Anyway anyway

It isn’t the right time for anyone to say that it will come when it comes. In fact, there is nothing else in the world that says that. It only comes from the mouths of those who insist on saying it. It will come. It’s inappropriate.

Similarly off is the notion of ambition. I could locate it chiefly in the states but that’s a cliché that runs too hot. All kinds of people have ends to justify. Pursuits that must be resolved. Purposes planned out. And then more of that must come after that. It will not come; you must go. Seems strange to assume hard work has a point of arrival.

I imagine the people committed these two ideas, and saying them aloud, are still seeking ways to hold their bodies in rooms. I can’t remember what it was like to go to parties but I’ll say this: Much of it is evacuating the idea of your body, insisting upon it, or fussing about. If you’re ambitious, you can make work of it. If you’re spiritual, you can touch people’s faces. If you’re ambivalent, you’re witty, maybe charming, emotional. If you’re fatalist, you tell the truth.

It’s typical for the ambivalent to love the fatalist. For the spiritual to toy with the ambitious. The ambitious stares after the ambivalent and the fatalist decides whether to urge the ambitious to destroy them or just do it themselves. If you were born to perform, you can cross over, back and forth in a night. People will hate you for this and they might sleep with you, too.

So you have to stop showing up. Anyway, either you get on with the work or you don’t or you do and you don’t. Choices seem to scroll and freeze and scroll and freeze. This isn’t interesting, but you write it down because it’s your condition and, you believe, validates your torture.

Anyway, not everything is so dark, the spiritualist says. You laugh. Some days, absolutely everything is funny. Or tender or erotic, says the ambivalent.

You look the person you’re in love with long in the eyes every day just to check. Are we still here? You think back — have I loved any one else? What were they like? You look up their account, find the pictures. They’re beautiful, says the fatalist. The ambitious digs deeper, builds a narrative: They’re happy. The person you’re in love with asks, what are you looking at? You say, pictures. Or you ask, did I love them? And you say, not like this. And they ask, does that matter?

Anyway, if it were possible to be either completely passive or single-minded you would have an answer for everything that didn’t happen and everything that did. You don’t! You check. You laugh. You made it here anyway.