Djelloul Marbrook

I think the world would be a better place—or at least it would be in a better place—if we knew just how crazy we are. Every one of us has an attic or a cellar full of lunacies which, if known, would make us less formidable to each other, perhaps more likeable, or at least less unlikeable. (I save for another day dicier speculation about what things might be like if we knew each other’s desires).

One of the zanier secrets in the attic under my disappearing hairline is the heartbreak I feel upon seeing torn curtains blowing out of the windows of abandoned houses. I know these houses are trying heroically to hold on to the intimacies entrusted to them against the weathering and greedy suck of time. I know that I am familiar with these intimacies, that these are my former homes, and no one need tell me how impossible that is. It’s my lunacy, and there are plenty more where it came from.

I regard the relentless creep of concrete, the obsession with cutting down trees and mortgaging ourselves to China as dangerous as al-Qaeda, because they’re an assault against the repositories of everything we’ve felt, suffered, confided and celebrated. So now you have a little slice of my nutcake.

I recognize the creak of certain stairsteps in those houses, the broken glass and picture frames, the rocker moved from its usual place, mattress stains, chain wrenches, overrun orchards. Not when the artifacts show up in overpriced antique shops, but where they fell or were put down or walked away from. I remember the sepia people on the cluttered floor, the antique headlines. But I can’t, can I?

And if I confided this to you over church coffee you’d wonder whether to enlist a cleric’s help for me, wouldn’t you? Or if I remarked on it at the corner market I’d be yet another local kook to avoid, wouldn’t I? But since I’m saying it here, where a modicum of folly is licensed by the impersonality of the web, I’m safe, right?

But safe from what? Our usual insistence on appearing saner than we are, saner than the other guy, acting normal when we know we have no idea what normal is, except that it seems handed down to us by other fraidy-cats?

You know I’m a lot crazier than this timid little lifting of a sheet, and I know you are too, and I think it’s… promising.