Life Is A Bottle Of Chemical Reactions
By Matt Staff
We’re all clamoring, stampeding for clarity.
As if we’re horses.
Fresh off the starting line, pretending a startling sense of practiced calm when the shotgun of chaos speaks a loud, unsettling, nerve-frying silence. They’re exhausted, we’re exhausted and we’ve just begun. Haven’t rounded the first corner.
I rounded a corner last night, to behold a young woman who wanted a man with no heart that spoke in the tongue of distilled, disheartened, sincerity.
She was looking for a man that was broken, because she, she was broken. Her relationship had run its course, her man had woken up – fucked up – and failed to make amends. The damn asshole, what a reckless fool, does he know what’s missing?
So.
There I was, I’d ended up in the graces of a red wine bottle-wielding woman.
She was all the wrong, right varieties of beautiful.
Her smile, rapt gaze, penetrated my drunken state of detachment. I was pretty drunk.
It’d been a night in a dimly lit, Marlboro veiled bar, talking books with a tender who was well read for a damn change. You get me going on books, favorite authors, anything by Henry Miller, our conversation will glare new excitement.
Anyways.
She let me into her apartment, my hands were cold, I’m not sure just what took her so long to come downstairs. We embraced, exchanged unspoken pleasantries, walked down the hallway with it’s assemblage of woeful ghosts, whispering hushed threats – condemning our anything but romantic proclivities.
We boarded the elevator, as if boarding a flight. If only, I could go for a change of scenery.
Yes, it felt as if we were boarding this flight, I was stuck window-seat to Satan, with God sitting aisle, absorbing evil, and effusing purity.
Our flight landed, the elevator came to a halt. I made a move, just acted, not much thought was involved and I kissed her something fierce. She responded, opening her mouth, and we breathed each other in for a bit. Then we exited the elevator, and made with a hint of haste to her room.
She opened the door, I followed.
The room was dark, smelled like crushed pine needles soaked three times through in cinnamon cloves.
I’ll never forget the smell; it was as if the room’s unprejudiced aroma allowed me to shed my coat that I’d picked up from a tailor down in hell.
She grabbed that bottle of red from off the porcelain counter. We sat down on a rug. We were sitting on fibrous clouds.
Mindless conversation, watered-down booze gave way to thoughtless action.
Really just a sexually fierce, sort of reaction.
One moment, we were sitting, talking, holding eye contact then the next – we were flying through a portal of time that transcended sense, to a land where desire stoked our heart’s fires.
Our hearts had melded together, in this confused ecstasy, and the wine, the bottle, the blush struck booze, ran rampant altogether dulling pointless conversation.
Then we smoked, laughed, laughed hard about times long since passed as if they were yesterday. We were on the outside, looking in, laughing together, through an ivory-tone framed window at our lives – what they were, what they could become, and what they are now. What are they?
The language of laughter gave way to a fleeting, calming sort of silence, because silence the bastard’s usually always interrupted by undesired dialogue.
One of her windows was cracked, cold air seeped through, and we heard the crickets and rickets chirp and pierce the thickets of a life well beyond our understanding.
After all, we’re all lost at sultan’s sea, struggling for offhand gasps of momentary lucidity from the lapping, face smacking waves of relentless confusion.
We’re all searching for the meaning, through the gleaning of the last drip-drop of a bottle, and the angered smash thereafter.
The smash, split, crack, and shatter of the bottle’s glass against a wall constructed, then solidified from the ground up with the promises of bitter men, lies of good women, and dreams of abandoned children.
The smash brings us back, centers us, reminds us there’s a tomorrow, a new devilish smiling horizon to chase down on the fuels of impassioned fortitude over the concrete highway of a hell on earth.
We’re lying under a blanket of silence; the crickets have quit their musings.
We’re sprawling on a rug, blanket really, of dreams. Caught in the wooly, meticulously needled fibers of a therapeutically softened nature.
It’s damn beautiful, all of it.
Her, me, our sharing of a bottle of wine with recognition life’s this unsolvable puzzle we continue to take out of the box, and try to put together.
We’re both missing a few pieces, yet tonight, we’re making it work somehow.
I’m stroking her face, thinking maddened sexual cravings, and she’s blinking agreement. We get up, breathe other in, rip each other’s clothes off, silently howl arousal, and commence with the fuck.
Sometimes that’s all you need, no luck, just a no-holes barred fuck, and language of the silence.