The Ease of Artful Living for Those Who Forget Their Innocence

 

We climb out of the bowels of the city, out from the trains that serve like veins to carry people here and there and back again. We're lost, like always, in this city that is just barely sitting on a spit of land, embraced by the hungry hungry sea on two and half sides. The city is the same as it always is, stained concrete and people in the streets trying to remember where they're from and forget where they are.  No one here eats meat, just curry and tofu, hummus and sprouts. We're trying to be what we eat--still and silent, frozen in place without a pulse. Something simple that grows and glows green in afternoon sunlight. A silent struggle to survive that we can pretend doesn’t exist, a pretense of peace we chase like foxfire. We are what we eat, we tell ourselves, but really, we ear what we are and that’s why they eat soups here, too, on occasion, steam surrounding an unwashed face like the habit cloistered nuns wear, the mark of three vows. Poverty, Chastity, something else. Obedience, maybe.  We never went to church. Our allusions are crude, cut from the clutter of rock songs lyrics and graffiti from across seas. But maybe we don’t eat what we are, because those three virtues don’t fit this city anyways, not really, not all of them. Poverty is prevalent here, the sect sequestered in alleys behind apothecaries, with addresses that read "park bench, left side, third from entrance". The unwashed and unwanted search for our gaze and we hide it, unable to hand them their dignity back or maintain our own. It’s alright. No one took a vow of decency. No one really took a vow of chastity either, not really, not with catchphrases from the sixties still on everyone's lips, not with people dancing in the streets to tribal beats outside shops where the windows are full of Shiva Nataraja instead of mannequins. Dancing to hip hop and rap  from the local underground, played on blown out 1990's –esque boom boxes. Across the street the Hare Krishna are there with flowers in their hair and shining eyes and clapping hands. They dance to their own chants. We crossed the street to three people in orange lost in bells and chants and claps. Hare Rama Hare Rama Hare Krishna Krishna Krishna, again and again. A woman with a braid like a rope to moor a boat took us into the harbor of her arms, safe port from our cigarettes and scars. She could tell we came to the city to be like the city, to forget and to remember. To wander. To come home.

She said. Come home. We chant every sunday. We have warm food for your bones, food that has never bled.

She had a different voice, not the sun-burnt salt-drenched fog of a voice that rises above and sinks below the noise of cars here.

I'm from England, I came a long way for this, for what I have.

We looked at what we had, long hair hidden under caps, loose linen shirts unbuttoned low with sleeves rolled up, jeans tight through the thighs and a*s, some sandles, necklaces decorated with peace and thumbprints, packs of clove cigarettes with girls' numbers written on them, some scars, keys to cars left miles away, abandoning us to chance, luck, public transit and the perseverance of our own two feet.

We said, We haven't come very far.

She had a robe, a braid, a bell, some flowers. A smile. Her hands.

We turned around, ran away, replaced the scent of flowers with smoke. One of us got a needle stuck through her lip in a shop where everyone thought they knew what they wanted. I wanted get "bourgeoisie" placed below the skin stretched across my collarbones. Instead, I bought another pack of cigarettes, and threw away the girls' numbers. We ate at a restaurant with a tree in the center and Christmas lights everywhere. We sat at the window and watched as the fog began to creep about the feet of the people walking. We placed our elbows on the table and put our fingers to the glass, trying to see if we could feel the molecules moving, melting to heavy bottoms like the stained glass portraits in cathedrals. Glass is a liquid, we whispered, like blood and tears and sweat. Glass is a liquid, like blood not bones.  We placed our elbows on the table and men walking by looked down our shirts. We put our fingers on a wall that their gaze could pass through but our voices couldn't.

It would have been a revolution to break the window.

We are not a revolution.

We buttoned up our shirts and leaned back, sneers firmly in place below reddened cheeks. Blushing is the way the body apologizes. So sorry so sorry for being what. you. want.

We leave, smoke cigarettes, talk about poetry like we understand something about it. Press lips to fingers to graffiti because in the words of e.e. cummings---you beautiful anarchist, I salute thee.  

We fled at the setting sun like specters of sacred things. Midnight occurs in the valley, amid the smell of grease and meat, stretched across back seats and perched on the warm hoods of cars.

We have hair in caps, loose shirts, cigarettes, scars.  We pick flowers in the parking lot. We laugh and shiver and shake the smoke out of our hair.

We haven’t come very far, but we remembered to forget the way back home.