Ghost of the Circle (Pt 2)

 
[According to Dr. Landon, the following passage was written almost immediately following her second therapy session with Jeremy. Multiple people close to Jeremy verify that he described the session as "an exercise in formal patronization", during which he became extremely agitated and stormed out early. No other details of that session have surfaced, but true to Jeremy's character, his feelings are put on full display in the text.]


Smoke

It slithers into nostrils
and invades senses

Doesn't matter if it's fact or fiction
Doesn't care if it feeds the friction

Bastard feces of awakened man
And half his addictions

God, how I miss it

-

Doctor, it is a crime that you bastards won't even allow me a cigarette. Second hand smoke may kill, but first hand has kept me alive far better (and for far longer) than you asking me how I feel while you fondle your pen and clipboard. You're a nice lady, but I kind of hate you.

Before you can form the thought to ask "why", I haven't bothered to really figure that out and that's the point: I don't feel a need to.

I told you during your first boredom-session with me that anything you needed to know about me was in my work. I'll give you cleverness points for turning that on me and putting me to this journal, but I've already poured my life into my songs and poems. You could find anything you need across albums and pages, but you just don't speak my language. No one does.

Try this on: you analyze others for a living, you're a professional observer. I claim no degree myself, but I'd bet money I can read people better than you with a blindfold on. Just a voice, the things they say, and I've got them. And I only just graduated high school by the skin of my cigarette-stained teeth.

It suits you well that your office is ornamented with degrees and certificates and honors and accolades and other papers with important cursive scribbles plastered all over them. It's a nice clean way to track your life. It also shows me how perfect you've worked so hard to be, how many of the right people you've done such a great job of pleasing. You're a very accomplished insider, which means you have no idea how to step outside the ordered world and truly observe the mess our species is and the frail, flawed universe we both create and inhabit.

I have forever lived on a perch over the gutter that wraps around the world you know. While I spend my life slipping and falling into the grime and climbing back up to the ledge, knowing I'll just be falling down again like a chump, you watch from the inside without even knowing there's glass between us. And between me and the glass are smoke and shadows and fog. So explain to me how you analyze what you can only see in silhouette?

But thank you for giving me all I need to know about you. Your walls and your cool-silence-performing-as-compassion play like the movie of your life before my weary eyes.

For the record, there are only three people who have ever given me trouble understanding them:

1.) my father - drunk as fuck half the time with the built-in cheat of being present (if you can call it that) since my birth. I did learn to read him like the cheap men's mag he was, but only after so many years and near his death.

2.) my mother - by the time I saw her, she was dead, and as an added bonus she only ever spoke to me in screams.

3.) Shanna - yes, that Shanna. Did you know she deliberately only writes lyrics about other people? That was part of the appeal for her to feature on so many of our songs: the lyrics weren't hers. She is a consummate master of deflection and the armor of flat sarcasm. It makes her even more of a puzzle that when she sings, pure Skyfield magic seems to radiate from her mouth, like the birth of an angel. If you met her in person first, you'd never guess the pure cultivated beauty of her voice could come from such a seemingly bitched-up heart.

[Most Whitfield and Sundial fans reading this will already know the "Shanna" referenced above as Shanna Torres of the band Tauruscide, as well as several stints of featured vocals on EOAS songs. The two artists first met when their respective groups both played at the Moore Theatre in 1989 less than a month before the release of Echo of a Sundial's first album.]

Don't get me wrong, she's not completely unreadable. What people choose not to do is often even more telling than the actions they do take.

She's the most interesting case of the three, probably because she's still alive. The first time we had sex, the only thing she said to me after catching her breath was "welcome to the club" in the sexiest deadpan monotone I'd ever heard. I thought she was just being sarcastic at the time, and she was to a degree; we were introduced by the third guy she was fucking that year, and it took less than 24 hours for us to end up in bed together. But with time spent perilously around her, the truth of what she said later dawned on me: it was a four-word disclaimer, Shanna-ese for "you may be inside my body, but you're still behind the glass with every other cock that's been here before yours."

To some extent, it was actually a direct warning. She very deliberately sealed herself off, which had only led to her soccer team of former lovers sweating after her even more. I'm not sure what it is about the woman you can sleep with but never really have, but I became another panting dog in her collection after one night. I tried - hard - to play it off, of course; I'm still a guy at the end of the day, and my father's son wouldn't be caught dead admitting his emotions got the best of him. Not outside of my metaphor-soaked work, anyway.

But she did. She got me, in the worst ways. Still does.

And that’s why I believe I’ve earned that fucking cigarette.