<!DOCTYPE html> <!-- Template for compiled 'Autocento' documents --> <html> <head> <meta charset="utf-8"> <meta name="generator" content="pandoc"> <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0, user-scalable=yes"> <meta name="author" content="Case Duckworth"> <!-- more meta tags here --> <title>I wanted to tell you something | Autocento of the breakfast table</title> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="./css/common.css"> <script src="./js/lozenge.js"> </script> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="./css/verse.css"> <script src="./js/verse.js"> </script> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="./css/autocento.css"> <script src="./js/autocento.js"> </script> <!--[if lt IE 9]> <script src="http://html5shim.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/html5.js"> </script> <![endif]--> <!-- <script src="js/external.js"> </script> --> </head> <body> <div id="wrapper"> <header> <!-- title --> <h1 class="title">I wanted to tell you something</h1> </header> <section class="thing verse"> <p>I wanted to tell you something in order <a href="poetry-time.html">to</a><br />explain the way I feel about the <a href="initial-conditions.html">Universe</a>,<br />its workings, etc. But I couldn’t <a href="exasperated.html">yesterday</a><br />—I’m sorry—I wanted only to <a href="ouroboros_memory.html">ball</a><br />myself up and cry all day. It was the <a href="sixteenth-chapel.html">sixteenth</a><br />day in a row this happened to me, and to <a href="love-as-god.html">be</a></p> <p>more than two weeks waiting to cry is,<br />especially when, the whole time, I wasn’t able to,<br />absolutely horrible. It was no sweet sixteen,<br />I’ll tell you that much. Unless at yours, the Universe<br />kept telling you to quit having such a ball<br />and that you should have died, like, yesterday.</p> <p>At first, it feels like you’re winning—that yesterday<br />you really were meant to die, but since you still <em>are</em>,<br />you beat the system somehow. But the Universe bawls,<br />“No, I meant you should’ve crawled into<br />a hole and fucking <em>died</em>!” And then the Universe<br />punches you right in the gut, something like sixteen</p> <p>times, and all you can think is, “Some sixteenth<br />birthday! Maybe I will go die in a hole.” Yesterday,<br />at times like this, is a luxury the cruel Universe<br />refuses to give you. This is when it’s a pain just to <em>be</em>,<br />when that Marvell line about “<a href="http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/marvell/coy.htm">rolling our stuff into one ball</a>”<br />just seems glib, when you don’t want one body, let alone two.</p> <p>Something else that may come as a surprise to<br />you: over the past more-than-a-fortnight, these sixteen<br />days, I’ve had nothing to eat but crackers and a cheese ball.<br />(That’s not entirely true—yesterday<br />I had some candy, peppermints and Jujubes.)<br />Maybe this is why I’m so mad at the Universe—</p> <p>because all it has ever wanted, this Universe<br />that gave me life, fed me from its breast til I was two,<br />and even before that, made a place in which I could be—<br />all it’s wanted was for me to take the sixteen<br />steps to sobriety, fold the Eight-Fold Path over yesterday<br />and step around it lightly, as I would an exercise ball,</p> <p>but the problem is, dear Universe, there’s no way I could be<br />something as hard as all that, to wake up yesterday<br />morning, stretch over my sixteen selves, bound out like a ball.</p> </section> <nav> <a href="#" id="lozenge" title="Random page"> ◊ </a> </nav> </div> </body> </html>