everything we'll ever have

It was evening just like it usually was with them. Every evening has a morning, and a day, and a night. Beatrice was there, snuggling in content after the exhaustion of her day. She just arrived from the outside where the winds and the Celcius whizzed up a sensational ice waltz of minus 35. The day she left behind was pregnant with mind games, her resistance to the mind games, her mind’s resistance to her feelings, her decisions mutating one into another at alarming speeds and, also, various pragmatic issues, like, say, what to eat. Her mind and her ego finally shook their fleshy heads at her in a pain of a disappointment and retired each to their own lonely caves. She then picked up a phone and rang Belacqua. He didn’t pick up. Her loner mind pulled its enormous head out of the cave to say, “I told you so!” But then her phone rang. Belacqua was calling back. They talked casually as if nothing was affecting them, which was always the case with them, and she finally said yes to coming over for dinner.

“I had no idea you would actually agree to coming over!” Belacqua purred, pierced in the face by the evening lamp light of his persevering kitchen, “I'd changed the whole dinner menu!”

He had.

“Initially, there was going to be a fish and rice little number! But now I am making a Guinness stew with all the stuff that you don’t eat!” “I can’t eat anyway. I have a show next morning,” Beatrice said, truthfully, “I will just hang out.”

Blissful Beatrice was there, snuggling after the exhaustion of her day spent inside her mind. The mind was so bogged just hours earlier, it wouldn’t let her move neither backward nor forward. Belacqua was on the phone every few minutes asking her to come for dinner. Beatrice was on the phone every few minutes wanting him to do more for her, not just make a dinner, but come and pick her up at the other end of town. Habitually Belacqua resisted. He brought up the ‘broken muffler’ puzzle, which sounded more like a euphemism. Her mind burst into tearful laughter and her ego said, “He’ll never go out of his way for you…” interrupted by Belacqua’s “At the liquor store now. Red or white?”

Damaged by socialization, like we all are, Beatrice was there, snuggling after the exhaustion of her day, having just gone temporarily crazy hours earlier from all the fighting with her mind.

She was there, and Belaqua was there. He was making the stew and playing his good country songs on the sad guitar that was there too. Every now and then he would come up and peck her on the cheek or give her a quick careful kiss. Neither time nor pain exist as soon as we allow each other to just be.

Sometimes all we had to do was let our minds subside and the itch of this mean quodlibet to die down. But there was always something that one had to do next. And so off our minds went in the deathless pursuit of goals, taking us further and further away from the present moment, not allowing us to ever fill up with the bliss of everything that we already had, which is, coincidentally, everything we will ever have anyway because there is nothing else to have other than the present moment.

brings you here

“It seems very pretty,” I walk around a theatre lobby looking at various bouquet arrangements left after an opening night, “but it’s rather hard to understand.” Every card inside each bouquet has been signed by one hand. There is only one fan behind this. However, the cards bear no signature. Instead, they each list a film title. One says, “My Own Private Idaho”, another, “Drugstore Cowboy”, yet another, “Elephant”, and another yet, “Serry”. “Hmmm..”, think I, taking a sip of espresso and turning around.

At the opposite end of the lobby stands Stanley, short hair and mystery eyes.

I take another sip, exaggerating the slowness of my reaction. I lower my eyes, to bring them up again. I empty my hands of the smallness of the cup and… what else?.. oh yeah… open my arms widely for the hug of a honey-like “ahhhh…!” As if nothing ever hurt us, Stanley and I are talking freely now, laughing and not remembering.

“What brings you here?” I say, knowing the answer. “A Russian play,” he says too seriously and too loudly to out-yell the wires of the street lamps outside. “I was a part of it tonight,” I say with dignity, “I still am and so are you now.” “I recognize that,” he smiles with relief. He stays nervous for ten minutes. I am not nervous any more. I just spent my own first ten minutes in the distance, looking at his profile and mostly at his back, having noticed him before he saw me. Time passes, the crowd around us melts. He is not nervous anymore, just close and familiar. We laugh like maniacs at each other’s jokes because we have always in the time before... ahhh... The theatre is empty now and, as if there was never anything ever, we are still talking in the middle of the hall. The past has no effect.

I get into his car. Even the car’s color hasn’t changed. “I still have the video of you cleaning the snow off it,” he shows me the video he shot with his phone and we almost get hit by some van because he is also driving at the same time. As if nothing ever broke before, we laugh. I feel like I have never left this very passenger seat. “I’m really a cowboy,” he said back then about the Volkswagen, “And this is my trusted horse, my VeeDub…”

The wires are now going, “BZZZZZ” and we are approaching the new residence of Sir Don Stanoite which he had acquired so recently that I have not been to it yet.

It’s both familiar and unfamiliar, to be here in this moment.This place is all him. Not like his last home with a transient mattress on the floor in the corner and a closet empty of any clothes. I was never invited to stay in that home. When I insisted not to be at my place for a change, he took me to his parents' house instead or, even, up North to his cottage. During that time of his recovery process, Mr. Stanley was reflecting, hurting, and taking a break. I met him while on this break. Eventually his break was over and life sprung back into those smirky eyes and cheeky cheeks. But he never took me with him into his life.

I am finally in a place where he actually lives. Busy kitchen cupboards. An espresso maker. Antique furniture. Story board covered with notes on paper squares. A big luscious bed. Curtains. Stanley.

We hug again and this time this tall, solid person of a man looks like a boy, far removed from our broken story and its histrionic passages. Everything disappears: time, pain. It’s only us now, floating. I let out little moans. I kiss all the little creases of his skin. I used to be too good to notice the creases of his skin. I used to be too good to please him. I want to let all between us go. It is not about keeping a face, it is about helping each other heal. Little creases of his skin… I am tiny, wrapped up in his huge body. I call him ‘baby’ and hear him pant in this word. There is no time. There is no pain.

I escape breakfast the next day. My mind takes me over as it does. I now know why we hurt so much as we did back then. In reality it was not painful at all, but our minds were cluttered. We did not quite make it out. The day has come for me to see that these ideas were just ideas, never reality.

You and I are no longer statues on the frozen pond. We are moving pictures, me and you, Cowboy. My Jewish Cowboy.