Part Three: Repetition, Finale.
As soon as the words left his mouth, you’re beautiful, he wished he could grab them back, like a balloon that when let go drifts up into the sky, but for a moment, the string is still there, although difficult to see, and just that more difficult to grasp, which he tried, with the words, with a sort of stammering shaking off of the adoration that he felt arranged the muscles in his face which delivered the purity of the statement, and an aversion of his eyes, a hand up to his hair, and a walk away, across the room, but it was too little and too late—the words had landed on her spirit, which he noticed shrunk away from him as if a piercing arrow had shot across the sky from the nemesis of Cupid and had popped without sound, falling back to the ground, where it lay small and quiet between them like a foul odor that no one wanted to address, fearing that they may be accused of originating the smell.
They awkwardly ignored the words, put on a movie, and watched it without laughing, which was made all the more funny considering that they had put on a comedy, and sat there stone-faced and tripping out of their minds on acid, refusing to look at each other, to eat or drink something, to even move a small muscle, as if they wished they could pretend that the other didn’t even exist and did not want to move in the slightest which would puncture that hallucination that they were attempting to believe in. It was as if those words, you’re beautiful, had dropped down between a thin breaking line in the earth that snaked in between them, and revealed itself, with every passing moment, to be a valley which swept down into the molten core of the world, and to say anything else would only acknowledge to each other the deep fall between them that would’ve been easy to simply step over, for it was a thin crevice, after all, save for the absolute tyranny of their youthful fear, over that deep and dark fall between them—just a step! Alas, they could not make the journey across, stayed to each invisible side by nothing more than young, romantic, terrifying fear.
At some point the movie ended, the two of them all the while silent and still and awkward, and by this time the acid had begun to escape its peak, and they more or less returned to their minds, and, when they finally looked at each other, quickly, just for a moment, in the sudden silence of the now-ended movie, just as quickly looked away, and landed at some random point on the wall, as if they had just seen each other naked unexpectedly, which they had, in a way, after the acid trip, which was strange beyond the acid, but also in the aftertaste of those words, you’re beautiful, which David thought was simply a punctuation mark on a sentence that they had been writing together, and which Emma felt all around her body in the way one does after being sideswept by a car which went the wrong direction down a one-way—she never even thought to look for such a car, and it hit her all the same, and she felt a sudden resentment towards David, even while feeling that this resentment was unfair, it was felt all the same, and being as young and foolish as David was, not knowing what to do with it, said, rather plainly a lie, I, uh… need to do some homework.
Oh, ok, replied David, thinking to himself but not saying out loud the words I guess I’ll just go fuck myself then, but which still was felt by Emma in the way he labored through the first word oh, and then swiftly in the ok, and punctuated by the fatigued sigh he let out and the furrowed brow and the pursed lips. David thought he played it off well, as in, I don’t care, but Emma saw just how much he did care, in all the words he didn’t say, but lived according to with his body, as we all do, as marinettes for our beliefs, which move us like a pair of hands far above where we know to look—some could see the strings, and some couldn’t. Emma could and David couldn’t, as is the case for most women and most men. What could they do about it? Nothing, nothing at all. They were young, they were stupid, and they were still on acid.
And so David went to pick up his things, only to realize he had only brought himself, and spun around and looked at the floor as if he was trying to remember the things he did not even bring, which Emma pretended to ignore by grabbing her laptop and book for the work she would not do, and would throw to the side as soon as David walked through the door, which he did, out into the hallway under the fluorescent lights where two drunken college students could be seen kissing sweetly, the kind of sweet that is only capable during the beginning of a relationship, which David looked at with the same feeling as if he had just seen someone kill his dog in front of him and asked him if he wanted to eat it.
All this, over you’re beautiful, right after such a moment, a revelation, ruined not by a I think we’d be better as friends, but silence. Silence!
Completely ruined, David went back to his dorm room, crept into bed, put on a playlist, and looked out towards the river, which was darker than dark under the twilight, the moon barely seen as it disappeared around a corner of shade, leaving a thin trail of reflected and bent sunlight, as if God was leaning over like a wilted flower, trying to pick up something dropped on the face of the Earth.
David fell asleep just as the dawn began to break over the river. His eyes closed, letting go of the groove in the tide, and into the dark of his body. He had class in a few hours, with Emma, with still no progress made on his paper on Kierkegaard’s Repetition, and he was simply in no mood to even pretend to care, or show up, so he didn’t—he slept, and he slept well, nursed to quiet somehow as he completely withdrew himself from any care in the world—for food, for class, for women, for the music that was still playing out from his speaker, for the clothes he wore, for the responsibilities and pleasure of life. Just let me sleep, he thought. His eyes shut and he fell asleep and in this small way he was alright.
