“A hundred thousand welcomes! I could weep, And I could laugh; I am light, and heavy. Welcome!”
— William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Coriolanus
*
But at least she was not like her nihilist friend, whose recent novel cavorted with a 60-year-old female character that she frequently found in her own dreams, thereby eliciting a sense of déjà vu that mingled with a desire to manhandle her friend's character (or the character her friend had likely stolen from her), if only to see what this older woman be willing to risk in different conditions than those offered to her by the nihilist.
At least!
Not that!
Unlike her nihilist friend, she would offer the character a Vespa. Unlike him, she enjoyed not wearing her glasses and letting the world return to its natural state of blurriness. Unlike him, she had once traveled on a vessel of touristic agitprop named Maid of the Mist and she could still remember how it felt to feel Niagara Falls in her eyelashes.
Absolutely unlike him in every possible way, she never feared snow melt or melting snow. No question about it. She still enjoyed standing on the porch and throwing her favorite ceramic or porcelain objects (including a tea set) into that magnificent white expanse, abandoning those precious objects to the whiteness, leaving them to be discovered anew after the snow had vanished. Looking slightly defeated. This resurrection and refinding could not occur unless the snow melted, or could only occur once the snow agreed to change forms and transubstantiate back into its liquid spirit. Snow theology was sacred to her. As a result, while staring at the snowless front steps, she nurtures a feeling of fury with the nihilist for mistreating the objects of interest in his novel, whether by greed or fear, relegating the 60-year-old woman and the snowdrift to situation that was frankly unbearable. The only way to deal with such things, of course, is to write them, which she refuses to do.
However—
After marinating quietly in all six of Liszt's Consolations and irresponsibly regaining a sense of herself from the melodies created by others, she decides to send an email to her nihilist friend, beginning with the observation that there was something on fire in his mouth, a fire that could very well be his father or a wish, since one cannot actually walk into the hotel room where the nihilist already stands without trespassing on the fiction of the building itself.
In this email, she asks a few questions and implies that his novel was very good, even though he is wrong about snow, a fact that Franz Liszt had made abundantly clear centuries ago.
Signed, A (The Architect)
Subject: some conflagrations.
While waiting for her nihilist friend to reply, she begins to resent paying taxes to a federal government run by humans so corrupt that she now fantasizes continuously about pushing these spineless assholes into a mud puddle. This particular fantasy is new to her, or the guillotine part is new to her, but she leaves it there, in the mud, intact and unfinished, to pick up a little bit later, since, unlike her friend, she has often dreamt of mud wrestling with world leaders.
Unlike her friend, she never asked Jesus into her heart, and thus, unlike her friend, never had to host a wake for such an event, nor was her metaphysics contaminated by such invitations and pledges. Since that day in 7th grade when she realized that her hand was positioned atop her heart while addressing a piece of fabric that represented the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, she refused to do pledges. Nothing was invited into her heart except blood, and this she left to her arteries. This time in seventh grade corresponded with a different sort of practice that entered her life, a practice not entirely dissimilar from that which her friend had novelized, although in her case, there was no darkness and no dick, but a stuffed lamb with ears that poked up from the side. There was also an afternoon light shining through the window as she took this lamb downstairs into the basement and sat on it. At one point in her basement endeavor, she was astonished to find this pleasure interrupted by a vision, a divine intervention in the figure of a snake moving towards her, hissing very slowly, and she remembers looking the snake in the eye, and saying yes to him, and then closing her eyes, allowing her face to settle into an insane smile that she would later attribute to Rapture and use as justification for saying no to boys that liked her because she was already a saint and the snake was her secret friend and her stake in the game of both life and text was not to kill the bull— no, not to destroy the beast she couldn’t tame, nor to diminish his power— but to study him like medieval monks studied the Mysterium in order to ride the name of her death, better than being ridden by it.
O! She feels horrible for failing to define a word she used earlier. It is never to0 late to make a point of clarification, or to restate a claim with more specificity. Unlike her nihilist friend, nothing was invited into her heart except blood, which was another word for Poetry. And she would pledge any and all to the maw of its obscene, metaphysical mouth.