TWO SENTENCES
Alexis Almeida
As the motion forward begins again, as you are conducting it from your seated position on the couch, what had been absent is suddenly panting in your mouth, causing you to pant in unison, until you don’t know exactly whose breath you taste, and you wonder what direction the motion is going (other than forward), and at what speed, (you are still merely lurching, resisting) and whose life it suggests (aside from your own), and if it had life before you, with a mind for itself, and who has grabbed hold—you or it—and if there comes a point when it is merely dragging you along, when it moves quickly with a fortitude you cannot normally maintain; but why, what prevents you?
And what truly separates this sentence from the sentence you were writing when you passed the three people on the street with whom you imagined love, or intimacy, or a stiffening gaze, or a basket full of bread, or the possibility of at least refusing those conceits, walking by them and instead letting them continue on in your mind like a tumbleweed, perhaps preferably, perhaps suiting you better—(“the first walked briskly, yellow shoelaces untied, looking callow and unkempt, but remarkably clever: I could tell, when he didn’t look up at me, just how clever he was,” you thought, when the sun began to rise), you smile to yourself knowingly and the sentence curtsies, a prim nod to the forebears of this moment, for the past has made it what it is, put this flavor to its tongue, and circling back, it gives life to moments we ought to continue living for, moments we might catch up to again, and reminds us that one loses only what one never really had; sinking in your seat, the satisfaction gathers in your stomach like a ball of helium, (soon it will be compressed and recycled, like a soda can), and you wonder if the coffee is still hot, or if it has settled and cooled into a wet, acrid soil, while the same words reel around you, they are repeating themselves like prayers in your mind, like bells hanging from the air, ringing just two seconds after each, but the sentence is restless and fickle, and it is becoming adept at its craft, it is setting off alarms and leaving punctuation behind like crumbs, abstruse reminders that it is but another layer of dust (or lacquer) over a reflective surface, like the one on which the coffee pot sits; (“...the second one had a strident walk, his wool hat pulled over eyebrows, a few red tendrils escaping around the back of his neck, his eyes were scintillating and mossy green, his arms akimbo as he stopped a friend on the street, didn’t even bother to tap him on the shoulder, just waited to be run into; when I felt his hand reach into my pocket...” you laugh ingenuously, like the first time was now); it knows, perhaps better than you, that the same man who is in the kitchen, drinking from this pot, is the same man who has been standing in that position for twenty-three years, curling his toes in his wool socks, his glasses slipping down the sharp slant of his nose, his thoughts borne of his words each time he speaks, his mouth secreting lemon-juice saliva (why else would he purse his lips that way all day?), and he wakes up next to someone who is in love, and those few moments they share is a moment to which no one has recourse: not you, not the sentence, not even them: when she wakes up in love (always) and he wakes up and stumbles back into it (everyday) as a response, a reaction, as if he is realizing for the first time, after consulting the coffee pot, after the pungent taste settles in his mouth (a reminder), that she holds him at the center of herself like a tree; which makes you (lovelessly) question that (hopelessly) abstract idea of the (focal) point, the center, the ontological scepter: like the state of your satisfaction, after italicizing your stolen thought, it floats like a balloon, it is reliant on whimsy currents in the air, and sometimes it needs to run into something, even if it is just a reflective surface, or a terrycloth robe, (“...the third one was sitting down on the train, he had a dark moustache and piercing eyes, active but serene; there was a girl standing over him, both her hands were on the pole above her, and every time the car jerked she became weightless and flimsy, nearly falling over each time; their knees were touching and suddenly our eyes clinked together like ice cubes and when we bumped into each other on Broadway a few weeks later, he asked me for a light; I didn’t have one, and exasperated, he asked me again...” you recall playfully, over the low din of the record player, his moustache braising your upper lip; the taste of raspberries is still fresh, but there is something unsavory about it), and you bristle, your heart is beating faster, with an urgency, the sentence is gaining momentum again, just as you wanted to take a break, without the clamor of the subway in the background, and so you wonder, as you hear the footsteps nearing the door of the room, beyond the prosody and the craftsmanship and the axiomatic sentences, if it is you who is pursuing the sentence, it who is the hypnotist to whom you are offering dues, and cues, and not the other way around, as you would have preferred to believe (pop) and your pulse thickens and you realize (how ironic it is) that it is the pulse that we invent that is indelible, and the pulse that invents us that is the train itself, the train we always fail to mention as it plods along, undeterred and rusty, and you wonder if there is another, a third sentence that has brought him into the doorway now, with a cup of coffee, steaming, and has it always been there, slithering between the two of you, free.