CH. 1

LOOKING FOR JOHNNY

A short story

Frankie

 1.

              Long before I did her for the first time, I knew I was going to love it. After all, she was forbidden, so it came with all the interesting aggregations of the concept.

It was a dry, impoverished, little town, deep in the Mexican northern mother sierra. We ditched from our missionary duties and hid on the landslide of a dead river that parted the town in two sides, both of which had a church. A bicycle approached us dustily, the guy riding it talked to us for a while, and so I saw her for the first time.

I must’ve been around thirteen at the time, so I thought I knew and had lived life more than pretty much anyone else. I was born with some kind of a god complex; I've spent much time of my life owning the certainty that I'm the center of it all that is happening, all spotlights directed to me, I'll live up to the highest, I'll know what the rest don't, and will spread a message that will somehow make all things better. I guess we all are, at some point, certainly to ourselves gods; we were born filled with requirements, if we got to live, it means that a process toke place were all needs our existence could demand were attended to us. A recently born human-being, left alone, dies. There's no exception to that rule, and it's not true for most species.

In the beginning, all we need has to be provided, then growth comes with new obligations we learn to satisfy, and lastly we arise to conceive our own needs; the ultimate challenge, between me and myself, bursts forever. 

That moment on the landslide was a pawn on a war. In many of life's exercises, pawns have to be sent upwards with a rather blindingly mandate, not knowing more about their own faiths than a childish justification to exploration, or perhaps a conscientious sacrifice to disguise.

I picked that slice in time to start telling this story because it was the initiation of the dualistic figuring of my conscience. Many describers cite the cognitive conception moment with their own stories of how suddenly the certainty of death hits them, or the passing of time, or the discovery of a loved one, or the splitting of right and wrong. Vital reflection and abstraction exercises have been flourished around the question: What is that very first thought that jump started your conscientious mind, the initial hint to stop being dependable and start tip toeing your own stone path through the fire?

My personal cognitive birthday is the moment I realized that there's two of us in here.

Physiologically, biologically, genetically, in the most of basics, educationally, psychologically, socially, in the less objective ones, philosophically, religiously, and ideologically, in the most subjective of aspects, I am two.

In every aspect of conceptualization in human existence, there is a state of is, and a state of there isn't, and that's it. A neuron either short, or open circuits, an electric current, and from that, everything is derived. 

That day, as most kids, my sides were in conflict. There was the one trying to hold the domesticated course, and the other one always yelling it's not enough. I never thought that being with her could be such a relieving conversation between my raging partitions. I was able to arrange reconciliation through conversation inside myself. She was my pawn's childish justification for exploration, my possible extractor from quotidian irony's suffocation. I’d heard about her before, but as anything profoundly pleasing, commented experiences were not enough, there were concurrent arguments, but the only real concordance was in their faces when they were reviving her in thoughts, feeling her touch through the impossible distance. The only way to know is to have her.

It's a beautiful thing to do when you're young. Rapidly, obsessively, entirely, give yourself. As you grow up, you master better care of your chips, but it'll never be as fun. Total predisposition comes with neat risk and in big probability results in undertaking disappointment; that's why it's so hard leaving the kid behind, because of the melancholy of much time spent getting off the mat, and that's the reason our feeling's extremities will be forever measured from that moment on. If we could’ve just known that it's all about balance.

But I didn't.

I had only thought geocentrically and I was just turning heliocentric. I’d always considered one, me, constantly ignored durability of cause and effect. Then I started, inspired by my hedonistic crush into early emotional independence, to foreshadow the very first foundations of intrinsic parity: something exists because another ignites them. So there are two that come from one that comes from nothing, and all the way around. So I've placed a god in the path through nothing and something, which is everything, and I've deployed in him all absolutes of the concept of good that my early social survival skills have thought me, therefore I make him all benevolent and gorgeous, but then I leaf through he's dual identikit to us, I feel that the way we're is the same that we aren't, and then turn into the man that enhances art, beauty, and life itself, and the other mother murdering phenomenon that we're also.

Picture that kid flashing thoughts of all that shit, under the sun, and still a promise of her. An alternative clarification to all of those things intrinsically wrong on everything that was prefigured ideal, a mysterious incognita that might just be moderator between devouring hypocrite irony in every happening, and good, a supportive adjective to the justification of our existence. So I was ready to do her. I was just another one of those happenings of the species, the kind that turns soldier into hero, thinker into artist, primate into human, and cell into organism, a genetics curator. 

I felt relationally standing on the sliding pathway of an intermediary airport, just landed from the land of ask no questions, transporting to board a flight to a macrocosm of ask them all. I was staring while gliding at all of those faces coming and going. Some seemed dumb and tired others fast and agile. Some looked old, but most were young, and they all appeared to be changing, as if a girl turned into a lover, a fool into a commander, a sedated into a sedative, a sober into a dream, and vice versa, all of it proportional to their direction and proposition in their very own transition of consciousness. 

