NEVERMORE

It’s been three years since Lenore left. Edgar finally feels completely disconnected, with absolutely no love in his heart for her.

I don’t even have the same heart, he thinks. That heart is gone.

In its place is a fulminating sun. He struggles to understand what he is to do with it, but even the struggle is better than the gelatinous mass of putrid shit that he was three years ago today.

He doesn’t hate that man. But as with the woman who broke him, he has no real love for that man either.

What a strange revelation, to discover that love exists independent of both hate and other people. It seemed to him that hate is only made possible through interaction with other people. Many believe it the other way around—that if there were no other to love, there would be no love; but the sad reality is that if there were no other to love, there would be no hate.

Yet love he does have! Love in abundance! Therein lies the greatest conundrum, the foundation of his struggle.

What do I do with this love?

Edgar and Lenore.

Upon their first meeting in a college literature course, this name-pairing seemed a happy coincidence, but perhaps they should have taken it as an ill omen, considering its source. Perhaps that was Jungian synchronicity warning them; but youth, caught in the throes of passion, never heeds such a warning. Hell, if it did, the species would have gone extinct long ago.

There’s nothing special about today, really. A lazy Saturday, he sits at his breakfast nook, punching out lines on his laptop while he sips at a fresh cup of coffee. Edgar can hear his leaky kitchen faucet dripping in discordant time with his own chaotic thoughts. He always tells himself he’ll fix it on his days off from his workaday job, but then he sits down to write, and the day consumes him.

He can hear the birds chirping outside the window, obliviously going on about their business, and he appreciates the song of nature despite his own inner milieu seeming, even to him, so unnatural, so grotesque.

He gets up, stretches, and takes his coffee to the kitchen window. A female cardinal sings out from a tree branch in his backyard, and a male lands next to her, offering a seed, beak to beak. They could be kissing.

How does a bird feel when it sings out to its lover? Surely birds don’t bother thinking about Jungian synchronicity. Is the real mistake of human youth not that we fail to read the signs, but that we bother to try? Edgar seriously doubts that the cardinal couples in his backyard bicker with each other over their feelings. Their beautiful songs flow freely from their intrinsic purpose, without interruption.

We humans are forever interrupting ourselves. Every action seems to be a trauma response. We like to lay the experience of trauma at the feet of this or that person in our life, and it’s fair, within the context of our egocentric thought processes, to believe it. But the original trauma was always consciousness.

Simply being aware of our existence is trauma enough without complicating it with thoughts about what it all means, but here we are.

Here I stand, Edgar thought, sipping coffee at my kitchen window, ruminating on the inner life of birds who literally don’t give a flying fuck what I think!

His kitchen fills with laughter, echoing back to him from the vaulted ceiling and tile floor. Perhaps that’s the old, broken-hearted Edgar, laughing back at him from between the space of three years, caught in the walls of this house he once shared with his lost Lenore.

So quoth his very own Raven:

Nevermore.

***** * *****

Muh Birds: