bill

It’s new to me, this unfeeling. This squeeze and fog and insurmountable molehill. Every Monday I walk ten minutes to work with a coffee and a cigarette. The trees impose on everything in orange and yellow—they cling to the tips of my galoshes and the rain off their leaves makes my hair curl every which way. My boss is an unintentional ascetic. He has no family, save one faraway brother for whom he doesn’t seem to carry much affection. He can’t drive, and rides his bike to the studio in the same variety of plaid shirt and cowboy jeans. As far as I can tell, he has no friends, no complexities, and no intimate feelings. I like to imagine my own rich inner life for him, with all that voluptuous pain, but it's only an intimation of mine. I truly believe his cameras, his passion for lithography, and his cat are the only foundation on which he needs to live. Bill will go on balding, taking lunch on the hour, and seeking the straightest path towards death. I wonder if I could live like Bill sometimes. If I could become used to living on such few fulfillments that they acquire new meaning. I question whether having a taste for gratification as a product of the whims of others has spoiled me forever. I see myself through a million peacock feathers, tilting and glinting in the light. Bill has destroyed his expectation that somebody out there is thinking of him, he operates without the weight of hope. The truth is, that hope is a horrible, twisted bird. The moment you allow yourself to be hopeless is the moment you gain the ecstatic relief of presence. Bill is a hopeless man, and sometimes when I look at him I want to cry for no reason. He has thinned the film between himself and death, and he knows it. When I look at Bill, it is not hard to imagine his funeral, or more likely, his humble cremation and passing of ashes to a distant relative. He expects nothing more, and he is free.