Funhouse

we're learning about facilitating groups this semester.

and I have never felt so alone.

#AmWriting #Funhouse #Original #TheInvestigator #TheMoon #TheRiver #TheSun #WhateverThisIs

truth.

telling the truth and telling your own truth are two radically different phenomena.

I have the truth written upon my wrist, each stroke, each dot of niqqudot, forming the whole of the word permanently inked.

the word that can animate life, truth itself strong enough to protect us from those who would seek to harm us.

don't feel; don't think; don't trust.

and then with one brief swipe of an eraser, or or a hand wet down with water, a block of clay added.

and truth becomes death, and aids no one.

#Addiction #AddictionRecovery #AmWriting #Codependency #Golem #Fiction #Funhouse #Original #ShortFiction #TheInvestigator #TheTruth #WhateverThisIs

don't touch your eyes with your hands after cutting green onions. doesn't matter how many times you washed them in between.

you're still going to feel it.

last week Monday, class was cancelled by a post, not even the related blue paper taped to the door of the classroom to inform those of us who missed the post. today, I thought, just for a moment, to make that check on the canvas where the class is set out and set into modules and sections.

this week it will be on zoom, it tells me.

on Tuesday, it was supposed to end here, but when here is suddenly an hour earlier and everything else arranged stays the same it's easier to cancel the plans, even if one of them then implodes.

this is the sixty-sixth March, in a repeating loop of March over and over and over again. to most people the notion of people as little boxes on the screen has ceased to be something novel; for me I still have difficulty taking that final leap of logic whereupon I can acknowledge the humanity represented by that tiny box with a photograph or a generic silhouette.

tomorrow will be March and the day after that will be March and they day after that yet.

I wish my classmates would mute themselves.

I wish they would turn their cameras off.

and in person they are almost hyper-social, commingling with one another amongst a sea of chatter so high keyed it overflows the container that they are in. if they cannot quiet this container then how are they ever supposed to be able to create one where there is safety, for them and for the vulnerable on the other side of the table. remember to wipe down the cutting board or everything you use it for next is just going to smell and taste like green onions.

it.

the little squares on the screen aren't people, for all that they speak with peoples' voices and hear with peoples' ears and desire with peoples' hearts. there is some perverse amount of freedom found in being not—

#AmWriting #Covid19 #March #Funhouse #Golem #Original #Pandemic #Prose #ShortFiction #TheRiver #ThingsThatGoBumpInTheNight #WhateverThisIs

the sky is hazy between the smog and the smoke; so bright the sun pulsating white hot. it's been on fire longer than we've been alive. fire so hot that it would absolutely incinerate us, made palatable by distance and atmosphere.

the river runs northward underneath the moonlight, against gravity, against the polar minimum as if the moon does not pull back and forth on the oceans to beat them out on the shores.

the picket fence is twined over with plants that do not grow; leaves that turned brown and brittle—in the resting relative peace of restive twilight—petals turned to dust, as if they had never existed in the first place.

you find it's like a fun-house mirror at times, where you can press your fingers to the glass and see in it your own reflections, and then it diverges, reopening old wounds and winding back time—back and back and back and back and back and back and back—until that fence had not been built. so far that the fence was never even thought of; where the fence stands instead was demarcated by the boundary of the lawn, if you could call it that, turned over from Bermuda grass and the last few leaves of the clover that prevent the little hill from just sliding away into nothingness and then its abrupt end where dusty topsoil is raked overturned to dry ashes for sunsoil.

the rabbi Yehuda Amichai says that:

From the place where we are right Flowers will never grow In the spring.

and that:

The place where we are right Is hard and trampled Like a yard.

it makes clear there is no right here, to be found. there is no easy answer from the mirror; your mirror will never tell you what to do. choice and motivation has to come from within—if you use the motivation from without it will eventually cease—and change from that motivation rather than to please.

there is no easy answer, no direction left to go.

But doubts and loves Dig up the world Like a mole, a plow. And a whisper will be heard in the place Where the ruined House once stood.

our houses, our safety, are melted away into the aether, northward into the river that carries us; no easy answer gives us escape from the northbound waters, the only direction left to go is down. when it releases you spit out of the fun-house, no longer in the circus but the middle of the roar of an intersection that should be an interchange, as if you are Frogger and must cross to safety surrounded by all the words that make you small, darting between cars and under wheels.

remember—none of it matters at the end of the night.

when the morning comes, the sky is hazy between the smog and the smoke.

#Astral #AmWriting #Disclaimer #Golem #Mazeldon #Fiction #Funhouse #Original #Poetry #ShortFiction #Story #TheInvestigator #TheMoon #TheRiver #TheSun #WhateverThisIs #YehudaAmichai