(Becky)

"I KNOCK YOU"

Human beings Love each other--
Love your fellows, Mother fucker!

That was all she could put on that piece of paper before the evening bout of introspection was over.
Yeah, it was a poem, and it rather rhymed, but anyway, it could end up being a long time (in time terms) before she might be able to set down a hard-won insight. And she thought on this: amazing revelation, won from suffering.

She thought, You go through these different experiences--(and cliché, that was what this was)-- and it forges you. By looking straight ahead, meeting other people but not being swayed by them, you come out More Fully Yourself as a Human Fucking Being, and that's all you can hope for if you're not some kind of social revolutionary. (But what about Michelangelo Buonarotti?) What's the alternative? Sitting around the day long, sipping coffee in the morning and beer in the afternoon, wine in the evening and coffee in the early morning. There was so much junk in her space.

She thought of a whole ordeal, setting her apartment on fire or smashing a storefront, all the risks involved, the mis-reading, the imprisonment. And then, something super-profound: oblivion, obliviousness. For an hour, or an hour and a half, the vision beguiled her: oblivion wise and cold, no metaphor accurate. But the phone rang.

And it would be a boy, who wanted her, or a girlfriend, needing her ear, super-petulant. These days she delighted in company, it made her.

The phone rang, but she put it down again when she saw the number. She knew the digits. She had never needed to program the name. She looked at it, she made an effort to become secure in herself, and then for a moment she allowed herself the bodily experience of her own hands, arms and fingers, by their nerves and tendons, ramping up to answer. She steeled herself back again with a hard thought and put that shit down. She knocked it on the nightstand but she did it very gently.

'I won't answer, I'll knock the phone,' she said to herself. Yeah: She had been forgetting aspects of life-routine and forgetting herself around boys, but she would not forget which boys were no good. 'I knock you most gently,' she inwardly intoned. Becky would let the Eucharist come to her. As a text message on her phone. Or as one of those emails dashed off in a drunk fury of empassionment. (An email beginning: "All I want to say to you is...") The words that these boys wrote her were so forgettable. If they had any real passion they put it into super-stupid stuff like rock and roll drumming.

The phone said it was 11:45 at night. What was she doing, it was still so early! (She wanted an audience to practice her new maturity and reserve upon.) She thought if she should call back. She watched the phone sit on the nightstand for a little while with its clock-belly up in the air. Or if she should go out. Infinity passed and returned. Like a stray cat she fed out of kindness.

It was almost full winter. Any day now she would discover her first gray hair. What would she do on that day, what would she be doing? By then the Eucharist would have come.