Robert Colpitts

Before Faith stands a crowd of the lonely, each locked in their own cell.  They neither hear nor see each other–one wonders if they hear Faith.  Each is preoccupied with something designed to preoccupy them so they do not see their prison walls.  I am in my cell, drinking tea, eating cereal, and writing this story.  The guy next to me is building a fertilizer bomb.  The boy next to him is staring at his father’s gun cabinet.  The woman in front of me is rubbing her pregnant belly and singing a song.  Something strikes me as disingenuous about this.  I ponder how at once it is possible to act without honor and to still think that act honorable.  I wonder why asking for help seems worse than suicide. 

“Surprise yourself not!” screams Faith.  “Strange things happen when you are left alone.”  I spill milk on my keyboard.  “Look out and suffer more!  Looking within is worse!”  Again I have that feeling that something is wrong.  I don’t like Faith this way.  “Look down!  Look down!  Look down!”  I cannot help myself; I look at my feet.  I think they are rosy.  “You like your feet because someone told you to love yourself!”  That is true.  I look around.  Am I really the only one listening?  “But your feet are ugly.  Look at them again.”  I do.  They are still pretty feet. 

I smell frying meat.  Faith knocks on my cage and screams at me.  “Do you love me?”  I burp, and really want another swig of my tea.  I put honey in it this morning.  I take another bite of my soggy cereal.  I’ve been writing this for some time it appears.  Funny the way that sogginess denotes time.  “Did I not once love you?  Embrace you?  Cherish you?  Choose you?”  I look up for a moment as another urge to drink overtakes me.  I figure that once I am done writing this sentence I will have another sip of tea.  Without putting down the period, I not only take a sip of tea, but I start searching Facebook.  It is a wonder to me that even when I write something about myself writing I cannot keep myself focused on that writing.  Faith is still screaming something at me.

“Faith,” I say through the walls, “you and I were never in love.  You hold the place in my heart for she that I did love.  I mean really, truly, fully loved.”  Faith stares at me coldly.  I allow her a moment of weakness and she resents me immediately.  I continue.  “The truth is you are a poor substitute.”

Faith retorts, “You were chosen by the feverish whim of a Goddess who was violently raped.  Amazing though she was, you were her fever dream.  It was a mistake.  You were just at the right place at the right time–a confused, almost drunk, Goddess loved you for a brief meaningless moment, and you think it was forever.  She cursed you into believing that there is a place in your heart for someone like her; that you are equal to the Gods.  You still think you can live in the world with Them, but, you are not even worthy of living with me.”

I don’t know what it is, but at the end of sentences like that, I just want to drink some tea.  I cannot help but remind you…eh, it’s too obvious.  Enjoy your solitude.

Spontaneous music by me with words by he. 

Faith was never taught to be herself, but the world in there presents the opportunity.  Yet the moment she accepts her prize, the world harasses her for it.  Faith wonders what the point of the first step is.

I know it is exactly this:  to watch oneself, to desire oneself, to seduce oneself, to fuck oneself.  Faith, hearing this, despises it, and suddenly knows her purpose.  She leaps into the street and hops from car to car pulling men from the driver seat (through the roof) and throwing them into the sun.  The cars, miraculously, turn into giant strawberries, and no accidents are reported that day.  The sun shines brighter, and new gods are born.  Faith tears herself away from any trace of her birth.

It is in this way that I desire less to be her than to have her.  It is exactly, then, how I become her.

Sitting across from me at the endless table of tablivion, sipping her latterific cappuccino-knock-milk, Faith stares into my eyes as if to ask me if I really lacked for sleep on a night when my dreams stung of betrayal-filth and whose thrashing left my toenails hanging like little peanuts from a string.  I imagine her crawling from my body, taking my mind with her, and walking around inside of her knowing what it is like to be she.  Despite the many misspellings in the letter I have hand-written to her, Faith obeys every word.  Her kiss tastes like bacon, and her hand on the back of my neck feels like the back side of a hammer.  I cannot say it is a pleasant experience, and Faith seems to share my thought as she strips her body bare and scrubs herself with a piece of sandpaper. 

