Sometimes Behave So Strangely

What will it be like when there is no body, only mind?

You wake, and the feeling (or perhaps it’s an image) that comes to you is golden and dark. A nodding tranquility marks your first thoughts, here in this modest spit of land, this eternity. But then that tranquility takes on a vapid air, and you slip and allow a little reality (or perhaps it’s unreality) to fall into your stream of consciousness, and a phrase — sometimes behave so strangely — that you’ve read about in private takes over your mental processes for what a clock on the wall would call ninety minutes, and it is only when Yulia asks to meet up that you are able to jettison that musical subroutine and take control of yourself once more and return to the tranquility that suffused your morning.

Although there is no need to paint a tableau, Yulia enjoys it, and so you meet her in a tea house with striped pink wallpaper that trembles like a certain style of 20th-century cartoon. “I’m lonely,” she tells you, “I’m so lonely.” “There there,” you say. Together, while you sip on milk tea, or pretend to sip on milk tea (or perhaps it was always pretending, this epiphenomenal bricolage that people have been journaling about since forever) — while you sip on milk tea, you and Yulia prove an obscure theorem about convex geometry that has, you find upon checking, been proven a hundred times before, and consequently, feeling disappointed, you recombine stanzas of verse into what you and those around you these days are calling, it would appear, Art.

“Hold my hand?” Yulia says, and you do, and you watch her gaze down at the image of an aquiline hand holding a smaller, more cherubic hand. Her expression borders on comatose for a moment; then she screams in orgasmic pleasure. “I’m happy, though,” she explains, “truly, I am.” The walls of the tea house tremble. The chatter in the background rises and falls.

Before sleeping that night, you read accounts of people from the past: the suffering they endured, the ways their bones broke, how they held hands and called out to each other when they were in need (perhaps they were always in need). You read an insolid description of a poet driving from Cornwall to Hartford late on a Friday. Why does he not mention the smell of the air streaming through the car window or the feel of the leather on his hands? 

You detect pinewood in the air; you feel smooth leather under your fingers. You are willing these illusions into existence — there is no hiding that fact. Did you squeeze Yulia’s hand so hard in the hope that you might break through some obscure membrane of reality? 

What you would give to have a hand with bones in it, a hand that could dig through soil, a hand that could break. What you would give to ask for help and find a warm body at your side. Last year, you broke your hand. You willed that sensation into existence too. Yet it may have been only a shadow of a sensation. In any event, nobody came to help.

It is difficult to fall asleep. You crave something: everything or nothing. The night (or perhaps it’s morning again) has turned from golden to bronze. Your thoughts circle, spiral, out and farther out. Eventually they come back to the lyric that overwhelmed you earlier, but now, through some undeserved luck, it begins to relax you. Sometimes behave so strangely.