The Empty Room

Didn’t we argue long into the night with Sartre’s half blind wisdom, or the hidden arrogance of Camus’ modest tales?

We did. Such existentialists as we were when we were still young enough for it.

I remember clear autumn nights, remember the slamming of a door that revealed the secret of consciousness: that we prepare our realities as we live them. Remember the suffocating horror of James’ dark presence. That too. Remember happier nights of reefer madness, and knowing nights of gentler clearer persuasions.

I do not forget the descent into another’s madness and that safe return that was granted us before we lost our way for a time in that other fear. Mostly I remember the long summer of sweating softly by the radio on a worn mattress in a barren room. You to catch my breath.

A window without curtains. A desolate street turned crisp by the night. A barren room without furniture, wrought in wood and dust. A mattress torn and jagged. An old sleeping bag. A pile of worn clothes thrown in a corner. A rattling heater for the cold before you came. A pile of books and notes. All.

Except my dreams. My misconceptions grander than the truth. My poems more brilliant than the day. Words. Songs. Terror and joy. Thrown away I found myself.

I did not tell you how I froze by that frail heater before you came, how I shivered to the sound of the wind rattling against the window, how I lay there for days on end in a fever, amongst the rags, too weary too move, too tired to care. Alone.

I made upon the wall, upon the cracks of the wounded wall, a great map of many paths and hidden ways. I followed them one by one to many lives, to jungles, to tropical villages by the sea, to great volcanic cliffs which looked far out to sea, to the ballast blown aloft by distant leviathans, to the sky, to the sun. It was terrible. It was wonderful!

I imagined then a wisdom so great as to surpass any I have heard of since. I dreamt it, and it has echoed down my life, loud and soft, even beyond you, beyond my dreaming fever, and beyond my haunting despairs.

After three days the storm subsided, the visions faded, the hunger returned. I looked out the window. I saw you passing in the street. I stood in the window and watched you walk by, and wanted you. You stopped and looked up into my window and smiled.

It is a room peopled with ghosts and spirits, of stories untold, and stories yet to unfold. It is a room haunted by the shadows of the imaginations of its inhabitants of which we were just the latest. I watched them all, the spirits, as I held you sleeping in my arms, and wondered at my fortune, and wondered at you.