Too Much and Not the Mood

muffling my Wow. I sensed all over my body the jolt of something unanticipated happening to me; of someone else’s impulse pressed against my lips. How even the most innocent acts swarm with pleasure because our nerve endings, thank goodness, never mature. Never mellow. They remain prone-to. Tendrils that keep us—in the best way—shatterable. Wasn’t it lovely, I thought, to be caught off guard by the boy whose every mannerism I’d crystallized? Who I never anticipated was considering me

His “sad, lustrous, and doglike eyes,” Lynne Tillman wrote in her 1992 Sight and Sound essay, “Kiss of Death,” describing his performance as “Mikey” Corleone before he transforms into Michael Corleone, when he can still promise Diane Keaton, “That’s my family, Kay. It’s not me.” Those young Pacino eyes capsize me. His battery of protean gestures is absorbing. Young Al Pacino makes me giddy. I sink into my chair. I experience the full-blown, bodily preoccupation of having a crush. Watching him is like discovering a long-lost audition tape, because his delivery, then, was intimate, kept, mild. I cover my face. I even once, not long ago, ducked under my desk while watching a scene from The Panic in Needle Park, before Bobby and Helen—played with disconsolate, plain beauty by Kitty Winn—spiral downward together and before Helen is using, when they’re just getting to know each other, actually.

the space bar’s lost its spring. Or how a cover of a familiar song usually forces further consideration before I can identify it. How, all at once, what I know for sure—the words to a damn song—can feel frustratingly just out of reach.

Groping through the dark is, in large part, what writing consists of anyway. Working through and feeling around the shadows of an idea. Getting pricked. Cursing purity. Threshing out. Scuffing up and peeling away. Feral rearranging. Letting form ferment. Letting form pass through you. Observing writing’s alp and honoring it by scribbling a whole lot of garbage and then clicking in agreement: Don’t save. Exaggerating until it hurts. Until you limp and are forced to rest, and then say what you mean to the sound of thunder’s cannonade; to the lilting hum of ghosts that only haunt the sea, or of Debussy in your earbuds, and the sometimes-style of piano that sounds pleasantly soiree-drunk and stumbly.

all I want is a person to be my pillow so I might feel less random, spinning, negligible. A person who listens while I don’t finish my thoughts because maintaining completeness grows tiresome. A person so acquainted with my treasury of reluctance, with the lines of my body, that I forget I have one, and he forgets he has one, and limbs become logs to rest our heads on, and are we even people anymore? Or merely two souls whose condition is best described as “awaiting clearance.”

I still have trouble discerning between loneliness and solitude, and Sundays, and Schubert’s sonatas

I rarely think of that room or the five of us in it—or should I say four? That silence, though, occasionally dawns on me. Noiselessness, I’ve come to learn, is simply how some memories age

as I spot my parents doing young, lighthearted things, I’m overrun by some cruel and preoccupying sense that I’m watching the memory of them

But what comes to mind most from that day is the sound that slipped from my mouth as my foot fell through the plank. It’s hardly a sound and mostly a breath. A gasp that was cut short, as if sliced by a butcher’s knife: it sounds something like Huh. Huh like the laziest reaction. Like a giving-in to. An agreement, sort of. I can never unhear that gasp. It wasn’t the sound of my life flashing before me. It was the very human understanding that gravity was real and that I was about to fall and that nothing was going to catch me

Disney’s “Wish Upon a Star”; MGM’s roar; Universal’s unapology, its trumpet and sun-eclipsing planet Earth; Warner Bros.’ nostalgic piano and its gilded back lot and superhero lettering; Paramount’s snow-peaked mountain; Columbia’s Torch Lady, and so on and so on. These logos move me. They petition from me how crucial it is to preserve a sense of the special.