There was once a couple who never told each other they loved one another.
Not because they didn’t;
they did.
Love though was only four miserable little letters, subject to convention and subtext and and usage, shared among all chattering things at Hy-Vee.
No, what these two had could never have anything in common with them, who didn’t feel as deeply as they did.
They heard others use it sloppily, applying it to what exists between mutual abusers, for pets and squealing offspring, for children they hated and gods who heard them but did not answer, for heads of state and countries that chewed them up and spit them back out again, for food they shit out just as fast, for operating systems, for guns, for pain.
They heard them invoke it in the parasocial relationships they had with celebrities.
Anyone can convince themselves they were in love, or worse, that bartender or whoever was in love with them, but that could never compare to what they had. Impossible.
Four letters couldn’t cover it.
So they said other things, drilled down deep inside to put words to chemical reactions and electrical impulses and evolutionary biology and socialization that moved them so.
They never said it, they railed against it, which was met with equal resistance by people in their lives who didn’t understand, who deigned tell them anything. You have to say it sometime, they were assured.
They couldn’t be made to feel a way, couldn’t be made to brand their souls with any human word.
Actions speak louder than words, they said over and over to each other and everyone else, too.
Actions speak louder than words, they said when they sold their possessions.
Actions speak louder than words, they said when they shut up irthe house.
Actions speak louder than words, they said when they turned off their lights and their phones.
Actions speak louder than words, they said when they sat down together nude on their kitchen floor.
Actions speak louder than words, they said when they got out their needle and thread.
Actions speak louder than words, they said when their bodies were found together like that.
*
They put me on a list of accounts that have been working against the notion of optimism. They’d been no-hit through six. They didn’t know what hit them.
I had no idea what to do, didn’t seem to have any toroidal diamantes in my book. The mist around me was red from blood, I think, illuminated in a certain way by some celestial body or another. I couldn’t see but wasn’t looking anyway.
I bought their master class; I took it in their master bedroom. When there weren’t enough words, when I couldn’t make myself sensible, I instead exposed myself on camera—another for the NSA Holiday party… the NSA doesn’t celebrate Christmas anymore, you know. They will watch yours, though.
10,000 steps, Gladwell’s 10,000 hours to mastery. I’m still getting there, watching the numerals diminish steadily until I feel something. My brain registers a faint vestige of the conditioned satisfaction response.
The Illuminati probably aren’t real, and the lizard people, not like you’d want them to be. They’re as real as I am. They’re as real as it gets anymore. I’ve created this guy on the Internet, and he sees these things; he thinks they’re a gas.
Tell me when you’re ready to get serious, when you’re ready to be serious, when you start taking this seriously. I’m not trying to lie to you, I’m trying to tell you the truth and they won’t let me. They won’t let me know what it is. They won’t tell me.