Eighty Billion Miles, Ten Hours Distance

“We are channeling immortality everyday with every birth.” Spoke Habakkuk to his mind’s eye. He was having prophetic visions, in one he was sitting on Mount Tomapayas viewing the panoramic entrance of the pacific into San Francisco bay, he saw “a much celebrated, huge white winged aircraft crashing on the Northern-Western side of a Mountain by the Golden Gate bridge. I have prophesied.” In another vision, “I see a cover of The Economist all dark blue flat, with one giant comic eyeball on the upper left cover area, this will be one of the last editions, if not the last, of the renowned Economist. I have prophesied.” He knew that these things would come to pass. Did the passing of The Economist mean the end of capitalism? Did the massive winged plane crashing mean the end of humanities love affair with technology? The Heidelberg , The Titanic and now The White Plane, “things happen in threes.” The only thing Habakkuk knew was that he was a prophet and prophets rarely got to live within the ages of their prophesies.

Antoinette was making him a cup of tea, he didn’t know how he felt about tea, he drank a lot of it, but he didn’t know if he liked tea, if there was something worthwhile in the taste, he didn’t know, he tried to convince himself, “I like tea.” But then he would doubt it, “its just irksome water, somewhat neutral,” that was it, it was neutral he didn’t drink much beyond earl gray, he always added two bags to secure flavor, “maybe it’s the lack of definition in my taste buds, tea is not as offensive as coffee, tea doesn’t seem to be trying to pull the darkness of your soul out through agitations.” he was somewhat right or so I thought, but really I think tea is just a reminder of the days when we drank dirty water like cats and dogs will drink from any puddle, today we don’t drink from any puddle, but it has to be that tea is a refreshing reminder of our long history of drinking dirty water.

Antoinette arrives with the tea. Lauren is not with us today, Habakkuk just stopped by for what he didn’t know would be tea, he could refuse it, he rarely has the energy required for refusing.

“It is really odd Habakkuk I have this new friend Shangra and Lauren is acting as if it were a betrayal, I won’t ever betray Lauren, our relationship is everything that I want; sometimes I feel she doesn’t need me, that she is too independent, but I mostly survive those moments, so I don’t understand why she gets so insecure about our relationship when I am the one that mostly caters to her every whim.”

“As long as I have known her she has liked to control everything around her, she seems easy going but she isn’t, and she doesn’t believe that she isn’t.”

“I am so glad to hear you reaffirm that, at least now I know that I am not crazy that it is not all my head making it up, but how can I get it through to her, and now with Shangra I have to worry about what she is feeling, her insecurities, her tendency to feel that if she doesn’t control everything then everything is going to abandon her, how can I convince her that I am here? We could be so much more if she weren’t so ruled by those fears which she hides with her nuts organization and incessant work activity to create certainty.”

“Lauren can never relax, tension is part of her makeup, she registers nuttiness everywhere else, she has this eternal distance from everything,”

Antoinette interrupts, “that’s it, it is her distance, she keeps her distance.”

Habakkuk continues, “There is something about her that is 80 billion miles away, where communication and physical distance are at once Near and Far. To communicate with her, we can send a message at the speed of light and it would only take ten ours to cover her 80 billion mile safety zone; fortunately for us, Lauren’s distance is physical, her jagged emotions reach us instantly with their turbulent definitions propelled by a litany of self denials.”

Antoinette comments, “we are all distant here, I feel that friendship is when the distance disappears without cause, when the distance is not there, like you say, 80 billion miles can be surmounted in 10 hours through a simple message.”

At that point there was a knock at the door, it’s opening revealed an apparently joyful soul, a soul that was healthy, she was effervescent ergio units dispensing an aura of clarity, of earth spirit, she was in touch with her nature, she had never gotten the technology bug, she had not constructed a political or scientific world, when she hugged Antoinette you could see the hug was thousands of years of an effort to squeeze the distance between herself and her humanity; you could see Antoinette’s back being mandated to relax infinitum, to release her spinal chord into snake-flexibility, she could have been born again; but then whenever another observer is there, he is altering everything too, the women reacted to his stares and composed their wayward spiritual release.

“Shangra, this is Habakkuk he is our local prophet, he has traveled the centuries, he has in his belly,” she pads Habakkuk’s flat belly with her palm, “he has in his belly wine that comes across the centuries, his aged well.”

Habakkuk puts his cold tea down, something he had wanted to do but did not have the vigor in him to accomplish until exerted by someone else, the sudden impetus made him spill some of the dirty water, “how do you do.” Head opting for a momentary bow.

