Relationships
                “You know, the attraction wasn’t metaphysical,” I wanted to say, but I restrained myself.  Everyone has his defense mechanism: detachment, aggression, appeasement.  I specialize in caustic witticisms, or in always saying the wrong thing at the right time.  The word “mechanism” applies to this type of behavior because it is exactly that – mechanical, automatic – but try explaining that to the girl facing you, mascara and eyeliner cascading over the precipice of her cheek bones, or else diverted into the reservoir of the crease just outside her eyes, where crows’ feet might appear in another twenty years or so.  She sniffles and lets out a deep sigh, saying that it is just too early for this to work but if this had been a couple years later or if I’m still available then she would marry me.  I didn’t know raccoons could cry.
                I don’t remember breaking up with my other two girlfriends in high school.  Neither of them says much to me anymore, so I must have said something right.  The first was a freshman romance – I think we kissed once, and if it was more, only the first time was worth committing to memory.  She was always forbidden to go out until five minutes after I called.  The second was more of a competitor than a love interest.  She’d had a crush on me since the first week she met me, but I didn’t take interest until over a year later.  This girl was an athlete.  Ropy arms, solid abs, and a perpetual ponytail.  She ran like a skinny penguin.  And she was just smart enough to be dangerous, in that she knew what she was talking about until she opened her mouth.  “You’re going to miss this,” she said, as she gestured toward her chest, and repeated it as she pursed her lips.  Suddenly, the perfect response came to me.  I shrugged.
This cavalier attitude extended to my friends as well.  In grade school, one of them, a kid named Mark, chased me with a two-by-four and threw my bike in a creek.  Maybe it was because I blocked every shot he took on the basketball court.  Maybe it was because I hit him in the face with a Koosh ball, although this was several weeks earlier, so it seems a tenuous link at best.  His family hosted a get-together for all of the players on his soccer team.  About ten of us were in the basement, separated only by a pool table and a chair – some semblance of cover in this soon-to-be war zone.  Each side hurtled the first volley of variously sized balls, and I managed to catch Mark’s.  “Bullshit.  You trapped it!”  He understood the subtle ballet of childhood competition; nevertheless, I explained amidst the din that either he was out, or neither of us was.  I was a marked man after that, so I began throwing blindly over the rail of the table at him, and one such throw caught him right in the eye.  “You bastard!” he screamed.  “You did that on purpose!  I hate you, Kyle!”  As he pinballed through the gauntlet of bodies, he added in a huff, “I’m breaking this off between us!”  “I didn’t know we were engaged!” I said.
I never attended a funeral until high school, and my cats were all alive until midway through elementary school, so I guess I’d have to trace my first memorable loss back to first grade.  There was a girl in my kindergarten named Carly who looked exactly like Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz.  The same subtle curls, ruby lips, and blue checkered jumper.  Her dog was a German shepherd, but I forgave her.  She came over once, or probably more but only once that I remember.  As a little kid, the whole world is your jungle gym.  On that day, the world was contained within my living room, where we ascended to the heights of a worn, gray couch, lugging a beanbag chair in tow.  I gave a little smile and a push and we careened over the cliff.  She clung to me like no one has, before or since.  After the crash, battered and broken, we stood up.  The next year rolled around and she had disappeared.  It wasn’t one of those things you asked about; it was more like a concentration camp.  Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, just keep shuffling through.  I was speechless.

Love
Most people turn to god for solace.  I turn to love.  “But God is love, right?”  No.  He is anger, he is angst.  He is Jackson Pollock, abstractly expressing his hatred for his creation.  “But God is the original and perfect Artist.  Look at the order in nature, from the cosmos to the atom.”  Again, no, but I must have misspoken.  God is Marcel Duchamp.  He delights in instructing us to gracefully descend a staircase so that he can push us down, laughing as we lie nude and bruised.  “This is terribly blasphemous.  Jesus is the Son of the Artist, and through Him your sins will be forgiven.”  If god was the original artist, then Jesus was the first con artist.  He invented the pyramid scam, himself at the top, followed by the disciples, continuing all the way down to the Jews.  I guess he’s a little better off than his father.  God created the one-night stand.
I’ve never met a girl so beautiful that I can’t imagine fucking her.  I’m talking about the ethereal kind of beauty, an apparition capable of penetrating any barrier, permeating any membrane.  The frightening kind of beauty, a scintillating specter that is both afflicting and anodyne.  You can’t put these girls on a pedestal because they fall right through.  There are only a few that have even been administered this test.  It makes me feel too much like Anubis.  Every time I expunge a name from the list in my mind, the bearer of that name gapes at me, bewildered.  When you build a pedestal out of a house of cards, it’s only a matter of time until someone blows it.
