Sometimes I wonder where it all went. That's a lie, actually. It's not sometimes. It's always. I always wonder where it all went, why he woke up one day and decided that he wanted something else.

No warning. No anything. A sudden cut.

It was stupid of me because I believed him. And I kept telling myself not to but up until the last fucking day he was telling me not to resist.

"Why force yourself to be alone when you don't have to be?" he said.
"Because it'll end one day and then I'll have to build my walls and my foundation all over again."
"No you won't."
"Why?"
"Because you should get used to it. Somebody will be there. Here. You don't have to stand alone."

So that night I decided that he was right. He was there and I trusted him. Three days later he ran out from under me and I couldn't even catch myself.

Friendship is not the golden possession, after all. No matter how hard I want to believe it. For me it is and that's my tragic flaw. People don't want friends. They want fuckers. And I won't ever be one of those. I don't want to be.

"The body is the vehicle and not the point"- Toni Morrison. But not for most people.

For me, I am the point and you are the point. I happen to have a body and so do you. I ask myself continuously:
"What is it you lost?"
The answer comes back:
"It's just a dream."
I ask myself again:
"What is it you lost?"
The answer comes back again:
"It's everything."

There is nothing here for me. Everything is a lie and all I can do is attempt to survive this maelstrom. But I think most of me wishes I didn't and the slight tapping in my heart right now that reminds me of the timer I'm on makes me wish it all ended sooner. Less than five-and-a-half years to go. According to the records.

And in the end I'll never find it. I'll never find that friend because even if I think I have, like I did, I'll know that not so deep under it, the connection is just an illusion. I just want to know why he wasted his time. Why he continues to lie and tell me that he cares when he doesn't give one fly's shit.

I hope he's happy. And I hope one day that happiness will make him miserable.

Refugee

He found his story in an addiction that melted him down and a lesson in the substitute for love when he was running so fast his feet stood still: horizontal on the floorboards, painful pleasures that jaded the Grand Design.

But fucking never taught him how to feel.

He knew that but proposed anyway because the city never let him sleep and on the inside the season never changes.

In the back of his mind there's another girl, a girl that turned him from the inside, out, a person that melted him down and welted him up and jerked his eyes from in to out from up to down but he would never venture there. Too real when everything was real to him because the force of her make-believe encased him and he couldn't accept change like that. (He grew up a long time ago, the kind of growing and going where you can't go back. And there's no use in glancing in the latter direction.)

So he looked the other way. She was tall, and pale, and no-bull-shit, like him. An excellent chef. There was always a good dish to come home to, and his pillar, the girl who let him forget a little while that he couldn't do poetry anymore--so much that it all came back and poetry wasn't it. It was a course load, a new path, physiology and cosmotology somehow mixing together in his mind until it went blank again.

The other girl showed up sometimes at night and he woke up sweating, listening to the plumbing dripping loudly on the porcelain sink because the landlord didn't give a damn.

Mornings were all like Easter Sunday--lazy until the bells rang around 10 a.m. Breezy. Then cut to the chase. Jesus resurrected. It wasn't a big deal to him: he resurrected people all the time and prevented them from needing it. Religion didn't float his boat if it wasn't the Kama Sutra.

It was the mantra tattooed in blood-red across the inside of his forehead.

God didn't do that to him and he knew He never would. The boy did that shit to himself.

He might've believed it until the floor above him caved in from a minor radiator leak and asphyxiated his mattress out of commission, and his faith in what little he had left of it all.

The girl screamed bloody murder when the cat bit the dust too soon from the poison laced with the thrown-out tuna that was really meant for the rats.

This city is a farce, he thought. And the ring is too big on her finger.

Those are the times the other one slips in and he punches the wall to release that unidentifiable monster that rises up like a wave in him. He pushes the identity down beneath him because he knows its name and the truth about what he is.

That addiction's a distraction and he knows it.

Because he's resurrected millions and prevented them from needing it. His saving was his desensitization and if he could only get it back, he'd take all of it in any form, if only just for a moment. But he couldn't, so he took the next best thing. It erased him from himself for a little while, erased the other girl, too, and the inferiority complex that made him shy away.

But fucking never taught him how to feel.

I think people like to make things into complications when it's the simplest thing in the world. I think people would prefer the lie (which is a complication) to the truth because sometimes simplicity is incomprehensible.

Like I've always said, there was only one thing I ever wanted and that was a friend. It took me a few to get there but I finally found it. I found more than I wished for and it was well worth the wait. But some people can't understand that friendship can exist without "wanting more." The more I tell the truth, the more they believe it's a lie. But I refuse to lie in order to give them an answer they would prefer. What really gets me is the fact that it wouldn't matter even if the lie was the truth.