He woke up after a dreamless sleep, and all of those responsibilities and pleasures and pains he tried to forget came rushing back like water over a small dam that was placed before a water it was not engineered for. There was no escape from his thoughts, and all the other things. So be it, he thought, as he clamored into the afternoon day, having put on some clothes, and deciding to go for a walk amidst the flocking of the thousands of students going there and back again across the University quad, which, he was just looking at it now, as if for the first time, consisted of separated planes of grass cut in between by walkways, and all around this small collection of grass and walkaways and the students adorning various parts of its body, was more cement, which lay before the University buildings, which, behind these buildings, broke out into more walkways with led to more buildings, and so on and so forth, until eventually the University at some undefined point turned into residential neighborhoods, of alumni of this University and many other Universities from other places and also of uneducated workers who never stopped to consider the question of college, all of these people all together emanating outward into this thing called a City, like rings of trees going out and wide, seen only through books or the man brave enough to cut one down, with piercing vision.
His mind had undeniably changed after the acid, even after it had worn off—it had done something else to him, very different from the way a person changes after donning new clothes, or wearing different makeup, or cutting your hair, or becoming tanner, or losing weight—it had went deep into his being, and rearranged its inner and unknown machinations, the way a perfumer goes into the lab with a fragrance and introducing new elements, or changes the proportions of the elements towards one another, so that, even if only one or two elements were introduced or removed, or even if only so and so elements changed in such and such proportions, which seemed like a small change on paper, when studied in a sort of analytical way, completely altered the movement of the fragrance when worn thereafter, which one could argue deserved a new name, for it was a different fragrance, even if it were only an alteration on one fragrance, altered by the same perfumer that had designed its original arrangement, the effect was so different, that it seemed to be an entirely new design, in the way that the sky changes in the dawn after having just went through a night, a poet would look at that same sky and use different words to describe it, different moods, and wrung into words completely different themes, landscapes, and feelings. Such a subtle change, and yet, like fragrance, David’s spirit had changed, in the way he moved, in the things he looked at, in the things he enjoyed now, and the things he didn’t care about though he once did, never minding that his clothes were the same, his face looked still like it did yesterday—none of these things could be ascribed to the essence of David, could they? The truth of what he was was something far deeper, as mysterious as fragrance, as the way the sky changes from night to day.
So if such things change always, and these things maybe deserve new names, yet we call them by the same names as always, how could we find a constant in this world, David thought?
Just then, an old idea, distant phrase from a long-dead philosopher lurked awake in the deep leviathan-worn waters… he thought on this, and he laughed with a whimsical air that invited the women that were walking around him like water around a rock with a flirtatious glance of the eye, because they could catch bits of his soul emanating around him during this moment, the way one hears an ambient roar of a rushing river, or the smell of a deft admixture of cologne and musk past you in a grocery store—unseen and probing yet still deep into those around it. How clever!
Just then, not puncturing this moment, but moving alongside it, like a guitarist’s lick over the top of a soloist, in the way light can change the color of foliage it shines behind, he recieved a text from an old friend, just then, asking if he wanted to go to a party tonight. He said of course, after ignoring this friend for months. He wondered for a second about the timing of his friend to send such a text, despite being ignored on and off in the past after sending offers for a drink or whatever. Coincidence? David didn’t seem to think so, when he would’ve just a week ago. He went back to his dorm room, played some music, laid back, thought of the vape, which was not broken, he noticed, but simply fragmented at the grooves where parts of the plastic were meant to come together and pull apart, as needed, and thought, for a second, about reassembling it, to see now, maybe, if it would reveal the thing he yearned for from it. Something paused him, and he laughed yet again, he was in a weirdly jovial mood after the awkwardness of last night, and went back to ignoring it, instead shutting his eyes and laying back on his bed and listening to the music, which sounded completely new, despite the countless times he had looped these exact songs. Same lyrics, same instruments, same arrangement, even, and yet something had emerged in them, which was always there, just not felt—it was the thing with moved him now to dance in a small way, to its beat. It was the rhythm.