Shangra’s effervescent character was immediately charmed by the prophet, she sensed the centuries within him, she didn’t feel any sadness enemating from him, she felt that he had no pain to nurse, that he was just walking the earth without a mother, she instantly took to him.

Habakkuk on the other hand envisioned that Shangra was a soul that would not last the length of the earth’s existence, that the constant cycle of desire energies to come would surrender her as unobservable, that somehow she was done here and she would be leaving sooner than she could imagine; he immediately understood that a soul like hers had no husband, lived alone, was instantly in love with the world, but all alone. He was right, Shangra had never married, was platonic with all types of associations, and she had no ultimate aim but to touch what touched her and not to touch beyond that.

Antoinette noticed the two strangers instantly becoming aware of each other, and their level of intimacy was such that they would not have to meet again, there would be naught to discover, they were in a comprehensive communion of spirit. Which is probably why Habakkuk dismissed himself.

“I am delighted to have felt your heart, I shall be going now but I remain with both of you.”

In part Habakkuk was lying, he was certainly in humane communion with Shangra, but he wasn’t in the same way with Antoinette, there was something about Antoinette that was puzzling and difficult to extract, there was something she wasn’t telling anyone, even as she surmised herself to be in sweet alterations with Lauren, the truth was that the mystery was hers; Habakkuk was going to say that only Shangra had arrived wholly into his essence, only now he wasn’t going to say it; but then how could he become aware of the eon background radiation that was Antoinette.

“It’s too bad that he left, he is so wonderful I really feel he contributes his soul when he is present.”

“He seemed a fine and wholesome fellow, hardly a man, he didn’t seem much a man, I don’t know if that is bad to say that, I don’t know if I should be saying it, I don’t mean to insult your friend Habakkuk, and he does have a wonderful name.”

“You don’t insult him, he doesn’t have a gender, the physical is, as he says it: “a logical deviation from everything and the truth is lack of imagination.” He doesn’t consider himself a man, he considers himself a desire manifested from nothingness through something called ergio; a kind of symbolic representation.”

“Whoa that’s meaning a lot.”

“I am not going to the gym today, Lauren is kind of upset right now and I should probably stay and see what is happening between us.”

“Is it serious?”

“No, nothing serious, just a strange feeling we have to sand down some rough edges that still keep us apart, and your being in my life is making those rough edges prick a little.”

“I am so glad I don’t have to deal with that in my life, girls can be so silly. Anyway I am not going to the gym either, I just thought I stop by and read Bobbie’s letters with you, see what we make of them, if only to past some time. But if I am going to be causing havoc I rather leave.”

“Oh no, not at all that isn’t a problem at all, we are just being silly you can stay I will bring out the letters, it will be fun to sneak into Bobbie’s life, Lauren has never had the patience to do it with me.”

They reached the master bedroom, they clutter the floor with their bodies and Bobbies, letters, they amused themselves here and there as they read on…

From letter #1
“I don’t know why I am starting to write this silly thing. I am not much in the way of expressing thoughts in writing, but it feels so lonely to be me, I have to write to you now, I have to tell you about my way to you, perhaps you will be curious, perhaps you will think me silly, perhaps I will never give you this letters. My bedroom door is closed now, father is watching a football game, the entire house seems empty, I am here by myself, away from the dangers that revealing my indiscretions could endure.”

From letter #3
“I have eyes, but then you probably deduced that, you wouldn’t have fallen in love with me if I were an eyeless woman, or would you?” “I have blue eyes, they are tiny compared to the rest of my face though my mouth is also small, so are my lips as I print them here for you to know them before you touched them.” (lipstick lips, thin)
The same letter continues…
“I look at myself in the mirror a lot, too much, I wander if other girls do the same, is the mirror an accurate representation of me? Does it really talk about me, In science class they said something about inverted sides, how a mirror shows your left as your right, and then they also talked about the brain, the left side of the brain is on the right side and the right side on the left, so does that mean that the mirror and the brain outsmart each other? Oh you must be very smart, you will answer all these questions for me, I am just a dumb girl, I don’t really like school, boring, very boring, I only get through it daydreaming about you.”
Same letter continues…
“Oh how I wish I were already eighteen.”

From letter #50
“Those infallible bastards, they think the know who I am and what I want, fuckers, I don’t want their advances, I don’t want to suck their cocks! If only I could tell them about you but pretense is my deep silence, I injure myself when ever I giggle with those fuckers! So full of their fucking dicks!”
Same letter continues… it appears time has passed…
“Ok maybe I am a little harsh, what harm are they, storming through life without taking notice of why they trounce all over the place, that’s not really their fault, they are just zombies walking around being men, I am perhaps too a zombie walking about thinking of you, maybe my being in love with you requires that I be a zombie too.”
Same letter continues…
“And how do I know I am not stepping over everyone’s sensibilities. Father doesn’t know anything about me, am I stepping all over his sensibilities by not telling him? Is my vault of secrets hurting him as much as it sometimes suffocates me? How has the world done this to me.” “Sometimes I don’t know if I have grown up.” “I don’t know too many happy moments.”

