Ben Kassoy
and I’m so stupid I’d rather be great than happy” and I’ve spent so long trying to choose that I think I lost my chance at either.
***
It’s like it’s the sixties and my house burned down and I saved the dog but not the photo albums so I hired stand-ins who vaguely resemble the people I’ve lost to recreate my memory of my memories and this model is six-two and smells like vanilla but throw a wig on her and let’s make it work.
***
Mik Everett says that “When a writer falls in love with you, you can never die” and it’s like you’re on a ventilator begging with your body’s silence and your eyes’ screams for it to end, but as your power of attorney I’m keeping you alive in the twisted daydream that you’ll regain consciousness, revise your will, and sign it all over to me. I don’t even want your chopper, I just want to know you’d want me to have it so I can finally pull the plug on all of this.
***
I vaguely remember a 60 Minutes special about the fallibility of eyewitness accounts and it’s like you’re the most beautiful and elusive shoplifter in the world and you’re long gone with the York Peppermint Patties and I’m considering the door of this Duane Reade trying to measure the height of your shadow like, “I couldn’t see her face, Officer, but she was either five-one or six-eight.”
***
Your hair whispers into the water as it sinks beyond the surface of the sea and summons luminescent eels to swim circles around your tenacious body, and on my end it’s Christmas morning and I’m alone in a log cabin and I’ve stuffed my stocking with the delusion of control, like making the bed three hundred times a day like I’m running a love hotel for ghosts, or like going to Vegas and betting a million dollars that Hawaii will still be there tomorrow.
***
Sometimes I think about you and call to report a missing person and then call back like nvm.
(They don’t ask me where you are anymore because they know I don’t know.)
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Ben Kassoy (he/him) is having three vertebrae removed so he can put his ear right up to his heart and hear it whisper the story of his great great grandmother’s first kiss. Read more at http://www.benkassoy.com.