I did not end up passed out on the bathroom floor with glitter in my hair

And cheap vodka on my breath, exhaling fumes like an exhaust pipe

Because the chant of one more was still ringing in my ears

I did not drink from the bottle because I craved Dionysian dreams

Of dancing sugarplums and laughter laced with laudanum and inhibitions

Drowning in ethyl, dying and drying up, shriveling up in their suspension

I did not end up a drunk princess living in a moment the size of a polaroid

Snapshot, wearing a plastic tiara and mardi gras beads that jingled when

She danced. I did not see constellations in the darkness of my closed eyes

And I did not lose any memories and I did not purge the excess from my body

With water streaming from my eyes and my white arms wrapped around

Stone cold porcelain. Those things belong to another girl. She lives in another

Universe and wears my skin and has my face with violet eyes, and she will

Never touch me, but I know she is there.

I overdosed on the dizzy soft sinking feeling of being loved, of love as sweet

And tender and bruising as overripe fruit. I licked the juice of it from my palms

And Iaughed, and then cried, because nothing has ever, ever tasted so sweet.

This world has tried to convince me to believe in nothing, because war famine

Plague religion pestilence racism warming sinkholes rattlesnakes sin perfume

Covering sin genocide and falling backwards and chemical imbalance and

The way time doesn't give a shit about us or our strange lumpy space rock.

And I don't believe in much. I am a fatalist. An end-statist. I see far and far and

Over the next horizon there is a slow fading that ends at absolute zero and

Erases everything we have ever done from the memory of sentience.

We die. Plants die. Animals die. Plankton under the waves die and bacteria die

And even viruses die: even though they aren't really alive, they still die.

Maybe the big theoretical things like time and space die too. The universe

Is a vacant lot. Gone, done, just days dissolving into stardust and dark.

Far away a the great10 grand-daughter of a girl with violet eyes will still exist

In a city of metal and ice, or floating above a ball of swirling gas. Hell, maybe

A square. A trapezoid. A dodecahedron, some cosmic dice ready to be cast

She'll gamble on survival, shoot the craps, win some money, lose some money,

Expire in a puff of smoke and a wave of blinding heat. A real heat death, that one.

And then there's another one, farther off, in another kind of time and another

Kind of space who isn't even a girl but thinks thoughts and dares to exist.

A brave thing with no brain, all eyes, always looking. Gets wasted on its

Birthday because it can, gets drunk on hydrogen gas. Laughs. Does it again.

Lives within a polaroid moment and believes in very little but believes

In the polaroid it hangs on its wall before its home turns back to wasteland

I took a walk in wonderland and I told them it was all just a hallucination

But I still enjoyed every minute of it. I believed in it. I believed in the moment.

I believed in her heart and your heart and my own and that somehow together,

They were strong enough to mean something. Fickle or constant, it doesn't matter:

Because we were there, and we felt it, and it was real because we held it in our hands.

That is proof. That is my faith, my religion. Holding your heart in my hand and

Watching it beat in time to my blinking eyes. Watching its blood and knowing it's

Your blood and loving it just because I love you. Isn't that wonderful? We're all

Dying and the world is beyond saving but I still love you, and I didn't need to overdose

To know it. I didn't need to have violet eyes to say it. I just needed love ripe as fruit

And a soft place to land, and a soft place to sleep.

And I had that moment I dreamed of. Maybe it began with the Murakami novel where

The prostitute keeps him from coming by quoting Hegel like it'a dirty talk

Or did she make him come more from the philosophy spilling like saliva from her

Slick pink tongue? It gave me this idea, the merging of the physical and the intellectual,

The base physical experience of sex, the pure carnality, the brain stem thrusting,

Coming together with meaning and words and religion, because skin is a religion to me

The feel of your cock in my hand the the vibrations of your breath and the wetness of

Your lips is a church. It is a philosophy of life. It is an aesthetic, artistic, meaningless moment

That somehow means everything, all at once.

And I told you this in between breaths, when my throat was unobstructed.
In between thrusts I spoke to you of aesthetic theory and spirituality and

How a moment can be a work of art, of how sometimes the basest things are the purest,

And therefore the highest. Because when we fuck there's no art, no design,
No end but pleasure without pain, and pleasure without pain is perfect.

So together we make perfection amidst entropy. You did not understand a word.

I was drunk. I barely understood either, but I knew it was my dream.

The entropy will claim me. It is already, as I grow older, the clay of my skin becoming

Grayer and drier and more set. I am a sculpture and a sapling all at once, and

I will crack, and I will bend, but in the end I will belong to the slow dark.

In the end I will belong to nothing at all, because I will be nothing but a memory

That lasts two, maybe three generations. If I'm lucky. And you, you will be the same.

We will fade and wilt together because that is the way of things in this universe,

And I don't have violet eyes, and you don't have a trapezoid planet, and you don't have

Any god and neither do I, except what I see reflected in your eyes and your open hands

But I loved every minute of it, whatever it might mean.

I loved every moment of the revelry, even the sleep

Because in your arms I find wisps of eternity, and they

Rock me softly to sleep.