Bat for Lashes - Moon and Moon
Tuco once told me that a guy named Jared Leto could shout, no, scream
Everybody run now, everybody run now, everybody run! and yet, these days, people rarely
do; that the reason for this was the erosion of their flight response. I'm not sure what that means but it seems like she's right about people not running when they should. Even after doing that thing with her body, the thing she calls transmogrification for those without ontological inclination, which I think of as
Monsters, Inc., people remain. They cry, throw up, and faint but they don't run. Mostly, they just seem to watch her eat. By the time Tuco's halfway done with her food -and that's a lot!- she's pretty much back to normal, and so she speaks.
"Dr. Judith Herman once wrote that in situations of terror, people spontaneously seek their first sense of comfort and protection. Wounded soldiers and raped women cry out for their mothers, or for God. When this cry is not answered, the sense of basic trust is shattered. Traumatized people feel utterly abandoned, usually alone, cast out of the human and divine systems of care and protection that sustain life. Thereafter, a sense of alienation, of disconnection, pervades every relationship, from the most intimate familial bonds to the most abstract affiliations of community and religion. When trust is lost, traumatized people feel that they belong more to the dead than to the living. A total bitch of a situation, for sure, but it could be worse. Take, for example, when that cry is eventually met with a response, albeit one neither anticipated nor desired, for trauma had, at long last, cultivated a voice, only the trauma wasn't entirely mine, just as the voice wasn't altogether His. Now, if you're looking for a reason as to
why or an encyclopedic explanation of
how this situation arose, you're asking the wrong person since your guess, believe it or not, is as good as my own, so don't ask."
Tuco often tells me that she's a motormouth sometimes, but it doesn't matter anyways since there are too many big-people words and this taco is really, really good. One of the taller girls asks about the situation.
"Goddamn. Look, some fuckhead philosophers could discuss and attempt to delineate the nature of distilled trauma filtered through a single, spectral entity and subsequently redistributed amongst the greater constructed reality but this shit gets complicated and besides, impotent analyses aren't exactly my forte."
Another girl, the one who read my whole story, asks another question. A better question, I think. Tuco rubs the space between her eyes for a bit like she always does when trying to make something easy enough for me to understand, but not always.
"I can only tell you who He was before things went to complete shit, and even then, it's mostly supposition. Anyone here familiar with the English band Keane? Three, four of you? Okay, whatever; the point being, in a song called 'Spiralling' there is a series of seemingly rhetorical questions posed:
Did you want to be a winner? Did you want to be an icon? Did you want to be famous? Did you want to be the president? Did you want to start a war? Did you want to have a family? Did you want to be in love? and if I may be allowed to misinterpret that last line, as it was repeated anyway,
Did you want to be loved? To all of those questions and more, His honest answer would have been in the negative, like, at pretty much
any stage of his life. To be candid, I'm leaning toward the notion that He never really
wanted anything, as if He suffered from a congenital defect of some kind. Then I crept into his life, and before you say
What's so special about you? believe me, the sentiment, recent ostentatious display notwithstanding, is shared by yours truly, but something clicked inside that peculiar head of His and faster than a teenage boy can ejaculate, cravings developed. A hunger, if you will, for the capacity to desire."
That said, Tuco unwraps a burrito supreme and simply looks at it. Burritos are no good. Too many tomatoes and gooey stuff. Meat is great and cheese tastes even better. The second girl says what Tuco did a few minutes ago was quite special, all things considered. Tuco chuckles. I let her know that I like that girl because she read
my story, and Tuco smirks but it's okay because I can tell when she's going to hurt somebody. Usually.
"But that's just it: What that was is a demonstration of the new normal, which is precisely the problem - paradoxically enough, related to who He and I had been yet nevertheless an insufficient explanation for, well, much
anything. Boy met girl, girl broke boy, but only because that's what she needed at the time -a stand-in or a scapegoat, undeserving or not- since the skeletons in one's closet continue to rattle well after their respective, deceptive demise. This may not answer your question about who He
was, let alone what has become Him, of course, but it's imperative to understand that at a certain point in my life, I needed someone, namely a male -or a boyish simulacrum of such- to decimate and I'll be the first to tell you that He fit the bill, most assuredly. As stated previously, what transpired beyond that point in time is beyond my ability to fully ascertain. Something found Him, or He found it. Maybe both. For all intents and purposes, there is no discernible reason, no
why. But you still want, nay, still
need to make sense of this idiot-savant enigma, right? Don't get me wrong, the urge is one I understand all too well, and Little Orphan Asswipe here is, like, enamored with your attention span and shit, so..."
One, two, three, four! Four is the number of bashes the burrito gets from her fist. Yucky tomatoes, icky beans, stinky onions, and a whole lot more, all smashed, is what's left over.
"...There you go. That's your
why right there. Not the hand, what it did, or to whom the fist belongs. I'm talking about the burrito, and I mean, sure, the thing is edible and yeah, it's still a burrito, I suppose, but ultimately -and let's not kid ourselves here- that's a pretty fucked-up chunk of Tex-Mex, which is exactly how He likes his burritos - and we are nothing if not smashed, just as He is nothing if not ravenous."
