One

We’re one, but we’re not the same
We get to carry each other...*

One was the prefix of my age before all this madness started. Fall, vacillating between amber and grey, breeds melancholy. I miss being twelve, when the difference between the sexes was merely a technicality. None of that “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours” crap. Pragmatic children we were. I like to play with Lego. Got Lego? I’m yours. Yours, until somebody shows up with more Lego. And then I’m gone. Bucketsful of plastic polyhedra, geometry in pieces, cocktail of primary colors enough to steal anybody’s mind. The little people aligned with their disposable hairdos, braids or bangs or red devilish curls. Restive fingers mix-and-matched torsos and hair pieces and heads. From the great Lego massacre a large unisex population emerged, so we built a large bus and shoved them all in it. It never occurred to us that the Lego people would rub against each other in a less than innocuous way, or pick-pocket their peers. It was so elementary then. Lego people riding the bus. No agendas, no stealthy foes or amorous carnival.

And now? Now there is a protocol for everything. Even for poetic things, with poetry itself submitting to the frivolous, compromising its esthetic accoutrements. For spontaneity. Now we have so much to say that we no longer pay heed to obstacles of form. They bore us. And so does romance. What credibility is left to romance when we convey maudlin facts with emoticons and announce we’re engaged on Facebook. Expediency and productivity concern us deeply, dating is a conveyor belt of fiascos and successes that end up, invariably, in fiascos. The praxis of love has changed, but has its nexus too? Independence has a component that blinds, success too bright perhaps, fools us that we stand so tall on iron legs. I need no one, I proclaim. Come on. Longing is everybody does, the object palpable or merely envisioned. When veils come off, claims dismantled beneath the heavy reality that defines each of us, a truthful definition, all that’s left to do is to carry each other, because nobody is strong all the time. And “I need you” is not a shameful thing to say.

* U2 - One