His back was hunched over with the weight of gravity, sipping on a cup of black coffee. No sugar, no milk.
I sit, and nervously reach for a raw sugar packet he is fumbling with in his fingertips. He is much larger in person then in pictures, and combined with my bubbling admiration for him, I feel insecure. I must prove my inner strength to him as a writer.I crush the packet against the table, and shovel the brown crystals into my winter mug.
“Now, there’s woman who gets what she wants. The freedom of New York City mystifies me.”
He reaches for the black box of raw sugar packets, and empties them on the table.
What is it to be truly free? He kept speaking, my mind focused with no room to wander away with these questions. His voice was a speakeasy, something in it felt natural to me, filled with an unfiltered wisdom and ambiguity.
There will be no ‘small talk’ in this conversation. No talk of religion, the media, or politics. I watch as the words tumble from his mouth in a jumble.My head whirrs, stomach tosses-and-churns along with it. This man means true business. I found myself involved in an exchange, one fragmented thought for another, all over a humble cup of coffee.
I’d unknowingly entered into a relay toss of collected disillusions.
He stacked the sugar packets into a tower, one after the other, and I grew lost in the methodic movement of the action.
“See, the form has imposed itself to the present time. But it is all just simply all a series of incidents that add up to something when you put them together. Its just about finding the right thing in the mix of it, and placing them in a space where they fit-”–placing two packets in the form of a Pyramid on top- “perfectly.”
By the third cup of coffee, his wizened hands had grown jittery. A breeze passed through the window, and its ripe energy foiled over Burroughs’s steady raw sugar construction.
He slid the paper-thin packets through his fingertips like rubble.
“Even so, things will always get jumbled out of place. It’s like a virus that creeps in from the outside. It seems impossible to determine how to start over, when it takes over.”
Had his imaginative intelligence led him astray from any true “reality check”? I debated in my head. I could not tell if the old man had become a cynic.
He reached for a black box of Sweet-and-Low. He shoveled the raw sugar packets aside to make space for a new stacking.
He ripped to shreds my silent thoughts.
“See, a virus will never harm anyone until it gets inside of its prey. It is extraneous and also internal. Whatever that virus is that exists, we dishearteningly are apart of its power.
The coffee cup quaked drops of dirt onto the table.
“It does not exist without our embodiment of it.”
My lips were speechless. The fresh air carried its energy to my senses, and I felt alive with new questions thrust upon me. His words echoed beyond the “classic” system of living displayed in front of me.
It was there, in that cheap café, with no name on the front of it, that Burroughs sat, looking down at his demolished sugar tower.
The genius always seems to humiliate democracy, and like a virus, I could feel it spreading.
No comments:
Post a Comment