A tattoo guy loosed its ink as he walked by. Some bird shortened her skirt. A recruit tore his uniform off and turned around. A priest did so, but kept his route. Some chick grew glasses, another one tits. A freaky stares and calculator, bad shoed, skinny guy, hurdled through people as the stack of documents he was carrying got higher and higher. Service car transported folks behind a yellow rotating light as they were scraped older and emptier. A little kid grew beard and muscle as he hung to his most precious sin. Pretty woman stepped on her mobile as she loosened her hair. An SS officer got a circumcision as he was walking; bloodstains started inking his crouch covered with both hands as scrutinizing pain bent him to the floor. Rainbow t-shirted hippie noticed through purple crystals and offered a hand; they continued arms around each other. I wondered if I was also changing, and then I reached the other side.

I jumped from the sliding floor to the static one. As I did so my skin chilled as I noticed that there was only a fraction of the people on that gate than there was on the one I was coming from. –“This could be even sweeter than recognition for a guy like me.”- I thought, but couldn't keep myself from stopping for an instant to catch up with my sayings. When I did so the steps behind me crashed and resulted in a neat apologizing doll face: -“I'm sorry about that.”– She said, in a posh 'n sexy London accent, staring deeply at my hyperactive pupils. –“You can't be lost.” – Signaled amused and cheerful. -“There’s only one gate, and a single flight going out. Your seat is waiting. I'll service you personally. No worries whatsoever, the whole lot will be provided.”– She said, in zeal, rushing away, with the liveliest inviting smile on her shiny, sharpest, lips.

It' quite a counter play how we actually get to believe in our personal agenda. As time accumulates in our bodies, we learn new tricks, as practicing hedonistic animals that we are, that help us float in the moving mass of our species in a more swiftly way. We eventually harvest security out of those tricks, and exponentially reach a plausible certainty about our plans. We consider the things we have studied, experimented, and learned, to be the field for the sedimentation of what we think we are going to do with our lives. Then certain, specific, more than personal, glimpses of our deepest desires emerge in the causality of life, they laugh at our faces, and throw right out the window all of our plans. Everything we know collapses like a pair of demolishing towers turning into devouring dust. Those detonators are hidden in gestures in my cosmos. It can be a blink, a touch, a smile, a smell, or a word out of their mouths, that picks me strikingly off my feet, and all my plans are none, and all I know is her, and everything will be forever new.

Fear mutated friction into gravity as I flashed through the boarding gate walking towards my plane. No ticket or identification needed at the counter as I was obviously expected. I walked the connecting strip with fresh temperature for the thickness of my blood, white clean walls, and shoe-bottom kissing plastic textured carpeting. I saw her as I pretended to stare at the boarding pass that I never got, she didn't see me, but I know she knew. I sat on a comfy leather chair with all kinds of massages and neat gadgets all around me. I adjusted the air supplier over me while flashing my life with her, bleeding because of her knife kisses all day, and letting baby turtles back to the ocean at sunset. A feeling of deserving hugged and tickled me in one of my most ideal moments. I explored all the neat details of the most luxurious airplane I was sitting in; I deserved all of it.

-“Because I've asked so many questions, I'm to be right here waiting to fly to a place where all my cognitive achievements will be understood and praised, as I will be in a land of eternal compensation for all of my creature efforts.”-

I inflated my chest with airs of peace because of completion, and decided to down half a dozen raw oysters, a couple king crab legs, and a glass of chilled French white while waiting to take off. I could’ve very well asked my girl for it, so I clicked the circled button with the stick girl with a skirt figure on it, and it turned alight. I wondered what would happen if we were all stick figures and stick figures with a skirt. I then sadly realized that there's were we're going, but before sadness numbed me, all didn't matter again because she came walking down the air-aisle, moving her fair sculptured figure towards me as if she was stepping on rocking stars. I planned to tell her about our new life together. I tried to give it to her in the most seductive arguments. She got to where I was, her smile repeated in hyper sphere gentle takes as if she was patently waiting for me to stop thinking.

As I did, she spoke to me so ever cutely:

-“Don't be stupid little one. You're not even here, you most probably never will be. You're still that freckles brat sweating drops of battling hormones under the burning asteroid kicking the floor to get the dust off your pants as you wait for her to be introduced to you. You have so many questions, yet you get few unsold answers; you're so alone.”-

Pointed out, the sexy air hostess, over the cleavage, and walked away, forever.

Make a drilling close-up to the temple of that boy standing on the dead river, go pass the skin, through the skull, get in there.

You'll find him sitting on a rusty metal chair against a humid wall of a dark basement with a stench of toxic egocentric unforgivable and missed satisfactions. Out of the shades a figure will come out rolling into the light directing the lad who’ll contact his approximate with a common rather wild stare. Out of the side bar of his wheelchair, the figure will take out a rolled piece of paper, and hand it out to the kid. –“These are your thoughts.”– The crack-pipe scholar, through a teeth-lacking, rancid breathed mouth, will say. Child-looking hands will take it. Will feel no fear, has felt it before and after, but never during.

Unrolling the note and reading in spider legged hand writing:

“Everything is, extremely, fucked up.”