The day had passed in a similar style of unfolding, and David during this movement lay still with eyes shut, listening to music, hearing the thing he had never truly heard before, rhythm, hearing it in the music, and also in all things—in fragrance, in the river, in the walking tide of the students, in the way his friend texted him, just at that precise moment where he was most malleable to being changed, in the way the world was, in the way the world swung around regularly the sun, and the moon the earth, and the sun itself around the galaxy, and the galaxy around… what, exactly? He didn’t know if the Universe had a center, in a directional sense, but he was certain that it had a way, a style, a manner… a rhythm. The acid had led the way to him seeing this unseen thing for the first time, the thing which was in between all other things and was the force behind how those things moved and changed. He was certain of it, that he had come upon a deep truth, but one which he could barely utter. No, instead he had to live it out. Maybe then… maybe then, it would return.
He later found himself at his friend’s party, and the blissful state he had been in earlier was beginning to wane, as he began to drink, and found himself saying incoherent, unrelatable things to girls who did not care if he lived or died, to guys who were drunk enough to want to fist fight each other, and some of them spontaneously bursting out into greco-roman style wrestling in the backyard, and the girls watching like spectators at a zoo, before an invisible glass, and David watching them watch the animals. He felt a repulsion deep throughout his body, and the booze began to sway profoundly in his heart, and uprooted all of the lovely thoughts he had been having earlier, about time and rhythm and life itself, and he felt an urge, he was pulled, really, by an invisible string, out and away from the party, having met nobody, having been ghosted by the friend who invited him, and having sufficiently stolen enough spiked juice with a ladle from an unimaginably large jug in the middle of the island of the kitchen, doing this enough times to get nearly incoherently and blacked out drunk, that he considered hitting up everyone he knew to talk about life, at 3am, and, even, the old girl he once loved and who once had broken his heart. Just as he was about to call her for the first time in months, he found himself shocked—there was no love left, but more than that, even the heartbreak was beginning to fade away. And by what devices? He probed for its name, but failed to grasp it.
He was walking down the street of the residential neighborhood which lay just beyond the boundaries of the campus, drunk as all hell, looking strangely at his phone for a name to call, and finding none of them persuasive enough, putting the phone back into his pocket, and instead swaying strangely in an indescribable rhythm of his feet, not quite stumbling, but moving like a cat, as, just then, a smell came across his nose, from a cafe just up the street. He tried to identify the smells, which had the typical assortment of coffee and bread and pies, and the fruits in those pies, strawberries, peaches, apricots, and more, and something else, something he struggled to name, as it evoked all throughout his body, and brought him almost out of his drunken wandering stupor, towards the cafe, where a girl sat eating something with a glass of water. He paused for a moment and looked at her, who was beautiful, but in a way he didn’t quite know yet, but he wanted to, beyond her face, her clothes, her smell, the way she spoke, but of the things she spoke and when and how she spoke of them, in the arrangement together, to see if something moved in them that accorded with him. He came closer to the cafe, and looked in to see some drunk students ordering food, and in the back beyond the counter, in the kitchen, the war-mad immigrant cooks who were whipping it all up together, surely being paid minimum wage, and he thought who should’ve been unhappy to do so, at such an hour, for such people as the University students who would grow up to ascend the ladder of society beyond the rungs they clung to, and yet were laughing and smiling and moving to the music with a radiant joy which the students would never truly reach themselves.
Hello?, the girl’s voice said to him, for he had stopped just at her table and had been paused by the scene in the kitchen, and he went to answer her, but before he did so, just then, he heard something playing from some speakers which hung above the two of them, from the cliffside of the cafe, playing something familiar, but not quite yet to him.
He’s one of my favorites, she said, sweetly and shyly, noticing him stuck.
Who is it? I thought I knew, but I don’t know if I do, he said, still stuck in a way.
Nick Drake, she said happily. He looked at her again with wonder in his eyes, and then down towards her plate, which held a half-eaten pie, with purple colors swearing across half-climbed tufts of whipped cream splayed out by a fork, her fork, and the smell of it together now clamoring out towards him, with the music, with the night, altogether, all at once, in a quiet harmony.
Are you eating blueberry pie?, he asked.
She smiled, and without answering asked him if he wanted a bite. He wanted to say so much, for he was struggling to contend with the things that were all rushing toward him, as if from the top-down. His phone rang and he noticed a text, from Emma, which said something that overlaid his phone-screen, which he looked at now, this too, as if for the first time. Something spoke through his body like a shiver, and he looked at this girl which sat sweetly there looking at him with a quiet sense of wonder, and he waited, as he looked at her, and the strand of gold hair which curved down the side of her face, like an arcing thread which shimmered under the twinkling light above, and then he said yes, I would, yes, I’d love to, yes, as he sat down with a smile.