detours on the way home ("I wanted to tell you, it was all very strange.")

It had already been night when we met, but we are still here, cutting long corners on my way home. Mirrors reflect the image of a tree. Light beams out of a projector, hitting the screen’s surface, while the tree swaps its position, from right to left, while, also from right to left, someone enters. You get startled and sit next to me, your knee touches mine, I look at the scattered black hair on your calves. We stand up and sit down again. You say you’re tired, but a few seconds later you jump back to the standing position, your starting position. The night is young, you say. The film ends, the film continues, 1998 and 2011, back when I would see you and back when I stopped seeing you. Or was it another time? Temporalities collide, while the tree sustains its reflection in the water’s surface. Symmetrical. A duck waddles slowly, from right to left, from right to left. From right, the tree overrides itself with a floating hologram of itself, while it loses and regains sharpness, again and again. Four three two x minus one, the Hockney-like blue of the swimming pool rhymes with the bluish mountains and the bluish tunnel. Listen, I stopped and turned on my way home, and it all was very strange. A moment later, the birds were upon me, birds, so far and so high. You inhale the cigarette smoke and say you’re feeling funny. You said the same line earlier, I wonder if you remember. Ducks are perhaps the worst (“Wipe that smirk off your face!”), and perhaps that’s how I should be. During such detours, I dissociate and become a tourist paying a visit to my own life, superficially interested, casually polite and always distant. If only you had allowed me to pass you by, without looking at you, we wouldn’t be sitting on these stairs, with the crippling sight of the church turning its back on us, while we turn our backs away from each other. Back at your place, you would usually take off your pants immediately and smile to me, in this one specific way that only you would know what it was supposed to convey. I never know what to tell people about you. You don’t know either, you evade, you’re never still. You smile again and lean toward me. Do you want to kiss after all we’ve been through? It’s night, still night, the dawn’s about to break in. We’re tired and hot, the sweltering heat of the summer days barely comes to a halt at night. We could rest, but we are here. I need to get back to getting back home, I say. You make a sad face like a scary clown. A completely white horse. A shimmer. A boy on the horse. A sunset. A mountain ridge. Another sunset. Skiing, skyscrapers, salivating. Why don’t you cross the odd one out? Behind us, where I can’t see, since my head doesn’t turn around so far back, someone makes a noise. Are they rehearsing again, you ask. The noise stops. You rest your head against my shoulder, let’s go, I say. We start walking. You take another wrong turn. I follow. This happened, yet it is happening. Interpret this language the way you’re so... already, our static input of poetry. Do you remember that time when the U-Bahn stations would shut down at night? Do you remember how we once bounced off an U-Bahn gate and lingered instead of just going home? People in white coats then. And now, there’s me. Nothing happened. When I swallow, my saliva makes a rattling sound of a final gurgle. You continue leaning, annoyingly. You’re so close that I feel your racing pulse. Your face seems so sleepy I would swear there’s no pulse anywhere. I tap the vein that pops on your shoulder, there’s a twitch I can sense only with my eyes closed. But then you don’t see me, you chuckle, while I wonder if I've really vocalized everything that has raced through my mind since the moment I didn’t pretend I didn’t see you. I cannot really tell, let’s part and go home, I say. We walk together. I imagine what it would be like to see the street ahead of us with my eyesight split, where what I see would be delegated to only one eye, while the other eye would see things the way you see them. I adjust my walking pace, our feet touch the ground simultaneously, left right, left right. I get dizzy, trying to force my eyes out of this split screen. It continues and multiplies. I remember our walks, outside the city, in a nearby forest, passing through clouds of pissy mosquitoes, dejected by the insect-repellent spray that would coat our candy-smelly skins. Your sweat smells the same. Maybe more acidic. Do you smoke more than you used to? We stop, my split screen stops too. There’s a chilly familiarity to the chirpy bird sounds above our heads. Are we at it again? Hiding, peeking out, generating non-existent choreography, blending movement from our relationship databases? Remember, anything can happen. Drag yourself home by your collar. We had our adventures, but I don’t remember. I no longer distinguish between now and what used to be our time and space, between our dream sequences, between hallucinations and amnesia, between our linear histories. Neither flashbacks nor dreams. We pass by a bakery, three men in white coats smoke outside. One of them smiles at you, you smile back and gaze at him in passing. Rhymes and rhythms from our past flood through me, like a film within a film, like a film about a film that becomes part of the film, while remaining, always, at its outside. You are my ex-cinema. My sadness feels like anger, and my anger tastes like flickering dark-orange holograms of trees, skyscrapers, street lamps, your popping shoulder veins, and cigarettes that even you must have forgotten you’ve been smoking the whole time. There’s peace to gain through this prolonged detour, while the sun sleeps, while the way home is not here, not with you, for what purpose. We are here to practice the backward of time for a few more minutes, here and there, while our memory is contaminated by our visions of ourselves and each other. Can a duck carry a bag? We should’ve had more threesomes, you say. What for, I reply, automatically, without really thinking of what I am thinking. It would be fun? I don’t want to have fun. A cat crosses the street. It’s the first time I have seen a stray cat in this city. There’s going to be a moment, one day, at some point, when I will remember. Now I don’t, though my memory is full. I zoom in: a window pane crack, a stone, a rusty cufflink, something that looks like a head, but how could it be a head? I zoom out, as we run out of detours. I run out of my earlier unwillingness to actually get home. There are ways in which we can part. I can, for instance, turn away and run. I can jump into a plane. I can morse-code, with my fingertips, a magic spell that will beam me up, Scotty, while you turn into a cloud. It starts drizzling. The street ends. This is me, I say. We hug, briefly. I hit home. I must tell you this, it was all very strange. There is a kind of overall narrative, a pattern here. You know, it’s about this, of course. Brushing teeth, sipping small sips of warm tea, applying cream to my tired feet so that they don’t twitch or rustle at night (ah wait, it’s dawn already). My mouth feels like sandpaper.