The streets fill with black boots, umbrellas, and the smell of pennies. Puddles fill the cracks in the cobblestone and threaten to turn into ice. I’m wearing slippers.
I tried, you know. I did. You’ll never believe me. You know it kills me to know that you’ll never want it as bad as I did. To lose myself in someone else; when have I ever been dedicated to anything except for those things which make me forget that I exist and that I have to choose? That anywhere I go, I actually have a choice to stop?
My slippers keep getting caught in the gaps. My toes are cold and starting to wrinkle. I don’t have an umbrella, and I’m disrupting the bubbles of separation that occur when passersby walk past each other on the sidewalk. These pockets of air — invisible columns under each shell, with barely enough room to squeeze someone else in to hold it for. That’s the thing with most umbrellas; you can’t fit both people under it perfectly. One person’s arm and the side of their foot is always exposed to the open air. I guess it forces you to be close.
So I always make sure that the exposed parts are mine. That’s the one thing about love that kills me: I find myself in common company orating about the virtues of a solipsistic life, but when I’m afflicted by love, such philosophy goes out the window. Everything has to be for that person, and even in theoretical self-interest, what my actions really mean is that my love for someone else is the only thing that brings me out of my own existence. Maybe love is not just the instantiation of someone else’s existence but the literal replacement of who the existent is: them for me.
My toes are wrinkled. If I go back to my apartment, I’ll have to shower, and then I’ll remember. I’m tired now and I could sleep, but if I remember, I’ll stay awake. So I keep walking down to the bridge. There’s a slope of raised cobblestone that imitates a sidewalk in a city that was born for foot traffic and recently learned it could afford tires. Yet it’s so desperate to maintain its old aesthetic that it won’t go one way or the other, and the pedestrians have been pushed aside to make room for cars that the city won’t commit themselves to.
一心不可二用。
One heart cannot be used for two things. The heart of the city has done a violence to itself by trying to prioritize both, and thereby prioritizing neither. By choosing everything, you choose nothing.