In Defense of Orpheus

Outside the movie theater sitting on the curb, head between my knees and my fingers laced behind it—the ground wet and stinking of rain, the sky a blackened balloon—I wept. I wept and wailed and moaned for all of mankind, for all the wars we’re always fighting that we never seem to win, for the proverbial ever-moving finish line, the home we’re always working towards that only gets harder to find, for the love we attain and fail at preserving, for the stab wounds and unravelled tapestries and written records that’ll be stuck under layers of sediment for years to come, for the burning of flesh whose reek chases each generation, a constant sinister reminder of our predecessors and their own failures, their own write-offs, the sacrifices of integrity and hope on the altar of idols we created ourselves only to later destroy, etc. I sat on the curb and I wept for humanity in general, I wept for the one Story, The Story, the only one there is, older than writing, older than song, as old as the silence between pulses of blood, of lifeforce.

They don’t call it sloppy joes for nothing. It’s all over my shirt and the shirt next to me. We’ve all got our elbows on the table like neanderthalls and I’m still working out how to eat solids. Our arms are all linked at the table with piles of puzzle pieces everywhere. We’re all neanderthalls, drunk neanderthalls, on the boat. We’re drunk and jumping off the boat, getting sunstroak on stretches of skin I didn’t even know I had. The yellow awning behind my eyelids as I’m sprawled out drying like a stretched hide: baking my eyes through the skin, teaching my body it’s going to be okay again, eventually. Murky water I was born in taught me how to make a wish, taught me how to take it easy, taught me how to dilute the poison. I fell in love a long long time ago, before the Earth turned brown, in the middle of my transformation from someone I recognized into someone I don’t like all that much. My skin is darker and dotted. I weep for lots of things now. Not just for myself.

In defense of Oropheus, I have looked back many times.

Who am I, if not in a perpetual state of turning around.

I don’t need to draw your attention back to the One Story because it never should have left it— it being the same story and all.

Personally I’d want to be loved up to that point, and maybe the seconds right past it. I don’t know. I’d have to be stumbling on the road back from hell to know it for sure. I’ve been Orpheus more often, though—it’s part of the trade—I remember the garage door like it was yesterday, turning around before I locked him out for good, not even waiting for him to mount the metal steed, he was still gathering the length of the chain off the ground, crouched, and sorry.

A different time I remember being a liar, doing a disservice to the story, coloring it the wrong shade. I looked back but I didn’t mean it, I didn’t care. By the time he looked back I was gone.

Once I looked back with such fervor and intention like I was willing him to rise. He didn’t notice until I kicked him.

I couldn’t look back when it mattered, this time. But I have every day since.

In defense of Orpheus a poetic temperament is not the easiest stallion to get a hold of. Why does the most committed lover of all time even need a defense, anyway? And so how would you go about defending the stars in the skies, council, all perched up there? To someone who loves you you could say don’t look back but it’s just a puff of air into an empty room—it’s just shapeless words, much less an order. I have been told explicitly to not look back and I’ve done it anyway, and survived. All that matters is living to tell the tale, living to carry on The Story. How would you defend the dreamless sleep where my resting heart rate reached new underground lows, it doesn’t matter whose face it was, pressed up—how the thrum of exhale taught me how to pray again. I looked back with a leap there. I jumped backwards and howled. What defense does the lover need, the lover who cripples under the weight of holy terror but finds a way to prevail? How would you defend Conroy, Marengo, Parnell, Ladora, and all the other towns that curl up next to each other like puppies, sleeping inside the gentle cushion of the Iowa county line? How do you defend the way we grab onto each other, like magnets, where you can’t tell who’s pulling into who? How do you defend life and death and whatever else there is, the whole shabang, galactic spaghetti and undressed legs and me, looking back, clutching the key in my pocket?

Orpheus knew something we don’t, and he found it all in that split second, looking back down at her.