Catch Up

I was at a coffee shop. Clouds lined the horizon, grey and dark like boxcars. The sun was obscured and I had recovered some of my sense from a lost year and a half wandering the wastelands of south Texas. I returned to the good graces of my former home town. Houston is a dark and savage place. One should never retreat there, even in pursuit of everlasting peace and redemption, or ones alleged soul mate.

This time it was different. She was wearing a blue jumper dress and a smile like a scimitar. Edgy. The Smiths were playing and I had a million ideas of recuperation dilating through my head. I must speak with her. It was the same story as ever, tics, hiccups and belches. She was charmed, I'm sure. A connection was forged; a psycho-spiritualknowing that transcended physicality and unified three different cosmologies in one lambent and underworlded package of glory and Coltrane type LOVE. Somehow she understood it all, the Tourettes-like bursts of nonsense and vulgarity, the coded ephemera of snorts and giggles that passed for speech in the heightened state of being I had attained.

She was Canadian, obviously, and completely entranced with the idea of trans-species communication. I explored with her the memories I had of teaching sea squirrels how to hunt. She shared that her dissertation (pending approval) synthesized research linking solar flares and the appearance of haiku form poetry in the western Marianas Islands in the twelfth century. Our future plans included a phase shifting domestic pet with which we could create chimera babies in the underground labs that would prove our love.

I immediately set out for the Arabian Peninsula. I had gained expertise in oil research in Texas. I was going to make a fortune, and return to our bunker of love. Three weeks spent wandering the desert vastness left me disoriented and hallucinatory. I awoke on a Yemeni trawler covered in fish scales and apparently betrothed to a reformed animist militant. It was immutable. We married on the dry sandstone cliffs of the Yemeni shores, backed against the timeless cliff dwellings that evade temporality. A lifetime of goat-herding and happiness erased any recollection of my lost Canadian fiancee.

Our honeymoon was perfect, a small cottage high in the Scottish fens. We ate broiled monkey and haggis. Feeding each other like confused frat-boys on a spring break bacchanal. It started to rain. Great sheeting drifts of wet slanting through our intimacies. A stike of lightning scared me straight. I was unable to hold onto my frisky North African soul mate, the deception it required was too much. I tore myself from his impassioned embrace. I ran out the door into the wide open moors, sheep pleading with me to reconsider. The night was endless and spinning as I escaped once again.