U (part 4)

I don't know it for certain but I have this feeling that I made you a promise in lifetimes past, a promise that I would find you, no matter what it took, no matter where I had to go or what I had to do. Because you were worth it.

I think that it was a promise I made half-heartedly, as I am pretty certain that I have spent more times on this earth as a fuck-up than anything else, a soul that came close but never went the extra mile, another grill in the crowd that folded and creased his morals each and every time some kickback, some payoff, or a skirt too short with legs too long came my way.

We stood on a summit overlooking some other city, speaking a language no longer spoken and of a culture since suppressed by the reigns of lesser men who kept their crowns in place by a kind of force that wasn't in our nature. Perhaps I sold you onto a ship for a jug of palm wine and your younger sisters lips. Or maybe you died on me. I might have been the woman and you the man. You might have been the predator and not the prey. It's a good thing that such facts elude us now, that we can only guess. That makes it easier to try again.

I would find your footprints in places where I would stand for the very first time, your scent in the changing winds of some forest where I was stalking that week's dinner. I would see flashes of you in my dreams, never remembering the details of your profile but still sensing your presence in the buzzing at the top of my spine. You were the other part of me Mike spoke of in that studio I swept clean hours after he finished lay vocals, just a week or two before a red light run made me flatter than a pancake and a candidate for baptism through yet another birth canal.

They don't tell us about this kind of thing during orientation. Quests such as these are puzzles with missing pieces to be solved in under 30 minutes without much help from Vanna or Pat, crime scenes free of that one stupid little fiber that sunk sinner number 16 million squared. But like the lady with the big forehead I keep looking, losing myself in the sway of ass and hips, hoping for a collision on some crowded dance floor filled with sheep, a brief moment of clarity in the tub filled with white noise where I once bathed you before it shattered into a billion pieces that went on display at every other museum known to man. And yet I keep trying like Curtis and Will Downing, pushing like Monch, Sandy and Cheryl, a slave to an Obsession more abstract than those commercials in the 80s, knowing that somehow somewhere I will succeed.

I ran into an old friend from the Ice Age who joked that this world is far colder than the one where we used to hang out, gathered in that cave with two turntables, a mic and that IBM Selectric II with the built-in correction tape. Somehow, some way it is the memory of us, the rise in temperature caused by flashes of heat brought forth when I think of your thighs, your big empty filled with a throbbing column adorned with destinies, yours and mine, an infinite collabo of past, present and future, that keeps me same in this psycho ward of a republic.

Now I sit here cross-legged in the tundra, rubbing sticks together in hopes of rebuilding the flame that made us who were so long ago. I only ask for just one more life for me to get it together, one more stretch for me to track you down. When I woke up this morning an invisible voice told me your name and where you were from. I know the taste of your left inner thigh and that one toe you paint a different color. I know the texture of the broken plate in your cabinet and the make and model of the ride you push to your daily grind. It's only a matter of time. It's only a matter of time. Out.