STATIC
The computer screen was only a temporary insertion of stimulation. I was jealous of its influence, of its never-ending ability to distract and hold the eye. I would wave my hand in front of it, feeling the fuzz of static and machine. Yet, you still seemed placated, content that at least the emptiness of time could be filled with some goal.
“I think of us as a ‘was,’” I would shoot at you, testing the waters of your convictions, always wondering beyond any past assurance if they were still a foundation I could fall on.
You blink and slightly jerk like the backlash of a disconnected plug. There was an explosion of silence, and I felt slightly guilty in my experiment.
You would speak in a hush, like a lost child, “I still like you.”
“We’re not going anywhere.”
“Where do we have to go?” you would ask in blank innocence.
My eyes burned at the rhetoric. The rims grown hollow, even after all this. You used to look so young to me, so stripped of intention. There were nights in my room where we would hide beneath my bunk bed, and quietly speak of dreams and realities known only to us. Where trailing words were enough to connect and I always knew you were what I had lost, what I was forever losing.
“You know what I mean. I can’t talk to you anymore.”
“Talk.” Your neck was still rigid in concentrating on the screen, the counterfeit world behind its glass.
Frustration swelled in me. Was there no end to this? How could I make you see there was still something calling behind my eyes. That there were still things you didn‘t know about me, and creations I could only give you a mention of. The long strips of earth where there is only limitless space and sky, perpetual red horizons, and the splintered moon. I am alike this only and alone face in the sky, reflecting off something more than myself, something I will never know and only touch lightly with tears and fingertips. Floating pieces of this puzzle gather as bodies strewn on the road of a fresh accident and like people driving by, wanting a connection, a glimpse of a different reality—harsh as it may be—I must see. I must know. For I would rather have a truth with the potential for offense than no truth at all.
But you were chain-linked to a profound oblivion, and I was pounding on brick walls filled with the winding signatures of graffiti—of this past I was still climbing up to. For some reason, I could never be in the present with you. I would wind this predicament around my finger, keep it in my pocket for days, petting it and clinging to it, wondering what it all meant, should mean, would mean. And if I was placating myself for you, or if you were a truth. Maybe akin to me and my children of abstractions and art, your delicacies and intricacies were something you could only truly know. I was again left here in raining silences, drenched in helplessness and the agonizing euphoria of dreams and insignificance. For the one thing I had always wanted was to be inside of you, instead of you always poking at the holes inside of me.
There were only a few sounds of inadequate communication to sum it all up: “I love you.”
And the screen would go blank and static free.