Now You See Him by Eli Gottlieb

I drove along the roads of my hometown slowly, as if grown suddenly unsure of streets traversed ten thousand times. Arrived at the residency hotel, I checked myself in in a kind of trance. I stretched out in the scratchy sheets of my bed, and I closed my eyes. To think was to risk a landslide. Better simply to inhabit the present tense as best I was able. I beckoned sleep to come forward out of the shadows and soothe me, but sleep resisted. I wanted to be blotted out. I wanted to drink oblivion and have it flood me with forgetfulness. I had never completely come to terms with what I had done in the woods six months before, when the shot rang out, and a violent compression of sound, widening upward and climbing fast, was soon dispersed on the heavy, still, hanging summer air. In and around the torn-up places inside of myself, I continued to miss Rob. He used to say that nouns were bits of two-sided tape that made symbols stick to life. He once told me all of poetry was contained in the b of the world subtle.

Lying in my rented room, I wanted to fast-forward five years and compress all of the stumbling, the late-night bone-chewing, the confusion and the pain into the future synthesis of a brisk, purposeful man who cared about new things, and new people. I could feel the soft moment arriving in which sleep would open up like a mouth and swallow me. I would flow through that sleep and wake up a tiny bit better. And each day from here on in would have that much less anguish than the day before, and would be a small stop against the forward current of regret. Because what’s past is past, right?

Right?