If I were you I'd turn away into the urban rain of blurred neon lights to walk down fond remembered streets in long winter coats with scarf tied and collar turned up against the coldness of the eternal stars. I'd wear darkness like a loving cloak wrapped around my ancient and unconquerable heart.
I'd forget about the beautiful illusion of momentarily owning me or any other mortal creature, even your children. All any of us can own are ourselves and our memories, our hopes, and we make these, each, like canvases painted, or movies shot, or statues carved by our own hands from our own flesh and blood. But from the smoke of these bonfires of the self arises a ghost not made of atoms but something stronger, more elusive, less susceptible to time.
If I were you I wouldn't love me, knowing what I do, but would be filled with overwhelming distaste for this wretched creature, his hitherto unsuccessful struggle to be anything more than an ape or worse because at least an ape knows he's an ape and harbours no greater pretensions or hypocrisies or deceptions. But I gave you a map of parchment and skin at least, and here I am unfolding it again now.
But knowing none of this therefore what you loved cannot have been me but some better version, mostly imaginary, based only loosely on available fact, but for this fantasy, meaning hope, you are blameless since it was not knowingly wrong and pertained not to your selfish self but to what you always longed and wished for.
Love is a kind of belief then, almost religious faith in the divine nature of these throngs of fallen angels we swim through, and here we are all falling forever grappling with each other and with the muddy sides of the endless pit we fall down looking upwards blinded to our own transience by an unlikely hope that makes us strangely eternal, oddly beautiful.
If I were you I'd make this city of blurred rain and darkness my own. A darkness textured as the eloquent fur of liquid cats and wistful as the nocturnal cries of foxes. I'd make this city a living library, a repository of kisses and stories. I'd make my veins and arteries into streets and alleyways. Everything about us dies and dies endlessly except words. Each word we write is like a nail, driven into the ever-rotting wood of life, but the nails will persist long beyond their neighbourhood of meaning to become opaque runes hammered into the silver heart of the heartless stars.
How hard to express the wordless paradoxes, but between words sometimes we build a cage within which the fabulous birds of yearning are unable to escape. If I were you I wouldn't worry about me or you or death or age or cold, but walk gladly into the long embrace of boulevards, the whispering of trees, knowing that all that exists on this earth loves you, wraps itself around you like the night wind speaking of distances and lost fragments of friendships, memories glimpsed at dusk and dawn: a long pallid glow along the horizon like an ineffable thought squandered tantalisingly while slipping into sleep.
What did it matter? This false tribal illusion that anyone could ever own anyone. I never sought to own you or anyone else. I mastered a disregard that may at times have seemed to you cruelly dispassionate. I schooled myself across the years in killing within me the last traces of that kind of romance in favour of something more useful and lucid and precious. It was like filming my own slow motion suicide of the heart so that I could glimpse some ghost, isolate some fundamental never-before-seen quantum particle.
If I were you I'd value that experiment and leave without leaving, part without parting. Live the rest of your life warmed by the fire of our invisible entanglement, both momentary and timeless, ephemeral and indestructible. If I were you I'd grow my long black hair both longer and blacker to become the coat of night and the sublime wings of wordless desire. I'd spread my arms and fly like a storm of crows across the fissures and canyons of this city like the folds of a brain, knowing that the lights of cars and windows and streetlamps and neon signs down below are flashes of electricity in the neural-synapses of a vast compound consciousness. Individuality is a myth, since we are all one. Death is a myth, since we are endlessly reborn.
If I were you I'd know in my bones a knowledge like the warmth of blood and swell of sap, that the prison of the self once escaped, as you once briefly escaped it with me, can never confine you again. I'd know that the view back to that moment was not back, but sideways and forwards and every way and no way. Meaning that time is a landscape for the spirit, over which it can move without limit or fatigue. Meaning the space in which I write this and you read it, is outside of time and a kind of monument of the mind, a Stonehenge of the heart into which the myriad strangers of the future wander and we bid them sit down and pray and let the breeze of forever blow over them.
If I were you I'd let the snow slowly fall all night in silent majesty beyond the window of your apartment as if weaving a dress of ice for you to wear. I'd wear my solitariness like a crown, glittering simultaneously as gold and frost. I'd feel the snow falling all across the world as I fell into sleep like some glorious accumulation of blankets of memory wrapping around you and burying regret, not killing but eternalising you like some pharaoh, taking you back to childhood in discovering that the warmth of the mother was the warmth and chill of all the earth and all life your siblings.
