the lightness of things

Finished The Joke on the train to Manhattan, while the dodgy sun bounced from cloud to clouds.  Started on The Unbeararble Lightness of Being shortly after.

Since Candice has left, I'm trying to get into a rhythm (more Mozart than Beethoven) of the weekends.  The workday is fine – I've started to cook again and to write read read write all the while splayed out after the sun is darkened.  But the weekends are still an empty journey that needs some filling - so I'm calibrating that.

Went to Chinatown for a quick bowl of pho and stopped across the street at Tu Quynh center for a banana-coconut pudding.  Past the rambutan, durian and lychee bunched and tied together on the faded green stalls along Broome and Grand - the day was cool after yesterday's showers.  The taste of smoke felt good. I discovered a basketball playground under the Williamsburg bridge after taking a different route on Havemeyer to get to Atlas Cafe. I'm going to start a pattern of writing on Saturday afternoons.

What if our lives are lived only once?  What happens if we never return to the moment of first discoveries – will our actions have meaning if it falls to the slumber or forgetting?  Tens of thousands of hundred years from now, will anyone remember that I've lived, long after the history pages have crumbled and the sheer volume of events and activities have shoveled themselves on the grave of my single life – will anyone remember?  Does anyone remember the countless lives that fought and died and loved before their time?  If our lives are only lived once, then all our actions are forgiveable, because who can predict, who can make accurate decisions, if we only live through them once?  Everything that I do is a first – first love, first ecstasy, first understanding.  Each minute of my life is the first time that I experience those moments, and each mistake is the first time I've made those mistakes.  All forgiveable.  For if we cannot forgive in the non-recurring life, then we are living in hell, where there is no forgiveness nor redemption.

But why should it matter?

What if our lives are recurring, and we have done all this before?  Then nothing is forgiveable, and karma and fate and destiny all conspire against us, and each of our actions have permanence written on them.  Our actions will have reverbrations into the next life and the next, until all of eternity shouts our transparent pitifulness.  But then, will anything matter then, if we are hooked to repeating our actions?  Our guilt now loses it's strength because we can always live another way, make new decisions – who is to say that we make better decisions when faced with inifinite chances?

Our miserable humaness, inexplicably intertwined with the knowledge of our own demise, is beautiful because we tragically live to only live once.

I discovered a Puerto Rican community for the first time today, walking home a different way.  Old women sat playing bingo on plastic tables on the street, their honeyed lemonade glasses sweating under the bright day.  Men slouched and slapped down cracked domino pieces, their crooked hats shielding faces lined by wisdom.  Young boys played stickball while their girls sat on stoops gossiping.  A bulldog looked up at me, black eyes bored and pink mouth laughing from the heat.

I remember the first time I felt repugnance at a girl's body.  It was after I slept with her, and she wanted to stay the night.  And after the tension had broken minutes earlier, the aura of her physical attractiveness melted away, leaving only a husk of odors and touch – the friction of her skin against mine was unquenchably nauseating, and I wanted to disgorge myself from that moment and clean my body so that my soul would come back.

I remember the first time I soaked in another girl's body, as our souls mingled and, leaving the physical act drained, we fell asleep together in harmonious silence.  It was the hysteria of love and remembering, of recognition and mutual compassion, the comingling of our respective lonely selves.

I remember waking up today, and for the first time having a sense of hopefulness in not the next few years, but few minutes.  And by the time the few minutes had passed, I had for the first time, hope in the next few hours.  And so on.