ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?

Posted by Minni |0 comments

Many years from now, I will remember my distant love affair with the eccentric art dealer from Hawaii, a time when the intense enchantment of love pumped from my heart into my veins and how we sat together, being hypocritical, under the shelter of a great oak tree. It started raining that day, we spent it under the oak tree playing mankala with pebbles in the dusty ground. It started raining, which at the time was a blessing considering the record breaking heat and the number of days between cloudbursts. It was a lazy thick rain, the kind that seemed to rip the sky and soak the ground without much effort, the kind that was proceeded by a rainbow poised high and magical in the eastern side of the sky. Love, like other drugs, has a way of altering with your judgment and, in most cases, makes you realize after you come down that you just wasted your day under a fucking tree...in the rain.
"If you stare long enough it will disappear." Mr. Grenier took my arm and led me away from the arch of colors in the evening sky. One day it will all come together, he would tell me quickly after walking away from beautiful sights that deserved much longer glances. He was so ridiculously predictable in his spontaneity.
"If you stare to long your eyes will become immune." He said this with a smile as he wiped the rainwater of his face with his sleeve. "Here." He offered a cotton corner of his T-shirt. He one of those who would at any given occasion, walk to the edge of reason without faltering and throw himself into an unfamiliar corner of the world with no inhibitions. From an early age he learned to approach love, among most other things with a senseless abandon and the only things that made him hesitate or doubt were beauty and magic. He felt as if humans had only a small capacity for absorbing beauty and like a bucket under a running faucet it would fill to the brim if one went around staring at beautiful things until eventually they became common. In other words, he was a lousy pretentious fuck, but hear me out:

"I've seen people caught in love like whirlwind,
listening to their squads
and listening to girlfriends
that's exactly the point where
their whole world ends: lies blow in.
That's where the drama begins."
~the roots

There are few places in the world that I would refuse to go and there are no places in the world which Mr. Grenier would refuse a visit. He had journeyed across the Sahara, ventured through the deep jungles on the Amazon and attempted to climb the highest mountains of Nepal all before turning thirty, or at least, that's what he said. He was a dumbass, but that was apparent. If at some point he felt inspired by the promise of an opportunity to learn, he hardly hesitated beyond the almost unavoidable and most inconvenient task of packing. On the evening we realized we were in love, he took a painting and slid it out of the window of the 26 story office building onto the filthy streets of downtown Detroit. "I'll have to reimburse Blake." Rubbing his chin mischievously he shrugged off my stare of astonishment. "What? I just felt like it."
Major dumbasses. Both of us.
Before that evening in Mr. Blake's art studio we never looked each other in the eyes lest one should give in to their feelings and we never spent time with one another outside of the circle of mutual friends. Something broke that afternoon in June, some unspoken rule that exists between friends. Not only did it break but it shattered into a million pieces like a glass frame thrown from the 19th story window of an office building in Detroit, MI.
Reading his tattered copy The Satanic Verses as he lay on his back under the red light cast from the oriental fixtures of his Chicago apartment Mr. Grenier seemed quite at peace with himself, and his surrounds for an hour. He was lost in the bold and beautiful world Rushdie created and I was lost in the bold and ugly world of the internet, sitting against a pile of imported pillows on the other side of the bed. Neither of us was aware of time or space or of anything Beyond the objects that temporarily captured out attention and, or course, each other.
In the beginning, when we woke up together for the first time in the vastness of love and the even greater vastness of Peter Blake's guest bedroom, a strange feeling came over me, as if a six sense had been activated. Ever since then I became enshroud with a strange awareness of Mr. Grenier, as if he presence made the air thinner or his movements made the axis earth title to the slightest degree but tilt nonetheless. On one occasion, when I was so taken up in my writing that I did not hear him come through the door, the light changed and I knew when he and I were in the same room without needing any of my recognizable senses confirm it.
The span of an hour was all the enjoyment Mr. Grenier could ever got out of the satanic verses in one dosage, especially in his third time reading it. The aged book and it fell off of the bed with a dull thud as he let it go. I shut down my computer and placed it on the floor near where the book had fallen. In the following seconds I felt an awareness so clear, so thorough that I knew he had to feel it as well and there grew a tension, a thickness in the air that seemed it would suffocate us and the only thing we found alleviated the intensity was the intimacy of physical contact. I felt his presence so strong by all of my senses that at one point I could not distinguish between my body and his and I was swept into a somehow altered state of consciousness.
exhausted and confused, tangled in a warm sea of Egyptian cotton and still pained by the newness of love, tears flooded forth like they had never had before and probably never would after. He took my hand and moved so that he was again on his back and my head was resting on his chest. Speaking for the first time in hours he ran his hand up and down my back. "I love you." He probably did.


"And they were falling, 30,000 miles,
the pilot was on the air saying,
'I'm sorry, I'm so sorry.'
And then they splashed into the deep blue sea.

It was a wonderful splash.

Into the caverns of the future
with just our flashlights & love
we must plunge, we must plunge
we must plunge
then we'll get there,
way down there at the bottom of everything

and then we'll see it
and we'll see it
and we'll see it!"
~Bright Eyes