Adam,
Every drumbeat I hear leeches something from the steadiness of our heart, carry something that might be my conviction to a higher stratospheres of brighter air. It seems like the bags we stuff into closets in the winter I now suddenly need, and opening them up, I find cats have been sleeping inside them, and moths have been nesting.
In the song Eden, you convince yourself of something resembling peace, and easily talk yourself out of it again. It seems you are as calm as I've been lately, letting your heart race along in time to something which seems like panic, but might only be the gravity of your true existence.
I can hear the swell of it run itself loose, like a dog running the shoreline of the Pacific. You run yourself dogged to the same conclusion any of the lonely runs themselves to, and finding the truth waiting, I can hear you reach the understanding that God must exist, and couldn't possibly, at the same moment.
I am reading this to some audience, now, while watching you slip your hands into the pockets of your coal black trousers, sand seeping over your leather shoes as you walk from the boardwalk to the water, your expression hard to read as you squint in the sun:
Eden is...
The place you feel in your heart, that sun shines from, at the back of your mind. It's a reassurance that God is both real and never was. It's this beach, and the space inside your pockets, where I know your hands are dry and pawing a gold locket given to you by Nick, full of two faces you don't recognize.
The truth about you is that anywhere you are, and anywhere you go, you're alone. This beach, which is still cool for the spring, I know is somewhere still covered with morning joggers and families making sandcastles. But when you arrive to it, all life condenses into this single expression; this dark and heavy outline of humanity, into which every experience of children is poured. You make the sandcastle, you kick it over, you experience the loss of it, you experience the vindication of it's destruction, and as you walk the grounds of this garden, you're alone.
God existing is the same as him not existing, and you being everyone is the same and there being no one else but you. The boys I know who run the length of the water with their dog have clean and pale lines along their necks, crew cuts new for the season. They lined up, I know, in the dim kitchen of their mothers, the clippers buzzing obscene, and they bowed their heads to her small stature so she could shave their heads for them.
You're so quick to accuse me of motherhood, but I wonder if you consider all the mothers you are. All the mothers who are forced into fatherhood by severance, the small women who raise sons, your mother, and how she was always you, within. The kitchen, becoming Eden, sliced into segments by the light of day which cuts in around the heavy vinyl blinds.
Eden is where you're always alone, but I can't remember if that means the same thing as being alone with me - the taunts and jibes of that same solitude being ironic.
You walk the streets of Amsterdam, and you're alone. There are people, but if you looked closely, they'd be some simple variation of you or me, which you do not. You ignore them except for the vague sense that they might exist, or have existed once, like portraits of long-dead kings. The streets are silent of bicycle bells, and empty of cars. You move over the face of the earth regarding it as a part of us, something so similar to our physical structure that it might respond the same way our skin does to your touch.
The brown stones which line the sidewalk in the flower district are cupped gently by your fingers, and released again, at the same time that your legs move strong into the tide of the Pacific. You inhale sharply and remember there is no God, once again, making love the only thing in your nature as a man to do.
Love,
Evelyn
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