If I were you I'd pity all those domiciled in the suburbs of marriage and middle-age, all those enslaved to the endless demands and whims of spouses and children. Every morning would be a clarion-call, a brassy fanfare of freedom wrought by the sun upon a fresh delivery of daylight and rain and winds. I would wander endlessly and aimlessly but joyfully, wherever I pleased in this city which is every city. This would be my calling, a kind of art distilled simply from the essence of pure being, like a photographer or filmmaker or busker, except that my art would be so refined as to at last require no product, no record making, no self-preservation or justification, just sheer childlike joy in the endless arrival of the present.
If I were you, my smile would become the crescent moon glimpsed at night above a field of snow, between the frost-bright roofs of tenements or villas whose extinct architectural language gestured anthropomorphically of faces and hats and modest stoicism of long dead craftsman hobbling home after a day carving some Victorian dream of a northerly Athens. If I were you, my laughter would be the sprinkling of stars overhead, tossed like salt and pepper or sea spray, meaning a kind of seasoning which brings everything back into its bearable place in the world.
Lying down to sleep every night I would be conscious of my nocturnal form as somehow in harmony and sympathy with the shape of nearby hills and valleys as if supernaturally linked to them in a kind of mute slow-motion ballet. I would see that sleep and night were mysteriously fused, since the entire planet is alive and its sleep is my sleep, its every dawn my latest instalment of eternal revelation.
If I were you my eyelashes would be butterflies and moths and all manner of obscure species of insects flickering their legs. Sleeping I would know that whole worlds and galaxies are constructed each night from every person's dreams and therefore our entire particular universe has been made from just one unknown and unknowable person's mind and conversely therefore that all of us are casually and unwittingly constructing other universes several times a night, filled with tiny puzzled beings testing and marvelling at the limits and rules of our insane subconscious constructs.
If I were you I'd delight every night in the impossible knowledge that I was one walking talking dream factory among billions, that we're not simply here as witnesses and consumers of this insane pantomime but constant constructors of it, unwitting collaborators in it, making the world by virtue of our witnessing it, because without witnessing nothing can be hauled into being, and therefore all of existence exists in a kind of self-perpetuating cycle of reality creating living things to witness it so that it can go on existing at all, and all of life is about this insanely insane struggle and yearning towards self-witnessing and self-awareness and waking.
If I were you I wouldn't shed a single tear for us, the loss and end of what you and I meant to each other, but cry out loud for joy in a spectacle like the beating wings of a thousand pigeons suddenly all rising up at once from a dusty city square on a bright day so that the shadows of their feathers and the diadems of the sun all interlaced in the eye in hypnotic confusion. Like the sprockets of a cine projector breaking as the celluloid runs out.
Our triumph was never to say a single bitter or angry word to each other, even towards the bitter end. And although you might at times have taken this as a sign that there was only shallowness between us rather than some abstract inherited concept of profound love, you would be wrong because there is no deeper and truer love than to refrain from owning someone, no deeper love than to refrain from loving someone. No better sex than to ultimately choose celibacy.
If I were you I wouldn't reflect on the anatomical details of how we shared our bodies with each other out of curiosity. I'd think of it instead as a breeze that gathered from all across the city at night and entered through your very slightly open bedroom window. I'd think of our lust like the cooing of doves, the groaning of underground trains dimly heard from ancient Victorian tunnels many storeys below. I'd think of our lovemaking like weather that gathered like a summer storm, a colour that developed on the underside of clouds at sunset. I'd think of what drew us towards each other as moonlight landing on roof tiles and alleyways and silent streets and glimmers in the eyes of stray cats.
I'd think of what we felt for each other in each other's arms as like the sound of soft rain beginning on tenement roofs, and gathering from all across the city into gutters and drainpipes and sewers and all combining together underground down below, the din and power of rushing water in secret places, networks under streets like the swelling of our hearts and loins.
If I were you I'd forget me and not forget me. I'd ignore me and not ignore me when you pass me in the street. I'd read this and not read this. I'd be both with me and without me for the rest of your life. I'd embrace that the difference between all these things doesn't matter provided that friendship does. I'd come to understand that in the end friendship is superior to love because it makes no demands and ultimatums of ownership but persists endlessly and open-endedly. I'd come to realise that even beyond friendship there is a further even more rarefied form of friendship which embraces the possibility of losing touch and not even needing to know how someone is getting on. And that's something so good there probably isn't even a word for it yet.
