Lost Echoes

37

EXCERPT FROM HARRY’S JOURNAL

My little friendly composition notebook, I come to you having been sharply centered, to now being off the plumb line, maybe two bubbles.

I’m not sure how I have come to be where I am….

No. That’s not true.

I don’t like how I have come to be, don’t like how I am, and yet I don’t know what to think or do about it, so pardon me as I write, for this will be, to put it bluntly, a little bit mixed and undecided.

There are upsides to my position. Mostly Talia’s backside, bent up and ready, but that’s not a way I like to think or a thing I want to live my life for, though, to be honest, it’s such a fine thing that one can’t help but consider, and I fear—shit, I know—that little pleasure may have departed.

Look at that.

May I say, I’m still clinging to hopes that are unwarranted.

Elvis, my friends, has left the building, and that’s all there is to it.

So here I sit. In darkness, except for this one lamp and my journal and pen, and this strange feeling of remorse and sadness, and the awareness that my old demons, the ghosts in the machine, have not gone away and I have heard and seen something horrible, and that true love isn’t always true and isn’t always love, and that love at first sight is sometimes a harsh light in the eyes.

Most of what plagued me before, the goddamn sounds, has not gone away, but I have been able to frequently put them aside, or, to be more exact, they activate and swim about me like sharks. It is as if I am in a large aquarium, a piece of kelp on the bottom of the goddamn thing, and the sharks are set loose, and as they move the water moves and the kelp moves, and I drift amongst them.

Not a good feeling. But I try to shove it back. Tad says not to do that, not to shove it back, because then I become a depository for those feelings. I am to be like a filter, let them drift through me and out of me. I am to accept our sameness and oneness and move on.

Easier said than done. I’m still trying to figure how they and I are the same. Or even how we’re one.

Zen, baby. It do be confusing.

On a good day it is less like the sharks and more like noise heard from construction work ten blocks away. That is a good thing.

But that is not why I come to you today, my composition friend. No, sir. That ain’t it. I come to you to tell you of a very bad thing and how sometimes the sounds and images are not from far away, nor are they swimming by you, making you nervous. Sometimes they are close as your skin, your intestines, your brain cells, in there with the beat of your heart.

Alas, I avoid. And for good reason.

Best way to put this, best way to explain this to you, is to start where it starts, not behind some rock looking from afar, wishing for a Winchester rifle.

Here it is, then.

So things were going really well, with a stress on the well, but there were signs, dear friend. Signs and portents, and the advice of Tad, right out there in front of me in my lessons, and all of it has come back to me now, and all I can think is: Weren’t you paying attention, asshole?

Once upon a time a poor boy who was afraid of sounds—and for good reason, I might add—got drunk and felt better, but felt less good when sober, and he met a drunk who didn’t feel so good himself, so they decided that together they would not be drunk.

Something like that.

Plans were made, deals were struck.

And, sure enough. They began to find the center they had lost. The wobble stopped.

Well, for me, Composition Notebook Journal (I give that to you as a title now), the wobble is back, because I forgot who I was and what was inside me, and I forgot who Talia is and how it’s her world, not mine.

Hell. I did not forget. I refused to remember.

My world is the dirt beneath her feet, and her world is the clouds. Way up there in the misty white, spotted with clear blue and all manner of hope and fortune and future.

Me, I’m down here with the worms, maybe loony as a rat in a paint shaker, for in spite of my thought-to-be-centered life, I was always listening and waiting for the trumpet blow, the one that announced betrayal.

Or maybe it was just the trumpet blast that told the truth. How it is on earth and not in heaven, and how it is for the not-so-fine and the not-so-beautiful and the not-so-gifted and the not-so-lucky and the not-so-rich.

And how is it, you ask?

Not good, the poor boy answers. Not good.

Joey is an asshole, and maybe, as Tad says, he is like a monkey who throws his own shit because it’s all the ammunition he has, but, that said, he still knows some things; there is still some undigested fruit or nuts in the shit he throws.