Hunting Eros Read online

  From then on details and recollections of the night fell towards the black hole; one having at its center a singularity of ethanol which, with its impossible gravity, pulled memories into irrecoverable depths. Of the remainder of that night (or morning at this point), only faint bits of raw sensory data were available. I remember the sound of a bottle, burst; the catharsis of a shattering lamp; the trickling feel of bitter, angry lachrymation; the dizziness of the room’s yellow wallpaper; the cold of a cheap plastic phone; a flash of flesh; black.

  When noon came, it dragged with it wakefulness and the disappointing knowledge that death did not find me in my sleep. I stumbled into consciousness. A wildfire seared the insides of my eyes. Pulses of pain, acute and vengeful, throbbed synchronously with my heartbeat. A fist-fight had erupted in a back-room inside my brain. Around me were the dregs of a night ill-spent. Lingering from the night before was my sense of scornful sorrow. It now mingled and danced with the sorrows of those who had stayed there before me. My story had been added to theirs, written into the gloom. I looked at the side of the room that was visible as I lay on my side and took in the ruinous consequences of the volatile mixture of emotion and alcohol. Polygonal slivers of glass adorned the ratty shag carpeting. The few conveniences I had been gifted as a hotel guest were strewn about in every way and state possible. They were relics; allegories of my failure. Then I felt a movement next to me; behind me.

  At first I was startled by the sudden alien movement, and as I whirled around, my surprise ebbed then roared back intensely. A woman –an actual woman, a creature of flesh and blood and boobs and matter- lay with her back facing me, half-covered by the gray diaphanous bed-sheets. Her bare, pale back winked at me with the daylight seeping in through the cracks in the curtains. A dirty-blonde head of hair rested on a pillow, frizzled from a night of unknown passion. For a moment, when the realization of what this meant seeped in, the voluminous clouds of haze and ache parted, giving way to a limpid, elevated state. For a moment, the creature that lay lightly snoring –I could hear it now- wasn’t a whore sleeping on a dirty bed in a seedy hotel, but a winged seraph, an angel, of the highest order, resting beautifully, (mechanically), on a cloud, in the boudoir of Aphrodite. That brief moment, that ephemeral thrill, proved, like my youth, to be transient, fleeting, as the clouds swarmed back, and the seraph’s wings withered into cigarette ashes, and the walls of Aphrodite’s chamber crumbled and revealed the dank dark-yellow wallpaper beneath. Then all was gray again.

  It was a bittersweet moment: to be unburdened with that rite of passage in such a way and at such a cost. I was so detached from what had happened that night, my memory of it so tissue-thin, that it’s almost like it wasn’t me it happened to, but someone else entirely.

  But I did it.

  It was done.

  The Epitaph on the Tombstone of Virginity

  No Farewell Words Were Spoken

  No Time To Say Goodbye

  You Were Gone Before We Knew It

  And Only God Knows Why

  Gone Yet Not Forgotten

  Although We Are Apart

  Your Spirit Lives Within Me

  Forever In My Heart

  If Love Only Could Kill You

  You Would Have Lived Forever.