From letter #45
“Maybe mother was gay, maybe she was gay, maybe she didn’t want to hurt father. Maybe she walked into that car to escape her vault of secrets.” (dry tears cover this letter.)

Letter 18 was particularly explorative and telling, Bobbie was controlling her urges and yet not wishing to administer them.

From letter #18
Where are the others? It would be unthinkable to imagine myself special. Still the feelings of my singular nature approach me with incessant persistence, am I a man in a woman’s body? Or do I represent masculine spirits within the body woman? Have I betrayed my sex?

From letter #18
When I feel the weather changing, humidity breathing, aching clouds, my body responds, my belly inflames, my ass feels everything it rubs against, almost air seems a part of me, trembling in the anxiety my lungs; the rain pours, I forget everything.

From letter #18
I saw girls walking in the park... my eyes followed them... my insolent mind trying to figure something about them... breathing them was easier... I fell that sunny day, I broke an ankle in three places, that hurt; the doctor, a man in his forties, darted at my crotch with devilish eyes. I was later treated for irritable bowel syndrome, I don’t want men staring at me, I am caged by their stares, caged!

From letter #18
The aches of a woman’s body are felt by so few men.

From letter #18
Everything in this world speaks a different word to Bobbie, everything.

From letter #18
No, a sex change wouldn’t do, I am a woman that loves women, I am not a man, I am not a man, I don’t want to be a man, it hurts to just think that what I feel might be masculine, it hurts so much.
(Here tears were lustrously illustrated.)

After continuous indifference, Shangra utters, “This isn’t a woman, this isn’t anyone yet, this soul has a long journey to curry favor from the world, she doesn’t kindle hearts with these trite one dimensional confessions, I mean Augustine’s confessions were a little more surprising and original, it just doesn’t do it for me; she is all alone.”

“I didn’t think to say it but that is what I think too, precisely that, and yet Lauren is afraid to read them or doesn’t read them for some strange reason and yet she hasn’t thrown them away. Why?”

“Maybe it’s the incomprehensible attention that she feels that she is receiving, maybe she is subconsciously aware that this is just a little heart thinking lollypop emotions, and so we must assume, that she is complimented by the attention but feels that if she acknowledges it by reading the letters, that she will realize how shallow they are, and so the admirer becomes an insult to the one that is being worshiped.”

“You speak truths there Shangra, that is it, the fan is not picturesque enough, there isn’t any passion there, there isn’t any guilt, there isn’t any anxiety, gay Barbie Doll could have written those letters and not assaulted the ears of Christian fanatics.”

Antoinette leaned her head into Shangra’s shoulder, and Shangra, turned her physical body essence, and gave Antoinette a powerful French kiss! Antoinette did not necessarily respond but she didn’t not respond either.

Shangra got up and said, “well I better go.” Seeing Antoinette perplexed and asking, “Why did you do that?” “That kiss wasn’t a kiss, it wasn’t even nasty, there is nothing between you and I, I kissed you because you were feeling guilty about being in this bedroom with me, as if you were betraying Lauren; I just kissed you to eliminate any romantic pretenses that weren’t there, just the same way that Bobbies letters eliminate true love in any genuine heart. Just throw those stupid letters and petty fantasies out to the trash. I will always be your kind friend Shangra. That’s enough, no need for foolish guilt.”

After Shangra left, Antoinette sat by the bed with the letters, “I didn’t feel anything, I didn’t feel anything, there was nothing there, and I was sort of toying coyness and acting as if something was there, how silly I must have seemed to Shangra, she wasn’t afraid to face it, she wasn’t afraid that there was nothing lesbian-love between us, what a magnificent confrontation to expose me to some basic fact.”

She collected all the letters and used them to light the fireplace.

When Lauren got home she noted, “I burnt all of Bobbies letters.” Lauren didn’t pause her activity of washing dishes, “That’s good I knew they bothered you, so that’s good you did that.”

“You are so arrogant, I did it for you, I did it so your fan would never die assaulted by her own pettiness.”

Lauren “Whatever, you needed an excuse I am sure of that, you just wanted to do it, you did it, I am ok with it.”

They didn’t speak the rest of the night, though Antoinette lit some incense which they helplessly breathed together.