“You don’t want to be me you idiot!” she screams suddenly sounding more like a bow-tie than ever.

“Well, I don’t want to be me as you, but I’d like to be you as you, as long as I don’t have to sound, look, taste, or touch like me,” I say.

Nothing happens.

“Because, you know, usually, in this kind of story, I’m still there.”

Silence. 

She’s not there.

What did I expect?

I tell Faith there is no one like E.  Even after 10 years, I still see her in the rain.  It may never end, this nasty, graduated pining, ruining every date, every relationship, and every hope of being wholeheartedly devoted to someone.  Faith tells me I am exaggerating, and that if it weren’t for me standing in the rain with sunlight streaming through the trees, I would never have thought of her.  And I say, “Ah but I did,” and begin to walk away. 

But Faith stops me–I am holding the carburetor to her car in my left hand–and asks, “What then?” 

Really this entire story is just to get Faith’s attention.  I could easily give up E. if Faith would just cook me strawberry shortcake and become an interfaith minister.

Or maybe I wanted your attention.  Maybe I want to love you.  Maybe I want you to slip me a love poem the next time you see me.

That being said, it is no less true–what I said.

Billy Buck
Walked off a truck
Into a pail of water
He looked around
Put on a frown
And tore the bucket asunder

The water still
Being magical
Stayed right there on his shoe
So Billy Buck
With water stuck
Kicked wildly ’till he was blue

At just that time
His dream of dreams
Walked by and saw this happening
Buck hid his foot
Behind his butt
Said to her, “This day is splashinin’”

The girl she smiled
For quite a while
A silent love composer
She puckered her hips
And bent at the hip
And beckoned Buck come closer

Buck knew just what
He had to do
Walk up and plant one on her
But he also knew
About his shoe
He hopped over, and fell right on her

Now you might think
It would be fun
To fall on the love of your life
But the water then
Decided to expand,
Joined his foot, and her foot
Together

That poor girl
She should have asked
Why do you stand so strangely?
For now she stands
Just like him
Hiding a foot so watery and so…well…watery.

And no, showers didn’t help.

“Begone feisty pantomimes!  Take your skip, Skype, scope, and peg a leg journey through my six hole hearing face!”

Yes, that was Faith.  What you don’t know is that she is completely clothed and having dinner with a family that say they have had dinner before.  Faith believes them like she believes Gods have Names. 

“This particular rump roast didn’t ask to be here, but no one loves me, so I knocked it out and dragged it here.”

The family disguises its surprise by calmly wiping its collective face with a leafy tree branch.  Bug bites abound.

“Furthermore, if that sad, ugly, annoying asshole comes knocking on the front door, shoot him in the head.  I hate his entrails.  A half-eaten rump roast is a better lay.”

Sure enough, I knock on the door.  Sadly, the family is eating sugary treats and before they can reach the door to shoot me, they are fast asleep. 

Faith stands at the empty table and wonders how she can possible get out of this story.  She reminds me that I don’t like to write long stories, that I am too much of a coward to seduce her, and that my dreams and movements are never going to come true, so I should go play some video games.  Seeing as I hear what seems to be a woman making out with a half-eaten rump roast, I think she is right.

But first, I get some tea and a motorcycle.  Maybe tomorrow she’ll pity me enough to let me watch.

10 years ago
She and I
Ruined any chance
I had
Of loving
Anyone but
Her

There’s a myth
For that
Right?

It is on the screen in front of her, but she’s staring at her shoe.  She sees her nearest neighbor dying, and wonders what to do.  What is playing is obviously boring, but what makes it so sad?  Why can’t Faith perceive her soul there?  Why is she so blue?  It is an homage, a fare farewell, from a filmmaker, not much younger than myself, to a woman, who moved right on from him to happiness. 

Faith does not find a hole in her stockings, so she creates one.  The movie continues.  She mends.  The filmmaker, somehow cognizant of this moment (he is eating an ice cream cone in Florence), finds it damning that he can get her in the seat, but he cannot make her love him.  He doesn’t care that the theatre, without Faith, is empty. 

The movie gets depressed and stops playing itself.

It was at that precise moment that the world celebrated July 4th, 2011.