false heart

thus begins a new series of dark mutterings i'm going to call false heart. enjoy.

She’s five blocks and a couple of decades away, the girl of my dreams.

Only she’s not the girl of my dreams, is she? She never is. The girl of my dreams doesn’t exist because she can’t. Because long ago when I was way too young and I fucked the girl who soon got left behind, and I pledged my love for her and it broke me in two, I never got sewed back up right. The broken part of me grew calloused and shallow. And I fucked the next girl, and the next girl, and the next one, and, grinning a false grin of trivial conquest, and I planted the flag of my supposed manhood in the pools of semen I left in their teenage sheets in the hot southern sunlight. In their still-little girl afternoon beds, all frills and innocence, a delusion of childhood lost that probably didn’t even fool daddy anymore, in some mad hallucination of suburbia, I left behind the reality of my heart and created in its place a carved-out facsimile. Atop the flagpole of my cock I precariously balanced a false heart, a stage prop that could stand in for the real thing, but only from a distance and only for a short period of time. Up close it wasn’t fooling anyone anymore than those pink and white sheets and stuffed animals were fooling the girl’s parents into thinking she wasn’t just another horny fuck machine like they were, just like we all are.

It was just my cock. It was just my cum.

It wasn’t a heart.

It wasn’t love.

And so I have fucked my way blindly through my sad, false life pretending all along that I was indeed a human, in possession of a soul, and that I had a heart, a real one, and that it was just in need of a counterpart, a perfect specimen that would take care of it and watch out for it.

But mostly all I encountered were girls and women equally as bereft as I. We all knew each other instantly, from a long distance away. We recognized in each other the self-same delusion, the longing for unreality, the hope that this was it, that this orgasm could lead us to a place where we could feel love again. A place where we could feel anything again. We were willing to lie to each other and we were willing to lie to ourselves for a time and pretend we were human, and that each other was human. Because it’s easier to fuck, to pretend, than to stop, even for a second. Because in that dreary little death that is our vacant existence between orgasms, we’re forced to face the looming evidence of our colossal, overwhelming emptiness.

She’s five blocks and a phone call away, the girl of my dreams. But she’s long gone. She might as well be living on Mars. She might as well be living in 1847. She died long before I met her, long before she was even born, really. She died in my chest one afternoon long ago, in the pain and depression of a colorless teenage hangover, in a car that plowed southward in the filthy, ugly Midwest rain, taking me further and further away from love. She died before she lived. Before I could encounter her actuality she faded into a sad, delusional dream.

But even in the cynicism and ever-more ambiguous morals of impending middle age--now suddenly finding oneself on the downhill side of the cloud-bound peak of a sad and pointless life, now rushing futilely toward gravity’s inevitable cold embrace, now closer to the meaningless end than the unsolicited beginning--even in fading, childish dreams of success and a life that might once have had meaning, in the realization that ‘potential’ is something that never comes--even then, it is possible to be taken in by that dream: that perfect love. That perfect understanding. That there is one person out there who has everything you could ever want.

Of course she doesn’t have all of that. No one ever does. I killed her decades ago, before she was even born. I killed her possibility long before I met her.

I killed my own heart.

How foolish of me to have forgotten that.

She’s five blocks and a couple of decades away, the girl of my dreams.

And I’ll never see her again. Only when I close my eyes.