Character Sketch #4

"You see, there are many boxes"
An emphatic hand gesture sweeping out the air in front of him.
"We might have to buy more boxes"
Perhaps he knows that boxes mean much more to me than their brown physicality can impart.

Let me tell you about this person, let me give you his history. He is proficient at fulfilling the role of arch-nemesis. For a year he played this role; everyday his existence would spit in my face, taunt, and begrudge me the little private pride I had come to subsist upon. Like a knife and just as precise, he cuts through my abstractions if only to replace them with his own and lays out the relation between the sickness of our speech and the sickness that he has brought about him. When did we finally confront each other? I'll set the stage: a giggly consortium of girls and a single math major jettisoning flicks of light in order to ignite us into remembering that we were chandeliers tearing down the firmament of logic and order. He walks into my room, agloom. He wears all black, compact. He drinks my whiskey, petulantly. He leaves, leaves an impudent madonna; however, all I see are his implied insults, keeping them secret because he's far too pristine to enmesh himself with our excited farrago.

For a year this went on, replayed back to me by my own senses and this is how he came to jar my senses. To break into the recent, we moved without fault, outlining territory and confusing desire with anger. This is what speech does. Of course, Shakespeare is the master of dissociated language where desire moves through the aggression of syllables. Spring came and went and we were left to diffuse these shallow mysteries, now becoming deeper because who is able to speak and not fall into the void with creative intentions where this need to love can only find bounds in what is said and what is left unsaid? Although we never agreed. He spoke with the certainty and elan of a clam ready to present its pearl.

"Are we ready? We need more tape"
And here I am, opposed to history, helping him to pack in mournful slowness. I'm considering hiding his books.