils that connect so much to so much else?
With pictures darling, with stories.
By seeing the woman sitting on the flat trailer bed in her red and white striped dress, singing, while the man drives the tractor round in circles. What does it tell you? The buildings are stretched squares making them rectangular and they are frosted with white stucco and pale blue stucco and the pigeons stand around kissing on top as though they were the adornment of a dirty wedding cake. The thick black power lines hang crossing and re-crossing over the streets, making the sky into a piece of modern art when viewed through the eye of the round boy in his stained white shirt and black pants looking up as the flock of pigeons flies from one frosted rooftop to the other, basketball gripped under his arm. There are iron bars on the windows and gates in the garages and front entry ways so that small brown girls stand behind them looking out like prisoners before retreating to ride pink plastic tricycles in the gloom. At the end of the street the chain link fence stands between the apartments and rows of head stones besieged by mustard yellow lichen, keeping company with decaying bouquets of both organic and synthetic flowers. A fence to protect the dead from the living, and a wide green lawn punctured by words, where memories go to slowly fade away. A mysterious, ephemeral thing. So beautiful I could cry.