Occasionally people tell me that the only reason I can be confident in life is because I avoid my problems.  To some extent, they might be right.  I tend to distance myself if I see a relationship falling apart, probably because there’s no reason for me to get hurt if I can see it coming.  Sometimes, though, I just lose myself – I don’t mean to, it just happens.  I lose myself in the night sky, gazing at light that has traveled millions of miles and just happens to be stopping by.  I lose myself in the rain, wondering if I am special to the water trickling down my hair, or just a roadside motel.  I lose myself in the twitches of someone’s cheek when they speak to me, the touch of tongue to tooth in forming a phoneme, the subtle flare of the speaker’s nostrils.  Sometimes I feel like an artist, lost in the process of creation.
At the Children’s Museum, sometime in elementary school, we saw a glassblowing exhibition.  I remember watching an older man, hands wrinkled as if they had been melted from years of plunging them into the flames of the furnace, reach the blowpipe in to extract the glass from the crucible.  My heart plummeted to the floor as I saw this viscous amalgam of silicate sands ready to slide off of the end of the pipe.  A slight turn saved the substance, and he extended another metal rod away from his body.  He gently poked the blob on the end of the blowpipe and began to stretch it, his tools like rollers pulling taffy.  I was transfixed.  After a little more prestidigitation, the amoeba had become a swan.
I’m enamored with glass.  I am inexorably drawn to it, a delicate flower irrupting through topsoil in a heliotropic haze.  It is motion frozen in time, but if you do not handle it with care, it will inevitably shatter.  It specializes in transparency one minute and reflection the next.  If you look through a window during the day, you see a prismatic deluge of hues, a splattered palette.  At night, the colors disappear into subtle shading, an arrangement in black and gray, featuring white.  But when you gaze through this supercooled liquid you see yourself, distorted, but present.  Light bends and delicately dances through fingerprints or stains, with every tiny subatomic particle the pane can see, again with the window, and through your pupil.  I can only speak for myself, but I revel in this.  Each morning I disappear into the dearth of shadow, and each night is my renaissance.

Hope
Noses are supposed to look like lower-case ‘L’s.  Mine is a ‘C.’  It only hints at its former condition, but the bridge consists of a crag on one side and a canyon on the other.  It was first displaced in seventh grade, during a church league basketball game.  Poked in to pick some kid’s pocket – elbow to the face.  My mom insisted that I go to the hospital immediately, but I finished the game.  We lost.  A couple weeks later I went under the knife.  Quite literally, actually.  Evidently, my doctor used something remarkably similar to a butter knife as a brace and broke my nose back into place.  I took a deep breath when I came to, only to find scratchiness inhabiting my pharynx.  A couple days later, I was as good as new.  Two years later, I was again the proud owner of a deviated septum.  I was a goalie, so I dove for a ball, and caught a cleat across my face.  I cleared the ball, and upon trying to yell at my defenders to push up the field, found my words were drowning in blood.  I laughed, to similar effect, and found this rather masochistic.  At halftime, I changed into red socks and finished the game.  We lost.  When I got home, my mom picked up my dark green jersey and remarked, with a rather pleased look on her face, like any mother observing her boy’s metamorphosis into a man, “You must have been sweating a lot out there today!”  I said, “It’s blood.”  She shrieked and dropped the jersey.  Soon after that, I stopped keeping track of the number of breaks.  I can breathe enough to get by.
According to Buddhist philosophy, inhalation is what you take from the world, while exhalation is your gift.  Imagine the catastrophic effects on the atmosphere that could result from changes over the course of a single day.  In.  We consume the gifts of others and alter our body chemistry to become someone new.  The change may be so infinitesimal that only on a scale of picomoles can we begin to comprehend it, but every time we breathe in, we are someone new.  You could be standing at the apex of an Alpine mountain, becoming a goat herder.  You could be in amidst the smog and smoke of a dingy bar, trying desperately to become a phoenix, to rise from the ashtray of the man sitting next to you.  Out.  I’ve always found smoking to be somewhat conceited.  It’s a concealed way to say that your breath means more than anyone else’s, that your gift to the world is special.  In temperate climates, there are at least four months a year to enjoy this privilege; maybe it takes a small, rosy-cheeked child to fully appreciate this opportunity.  I don’t expect a thank you card for my gift, nor should anyone else.  In.  A circus of scents wafts into my nostrils, despite my shortened breathing.  Out.  The Cirque du Soleil escapes in a hushed puff, and I let it go.
Once the funambulist begins his act, he doesn’t know if a net is below him.  He just walks on the wire and tries not to fall.