GATEWAY HUGS by Peter Breakfast


"Welcome home, love." The big open palm in the sky. Washing orange lighted, and you can do whateva you want--high five, shake hands, nestle down into a crease somewhere, sit in the curve of the palm and stare. There's barely any shade, but it's there, deep down if you want it. And sometimes being here makes you feel you're holding a piece of cake in your mouth--just waiting. "Uh..."

Imagine the most beautiful person you've ever seen, and imagine you're on a beach madly in love and you're drinking beer, if you like beer, and just there. Humans being. You all about them and they about you and what is this book I'm holding in my hand? Who cares? Just melt and be here.
      It honestly does not matter what you're doing because anything that you do is the same graceful play. Anything at all. There is an ease and trust that's always been there but was somehow lost or caught in the details before, just out of reach, unhuggable. The imaginary veil we drag around with us is lifted and it's all swift and easy. Light as a goddamn feather. An incomparable comfort of weightlessness because things are put into the focus of this depth. And sure there are wars and mean people, but they're far away from those eyes. Everyone else in the world could just fall away, a bomb goes off out the window, but it's fine, all fine.
      If a picture's worth a thousand words, what is one moment worth?

      Imagine the most comfortable you've ever been. Were you nervous? Worried? Thinking at all? Were you in bed with the naked smooth glory? With the heat sun and air? Was there earnest importance or concern?

      It's a gentle sort of reprieve from the massive deathy machines of the rest of the looking around you. Like for just one goddamn breath you can feel one hundred percent fine, but that's all you get... because we're people and eventually we want each other to be like we are only? To be objectively right!? Give us non-verbal unconditional love goddamnit!

      I was in a huge mall in downtown Chicago and gradually getting more baffled and upset as time wore on. Racked clothes and people with no heads and bright neon yellow light and stylish signs until finally we come upon this corner full of smelly sexy soaps and I can't smell.
      Apparently she wants me to shower more? What is she trying to say here? And I'm bored and inundated with "Do you like this one?" and since I can't smell all I'm thinking of is the color and texture of the soaps, and I guess trying to get an idea of what the soap does to me by thinking too hard about the names and descriptions of the soaps. "Winter river"? Yes, I like rivers, but the water would be terribly cold in the winter... pretty, though...
      And there's a salesman and my girlfriend is explaining that I can't smell, and so ends up just trying to sell the soap to her, and she's really cute, but I want more than anything to get the fuck out of here and read or nap or just see something else.
      Sometimes all you can do is laugh. Literally.

      It's truly humorous that just breathing is sometimes burdensome, has some stupid emotional weight. Because everything that's bigger than that or somewhere else is totally not concerned, not taking it seriously, and we are! HA! "Little old me! GRRR! GAAAHHH!!" You want to like shout or punch a car if only you weren't aware that it's hopeless--you'd just hurt your hand. If only our hate or loathing of our emotions was isolated and pure then it could be expressed totally, like the big bang, big ego bang. "Look!" and then it's fine. And christ knows we try all the time: blame and judge friends ("who can I punish today for everything being just the way it is?") situations and time--external shitballs fuckin with the flow.

      Just pile everything on top. You have more books and you don't know why. Where did this shirt come from? I'm driving again, this guy next to me, I like him, I forgot he was there. Hello, hello. Yes, we like to walk in the woods, get some certain satisfaction from that. And we cook and throw away plastic--garbage day! And all the theory people come up with, people who think too hard and make you feel stupid, trying in earnest to map culture and masses of people. You need new shoelaces, a band-aid.
      And so that's what happens--always this playing, back and forth, it seems so trivial and silly! How boring, what a waste of time! In the end what sticks? Not even "in the end". What sticks now? What hangs around for more than three seconds? There's that rhythm, bouncing along, and sometimes it feels like you sit down to eat and you forgot to eat and you're still hungry so where's the meat? Let us sink our teeth in hard and be satisfied, really done like that...
      Even love seems to slip through the fingers. "But only if you expect something in return."

      There is no one here with her (It's either Simone de Beauvoir or Janis Joplin...) There is a sex to just being here, elements of it. "I don't remember the time, I mean how long it's been..." Everything is wide open. Eyes, hands, mind, sky, the truly empty space that holds all molecules. She's sat at the end of the middle finger and literally watched the fingernail grow. She'll live here forever and that's fine because she knows that the only difference between a lover and a stranger is the depth that you feel that connection.