I suppose I'm an anomaly in this world. I put everything into a friendship where almost everyone else puts it into romance. As soon as "romance" enters the equation, the relationship and my idea of it is automatically demoted to something trivial and inconsequential.

Yet I love just as intensely, just as much. Maybe more, because I never stop loving where anyone can get over a romance. At least most of the time. Unfortunately, friendship isn't enough for people. They want more. They want bodies, and that is something I do not want of someone I value. Trust me, plenty of opportunity I had to go in that direction if I had wanted. But I value friendship much more than that.

Nevertheless, I have been slighted. I have been tossed away because friendship is worthless in his eyes, or at least not nearly as wonderful as the flippant and ephemeral kind of love.

My love is not ephemeral, despite what may have ended and what may come back. My love is of a greater height, an ethereal height, a lasting height. It hurts so much it kills me while making me more alive. Even though I lose the friends, I don't ever lose the love.

Unfortunately, this time, I lost more than one. And this time, I am done. There's nothing to really think about now. We weren't enough. We weren't ever enough.

I remember a time when Saturday was Shabbat, when I would not think of lifting a pen to paper, or of switching a button to turn a computer on. I remember when that day was the day of rest, truly, because I could not worry about anything.

Part of me misses it and still feels it tugging at me, just like I miss being a part of something called friendship when I know that both of these things are lies forever misconstrued as truth.

"If you believe in no Truth," the angel asks, "what then does the Lie force itself from? What is its counterpart? A soul is the fulcrum between a delicate balance. There is no other way. Are you telling me then, Little Girl, that you are alone with the Lie, and therefore, stand in the place of Truth?"

"I don't know, Uriel," I answer. "Perhaps there is neither the Truth nor the Lie. Maybe everything is just Chance."

"A worthy speculation, but not very wise."

"What would you suggest, then?"

"Another look into yourself. There are doors yet that have not been opened. There are curtains behind which they lie wearing the guise of walls. Remember, dear, even walls are penetrable, and not all warrant a door to pass through."

It's on nights like these that the loneliness gets to me most. When I need someone but no one is there, my two pillars holding up each other with no room for anyone else.

I go back to my own foundations then. Although I hold myself up, I wonder if they understand that they hurt me more than anyone else. I feel the knife twisting through me and scream in my head over and over again "You make me want to die!"

They make me want to die.

"What is the lesson learned?" the angel asks.

"That I am alone. And will always be...except in brief respites of illusion. Never trust a thing."

I was sitting in a Quaker Meeting when I lost it. It was as if God had sent an angel to tell me that everything I'd tried to hold onto for so long was lost, was not worth the agony of fighting for, that contrary to popular belief, blood means nothing to the shaping of faith.

But I waver back and forth because my blood says that I am a Jew and blood doesn't lie. Blood is your nature and although I may rebel against my own and try to claw myself out of my own skin, my blood has shaped my soul. Despite how much and how far and how fast I run, my skin runs with me. And when I leave this earth, my soul will run with me, too.

The screams of history are what beseech me, and they are the screams of Past, Present, and Future. I cannot escape that wind.

A woman stood up in the Meeting and pierced me all the way through, back to my ancestors, and forward, to my descendants. She reminded me that it was the second day of Rosh Hashanah, the second day of the New Year. I heard no Shofar blow, no Torah read. I cried silently in the midst of the silence. My best friend held my hand and I hid my tears but he sensed them anyway.

It doesn't matter what I believe, or what I have faith in, or what I don't. It matters what others believe: that I have horns, that I worship the devil, that I kill Christian children and drink their blood, that the world can never sleep as long as there is the faintest trace of a Jew.

I wonder how we survive. I marvel at the fact that we survive. For all their killing, for all their slaughter, we survive--and it is not a sword of man that kills the others, merely Time, just as it is not a miracle that preserves us, merely memory and persistence, and hope.

When I was fifteen years old a clarity came to me and I understood what the moshiach was. The moshiach is all of us and we will never embrace it because the world waits for something great while staring at its own reflection and misses the point.

A moment in time:

A girl runs back and forth, up and down the hallway.
The clock ticks one second farther around.
A boy throws a chair against a wall for nothing but pure angst at life.
The snow begins to flurry outside the window.
A poet comes up with the words he's been looking for for years.
A heart is broken.
A heart is sewn.
A bomb explodes, killing 14 people and injuring 60 more.

A moment in time:
That was nothing.
Where will it end?
Do we want it to?
Better question:
Where will it begin?