My Intention

The hours leaked from our souls like battery acid, burning our cheeks, falling to the ground, and leaving traces on cold cement. The ground was impervious to our brushes and hoses, to the power wash of forgetfulness. Our cheeks, once fresh, were carved like the canyons of Zion. Corrosive hours, text messages by the hundreds pleading for cash. They sought not loaves or fishes but airtime. We all long for our time in the air. We were asked to choose between a lost paradise and an inferno, and nobody could agree on which was which. The stink of war hovered in the air, in the time, in the airtime for which we were to pay. 

All paradises are lies, I thought, except for my time here with you — perfectly imperfect, where the only polemics concern whether at long last to rid ourselves of the stacks of plastic stadium cups in the bottom shelf, one year’s vessel occupying the last, the ballplayer emblazoned on the bottom cup already long retired. What would it be like to have an empty shelf, ready for a new day, a new way, a paradise shelf? Could such a shelf be trusted? Or, should the eldest cups be brought forth from the cabinet and displayed, summoning the well-worn paradise when the bats were ash, the fields were grass and the chin music was sweetly menacing? Wait. I’m not sure these are even my memories. I think we actually long for the way we imagined our shelf to have been long ago, during the days of our creation, when we had only two cups, and sometimes I drank from yours and you from mine. But all pasts are perilous.

Consumption by flames is a dream for those who like it hot, just as it is for those who seek martyrdom.

I should remind myself that not everyone has a cup. These are privileged conversations. But I don’t understand if that means that we are privileged to be having them or that the conversations are not subject to subpoena. Perhaps it all means the same thing, for I fear my every public utterance is a sin. Shall I acknowledge my sins? All paradises are performance. 

Who am I to speak of cups when my cup runneth over? Don’t I know that this is a desert and the desert’s in drought and thirst is greed and its slaking is gluttony? To live in the inferno, one must learn to drink the heat. The inferno awaits us as it always has, the rings of creation, our creation, where the circus goes on and on and on. I am told, over the airtime of others, that these thrice-three rings are paradise. All paradises are relative, I suppose. The fire emoji is having a moment, and the moment will not pass. Consumption by flames is a dream for those who like it hot, just as it is for those who seek martyrdom. In this alone can the killers and the killed shake hands at the stake and come to agreement before the pyre is lit. 

The hours leak from my soul like acid, a scorched season pooling at my feet, words still snapping like flesh on a cooling pan. What do they want me to say in response? Which army shall I follow to the garden, the flame, the cliff? I think I know who sells tortured truths and who traffics in lies. I can distinguish the Puritan from the devil. But when my own airtime is purchased, I will fly to purgatory and live contented on its anxious sands. In our home, the cabinet remains a mess. The available answers — retain, rid, restore — all seem insufficient, even inhuman. We will fill some cups and donate others. On some days we will make decisions, on others we’ll remain ambivalent. Most days we’ll give our attention to other things. Our stomachs were not built for the corrosion of daily decisions. We are advised to live with intention, but life is not intentional. Did you intend to live? I did not even intend to write what I am writing. The words are imagining me as something I didn’t know I was. All paradises are imaginary.

History lies scorched at our feet, inviting us to build something from the wreckage. We will use what we have and make of it what we will, for life is not to be purged but lived. I used to live by the watchwords, Make a beautiful thing. Now I’m willing simply to make a thing and hope that it is somehow beautiful. Is that intent enough?