A's and B's
Ben Elhav
A’s
- If I could tell you something that you already know, I would tell you that I love you.
We both know the definition of this love has
changed and mutated into a subconscious feeling which may no longer exist in a conceivable or comprehensible form.
I once thought that admitting this would be
shameful, yet perhaps it is braver because I have the audacity to create the feeling of love through my admission of it.
With shame comes vulnerability, yet perhaps
I am anything but vulnerable, because through this admission I become the creator and destroyer of worlds. My feeling is reality which is reality because I say it is. Every possibility and door which has yet to open or can be closed is at my discretion. I
take pride in the fact that I am shaping reality and creating truth by holding my subjective understanding of the world (and of you) as objective fact.
- If I could tell you something that you need to hear, I would tell you that I think we’ve been drifting apart.
I feel as though you’re stuck in a pattern
of rush and excess, and when I’m around you I accomplish nothing but enjoy everything. I think we just view these things fundamentally differently and maybe I am a workaholic, and vain, and a hypocrite in thinking that everything must have meaning when I myself
create that meaning and it has no intrinsic value. But if we can’t create meaning, does anything matter? Does it matter if nothing matters? I think it matters to me. I don’t think it matters to you.
You crave the rush of sugar and the rush of
a pointless rush which makes you rush for more. I crave fulfillment. I crave the illusion of closure. Go ahead, mock me for craving an illusion, yet the illusion I chase is more tangible than the nothingness with which you are so content.
- If I could tell you something irrelevant, I would tell you that I was wrong to love you.
We are on opposite ends of the platform looking
in opposite directions. I think it is best that we remain this way, for I once came down to meet you, a deer in the headlights already resembling flattened roadkill.
And that was
before
the train hit!
B’s
- Strong.
I was once there, 6 to 16, bags in hand, laboring
up the endless flights of stairs to my house and the endless stairs away from you and from each house to the next. I then confronted each doorway - each world of endless possibility a vast and terrifying chasm of the unknown - and yet I labored on. Over the
stairs, and through each doorway, and into the room where I left my brain, and into the room containing your heart. There I found nothing but darkness and when I turned to leave I noticed that the door was locked. The true terror is not of what lurks beyond
the open door but what is kept away from the one that is shut.
- Wise.
As I was born I knew every detail of the world,
but in waking lost my knowledge, that familiar world changing before my very eyes. I became a hermit, collecting passages from designated texts and relics from designated persons, truly believing I was a worthy curator of a world too vast to fully inhabit
or comprehend. One day I came across a passage I could not read and yet I read and read and transcribed my findings with great confidence and apparent comprehension yet was proven wrong when that which I had written was re-written by the pesky hand of time.
The etchings on the cave are now meaningless scratches with the same value of etchings in flesh in providing the same amount of displeasure.
- Good.
Begrudgingly accepting the unwritten contract
I had been handed by those who begrudgingly wrote and rewrote it to their liking, I stumbled and fell onto the beaten path with a reluctance which I mistook for elegance. I must have fallen on my head because at once I had a perverted desire to tear up the
godforsaken covenant for the sole purpose of feeling the intangible paper tufts between my claws. But once I felt instead the tearing of flesh and blood and tasted iron and salt I ran and fell and stumbled away from the narrowing path ‘till I was consumed
in earth.
