The air was dusty. The thunder cracked the cement. Hail fell.
I ran to her house, awed by this surfeit of signs, afraid of the
stones of ice and the black sky. In the house the cat with his
face was waiting. I took the cat home.
*
Year after year, he is with me. Solitude is with me and he is
with me. Now I’ve spent ten years writing. Imagine a huge
stone and you have only your own fingernail. You scratch the
message you must write into the stone bit by bit. You don’t
know why you must but you must. You scratch, one can barely
see the marks, you scratch until the nail is torn and disintegrates, itself pulverized into invisible dust. You use the I23
blood from your ripped finger, hoarding it to go on as long as
you can but hurrying because you will run out. Imagine ten
years of it. But the solitude changes. At first it is fresh and
new, like any lover, an adventure, a ravishing excitement, a
sensual derangement: then it gets deeper, tougher, lonelier, not
because one wants the closeness of friends but because one
doesn’t, can’t: can barely remember wanting anything but
solitude. One remembers wanting, needing, like one remembers a childhood dream: but even the memory seems frivolous, trivial, a distraction: solitude kills the need for anything but itself, like any grand passion. It changes one, irrevocably. Promiscuous warmth dies, all goodhearted fellowship with others dies, seems false and cheap. Only burning ice is left inside. Whoever gets too near gets their skin burned
off and dies from the cold.
He lives inside my privacy. He coexists with my solitude,
hating it sometimes but rebelling in silence by himself because
he does not want to leave: I would make him leave, even now.
I put solitude first, before him. His complaints are occasional,
muted. I keep him far away even when he is gentle, asleep,
curled up next to me like an innocent child, my solace, my
human heart. The years of solitude— the seconds, the minutes,
the hours, night into morning, evening into night, day stretching into night and weeks stretching into months— are a moat he cannot cross. The years of being together with him— the
seconds, the minutes, the hours, the days into weeks into
months into years— do not change this. This is the way I love
now.
You are nomads together, in cheap room after cheap room:
poorer and poorer: the written word does not sell: some is
published but it is not embraced, it offends, it does not make
money, no one wants more of it, it has an odor, those with
good taste demur: the pink apartment with the toilet in the
hall is left behind: food stamps, bare foam rubber mattress
that starts shredding and has great potholes like city streets,
cold floors, cheap motels, the backs of rented trucks moving
your few belongings from one shabby empty place to another:
writing: hungry. He is closest and dear, loved more now, but
he is necessarily outside the concentration and the pain of the
task itself, the discipline and despair, the transcendent pleasure,
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