Pillow Talk

Today there was a sliver of light on one of the pillows lying on the bed. It looked like a mouth opening and closing, as if the pillow were speaking a silent soliloquy. It wouldn’t be “to be or not to be.” Pillows don’t contemplate suicide. But what do I know? I’ve never been a pillow. Who knows what pillows think. Suppose I were to ask, what is it that silk worms do? A silly question, to which the pillow would respond with its luminous mouth opening and closing but with no sound coming out, no words, go groans or murmurs, just silence, which would serve as a good description of what a silk worm does, making silk in a silence so complete and firm that the silence is silken, mute as a moon. This pillow will be a good place to lay my head when the time comes. There will be no sliver of light on it then. The pillow will have resolved everything by becoming a pillow again, all of its enigmas concluded in the ineffable dumbness of foam. I like the dumbness of id. It helps explains my idiocy. My idiosyncrasies. My need for a good pillow. I like sleep. I like flirting with oblivion. I remove the harness of responsibilities from my neck and lie down and drift into darkness, weird geometries of joy and languor, circles whose centers are colinear and whose sides contain iridescent radii and whose overall resplendence is a toy of time and matter. And then it all disappears and the morning arrives and daylight feels like an intrusion and the floor feels like an intuition and identity feels like a beekeeper on Mars. The physics of the situation is material to my development as a rhythm in a space suit of hair and skin. You can’t call a wainscotting irrational when you’re sleepy. Wait till the rest of the universe gets here. We’ll have a blast. I’m not a harsh person, though I sometimes pretend to be an angry goalie just to irritate people. Nobody knows what game we’re playing or if there’s ice involved or balls. It’s a game of insight so no, ice is welcome but unnecessary and balls will be balls no matter where you put them. Doesn’t matter. We can maintain decorum anywhere. Give me a little gold braid and fiery epaulets and I will rule a platter of hors d’oeuvres with panache and trigonometry. We’re all astronauts. We’re all in space. We’re all encouraged to keep our metaphysical inquiries and fears to ourselves, pack it all up in a wad of angst and set it down somewhere in the back of the brain. Look. There’s a prerogative flying overhead. Isn’t it beautiful? Try snatching one out of the air sometime. It’s your prerogative, both as a human and an astronaut, or somebody just wandering this place in a trance, spellbound by all the candles, all the blankets, and all the pillows. Here for you. Here for me. Here now and forever and the rest of the universe drifting by.