29.Identity

He asked you, on the third night, 'what do you want'?
And you said, you said: I don't know.
You said: I want a mattress on a wall.
You said: I want books to read.
You said: I want to forget.
You said: I want to feel alive, cause I'm not.
You said: I want to be gutted by a bull.
You said: I want to be thrown to the lions.
You said: I want to be tied to a pole naked and have stones thrown at me, or arrows at my body.
You said: I want to be myself.
You said: I want to be someone else.
And he asked, laughing, he asked, 'you're kind of lost, aren't you?"
And you said, not knowing what this laughter meant, you said: But I want to be found.
And he patted your head,
And you leaned into the palm of it, his hand, nuzzled the lower part of your face in it, and you said: I want to be your dog. You almost had tears scrapng your throat as they swelled upwards.
And he remained silent.
You said: I want to look out of windows forever. I want to look in on other people's lives because I have none.
You said: I want to live in a garden.
You said: I want God to come down and take me by the hand.
You said: I want to cease existing. But every day i wake up it's just another struggle for existence.
He said,'there's not much we can do than survive."
He said, 'we're all monsters.'
You said: yes, yes.
Should we set the monster free?
He said, 'everyone i see in the street is part of me, or i'm part of them, but we don't know. This is part of the beauty in the world, eliminate the I. You and me and them and us, we are visions of ourselves, there are no words to make us true, the words just distort what we are, nothing.'
That night, you were standing under a big arch in some square, empty, but illuminated, it was raining and the rain formed clouds mingling with your cigarette smoke. He let you lean your head against his shoulder. You both wanted to be one with the arches and the walls and the statue and the rain and the nimbus around the street lights, one with the paved square. How strange to be born a human and not a stone staring into eternity or the non-existence of it.
You said: Things are funny.
He said: Things are serious.
You both thought: things are in-between. things are ghosts. words are ghosts. we are ghosts, made out of words.