Words in a Box

"Attractive," he says, "I think you're really hot."
And that, my friends, is love this day in age.
Oh how I wish I could hold the banner high, wrap myself in school's fighting colors and scream for our team, but that's all the dust cloud of appearances.  Men on TV wear nice suits but they are not nice.  Teabags taste better when you add water, but they do not taste good alone.

"Why do you love me?"

"Tell me why you love me!"

The thing that I like most about people is the thing they will never know about themselves.  Often its unknowable, and it goes without saying that the quest for knowing the unknowable has saved the majority of my friendships.  They are negative, I am positive they see it wrong, and we reach a kind of alkaline neutrality, send an email once a month, and then click on the banner ads for natural male enhancement.

The beer ads on TV football games are created just for me.  That starry plain of advertising shines brightest from my perch on the La-Z-Boy.  Demographic. A single vital or social statistic of a human population, as the number of births or deaths.  Growth occurs only when there are more births than deaths.  At funerals we all wear black, whereas newborns, full of promise, are afforded more color.  Its fun to be wrapped in something, like, conformity.  But pink or blue are fun too, the two choices when last I checked, dependent on gender.  We bring them presents, gifts of promise, economic stimulus in times of despair and woe,  pink for a girl, blue presents for a boy, though we love them just the same.

"Love me?  Love me?!"

The father has a box.  Whatever the sky is saying, the words inside his box do not change.  Everything you trust, which isn't real, does not change the fact that there are words inside a box.  And doubt is a kind of certainty in its way isn't it?  "She's sure that he couldn't love her because she sure hated herself."  But in that sublime moment when all our questions are answered like the sea draining into an eternal abyss, and the dust clouds culminating in an event that we've been striving toward for so long down this winding road of we would feel a terror we could hardly bear.  The shadows of the letters inside your name.  The empty-sea of space where beachside houses wait in line staring over the mudflats at dawn.  "Its empty, but its beautiful," the father writes, and we believe him.  Because we love him.

"Beauty?  Is that all I am to you?"

"Yes."  The college game is on.  Its a Saturday night, and I will put it on mute to look at you speak because you are pretty.  "Yes.  Tell me about your day.  Thank you.  Was that a touchdown?"  Later we'll teach our friends that I loved you in that moment, and I'll love not knowing whether or not you knew that I was thinking such shallow things, and trust you to never rest.  Wrapped in the unknown.  Because you'll never rest, until I prove it to you in a new way another day.