text: “Do you ever feel like you’re looking out of your eyeholes?” He said. “What?” She replied. Sometimes David would just talk. Not talk in the sense that he couldn’t stop moving his lips and making sounds, but talk in the way that he would just say...things. Things that were on his mind. Things he thought about when nobody else was around or when everyone was. He thought often. In fact, he thought so much that sometimes he couldn’t stop thinking. It had quickly become a problem. “Honey?” His wife said again. “Sometimes I feel like I’m looking out of my eyeholes.” “What a funny thing to say. We all look out of our eye holes, dear.” “Yes, but we don’t feel it. I feel it.” His wife had borrowed the look she used when trying to tell him about that song she’d heard on the radio earlier that day. She used to listen to it all the time when she was a teenager. It went a certain way, like this, she said, and had kissed her lips together for some doos and dees and dahs. All around the world, he remembered. Simon and Garfunkel. No, just Simon. “I’m not sure what you mean,” she said. “I know.” As of late, David had a tendency to feel trapped. Trapped in his own head. He wanted to fall onto his hands and knees and crawl like he did when he was a baby. In her old age, his mother liked to watch the videos she’d taken when he and his sister were little. His wife leaned over and gave him a kiss on the cheek. The bedside light clicked on and the overhead light clicked off. The VCR continued to whirr inside his mind. She used to wear a satin dressing gown with red flowers on and her house smelled like microwaved milk. “Do you see that?” David was looking out the window toward a great dappling of chalky, sallow smoke arising from his neighbour’s garden. The achromatic plumes of pencil were being drawn towards the heavens, trying to escape the circles of fire from below with wind as their Virgil. Prometheus had bought us this, he thought, and he had paid the price. “I think the neighbours are having a bonfire. Either that or a very large barbecue!” She laughed and looked back at her husband. The right corner of his lip faintly heaved upward and she glanced back toward her hands like a window had been opened in her heart. Everybody sees the wind blow. “Honey? What did you mean by ‘I know’?” “I know things.” “Yes, I know that, honey.” “But I know a lot of things.” “I know that, too.” She didn’t. “I know things that you don’t know and others don’t know and even I don’t know.” “Are you worried about how smart you are?” “I can’t tell if I’m smart or if I’m cursed.” “Cursed?” “With knowledge.” “How can you be cursed with knowledge, dear?” He met her eyes with his. “Do you ever know things that you wish you didn’t?” “Well, just last week Amanda told me how Harriet’s husband had an affair a few years ago. How am I supposed to talk to him now?” “Harriet’s husband had an affair?” “Yes, a few years ago.” “You would never have guessed if you saw them.” “Well, you can’t tell much from the outside.” She thought back to the song she’d heard on the radio earlier. Paul Simon. Graceland. David continued turning the pages of his book without looking at them as his eyes were seduced into a black abyss before him. There was a vortex there that he couldn’t see, drawing him in and covering him in grey. Not silver, grey. It clung to him like cling film, wrapping him up as a cellophane mummy. “Why don’t we take a trip?” She interjected. “Just me and you. This weekend.” “Where to?” “I don’t know. Where would you like to go?” He felt dense and heavy as he washed across the universe, discovering the insensate, deafening torment of corporeal and ethereal mortality. He wanted to go to sleep. “The Cotswolds?” “That sounds lovely. We can go hiking and exploring.” “Can you call it exploring if someone’s already found it?” “We haven’t found it.” “That’s true.” He felt so large and yet, so informally empty. The waxy candle of fiction had been snuffed by the frozen candour of existence. “Just because someone’s been somewhere before us doesn’t mean it’s any less exciting for us nor does it make it any less difficult to get through.” He frowned. “Why would it be difficult to get through the Cotswolds?” His wife still had the lyrics rattling around her head. But I’ve reason to believe, we will all be received in Graceland. “Sorry, honey, I was thinking about something else.” He nodded as if he understood. “I like that song you showed me earlier.” “The Paul Simon one?” “Yes.” “So do I. I used to listen to it all the time when I was a teenager but I had no clue what it was about.” “I guess sometimes music doesn’t need a meaning to be enjoyable,” he said, letting the words wash out from his mouth. His eyes opened as wide as they could in order to let the light steal his heart. He smiled and suddenly felt the weight of himself against the bed. Watching her now he saw her looking irreplaceably identical at 18 and 80. The paralysing Elysium of memory and vision crafted a pool in the crevasse of his eye. An escaping droplet lay against his forearm as a feather upon the floor of spring. The light of the lamp felt like it could burn forever, and she felt it on her shoulders and in her chest. The warmth enveloped her from all sides and melted them into one. Together and alone they had lived. Together and alone they were ample. The radio that day had played Bridge Over Troubled Water by Simon and Garfunkel. The notes of the piano escaped from their mind and embosomed the room as the two continued to hold hands even after the light of the lamp had surrendered. It was in this moment, and the next, that the iridescence was sculpted into one complete, fulfilled eternity.