air

A light man is running through a light landscape.

Trees and grass lift themselves gently in an almost nonexistent breeze, and they seem to weigh as little as the scarceness of morning sunlight upon them.

The sunlight seems a form of water, and drips from higher leaves to lower leaves.

The man is wearing tiny earbuds playing ambient music.

The man is beautiful, long-legged, in shorts and a gray t-shirt and runs at a seasoned clip.

The music he listens to is the aural equivalent of inert gases. The music spreads out and rarefies, odorless, colorless, like a monatomic gas, with a very low chemical reactivity.

He is thinking about a novel he has just read.

He finished it in the hour immediately after he woke up and leaned on one shoulder in bed and read, and it helped him to feel even lighter.

Leaning on one shoulder this way and reading the Japanese novel, he looked like a character in it. Weightless and beautiful and with a cool tonality of thought.

He really loves novels which can approximate the airiness of existence, the emptiness at the heart of matter and human feeling.

Novels which unashamedly aspire to be like ricecakes.

These novels are composed of an airiness of matter and the characters within them touch the airiness of matter and grow increasingly disbelieving of matter, ideas, and often themselves.

When the characters in these novels try to touch or taste each other, they find their hands, their mouths, go right through one another's bodies.

When this happens, when one of the characters has tried to touch another and her hand goes right through his body, she picks up a piece of spiritually light food, like an apple or a bosc pear.

She picks it up and takes a photo of it and pretends as though she will eat it.

But she doesn't. Or he doesn't.

Still, there is a sense of grace.

A sense of not having that is rewarding in itself.

The photo of the airy, spiritual food is posted on the internet.

The beautiful glow of matter without intent.

No disappointment occurs, but no satisfaction fills the void of disappointment.

Why should it?

The man is very handsome and his bones are rather the bones of deer. His sweat evaporates as soon as it forms.

His life: it is a reciprocal process of gently withdrawing matter from existence, existence from matter.

Some of the characters in the novels he admires just evaporate, and the man particularly loves when this happens.

The young man has always felt that this is something which happens to people in real life, but that the news reporters and other have just chosen not to document it.

It almost happened to him on numerous occasions.

But then the phone would ring or a dog would bark or his girlfriend or boyfriend would slap him and he would be back. Here.

The man loves running.

He loves the absence of thought while running, the inert gases of ambient music playing in his ears through the tiny earbuds.

He loves this feeling of noncomittal existence.

This is the ultimate feeling of freedom. Once the man was pinned down by the opposite of this feeling.

The man crosses a bridge now and the stream bubbling below seems to remember the ancient Japanese woodprints which also speak this young man's language.

The stream below the bridge is defying gravity slightly and lifting as it flows.

The man stops a moment and stands on this small bridge which has no sides, no railings.

The man has lovers but prefers lovers which don't really possess the grossness of physical being.

This has nothing to do with what his lovers weigh, their body type, but rather the weightlessness of their souls.

There is a rather large woman he makes love with whose soul has the weight of rice paper airmail correspondence paper.

He loves the disparity of her body and her soul when he is inside her.

He prefers lovers like himself who aspire to translucency and porosity, and the non-reactivity of the literature he admires.

He will fall in love with another young man or woman who will be similarly rarefied, given to silence. Deerlike vertebrae. Slow gestures.

He will fall in love with a man because of the way he holds a bowl.

He will fall in love with a woman for the way she stares at her car, as if it were a ghost.

It's a cold day in spring and the man stands on the almost non-existent bridge and looks about into the the forest all around him.

The day is so light that even birds have chosen not to weigh down the air.

Birds sense that this day has been written by a Japanese novelist who could transmute a ricecake into a novel, a novel into a ricecake, death into a ricecake or a ricecake into death.

Birds are respecting the silence-anchored prose.

There are no other humans for miles around.

Nobody runs this way.

The man doesn't feel strange or unearthly at all.

He is perfectly content to aspire to live as a ghost. It's a philosophically defensible position.

There's nothing you can say or do to disprove a feeling as beautiful as constant erasure.

If somebody wants their soul to be as light as sunlight, you would be an asshole to grab them by the hand or the ass.

And to enter their body with the wrong feeling would be like a man raping a deer.

How could anyone do that?

When the young man makes love it is like drinking pure water from a deep stream as slowly as possible.

A concavity below his ribs gathers moisture.

His hands lie lightly upon his lover, and when his tongue enters between his lover's legs it as though he were gently wiping down an ancient baby's skull in a museum's restorations chambers.

The man has rested enough and continues on now. He goes through the landscape which has lightened even more as the sun enters clouds and sunlight is intermittent.

He is a beautiful creature and there are animals all about him. He can feel the movement of their bodies, so subtle, in the changing air currents.

Far off in the woods to his right, but beyond the young man's vision, two deer with heads lowered run at each other in a courtship challenge, antlers pointed forward, and go right through each other in a demonstration of the perfect emptiness of matter which physicists always insist exists, though we never really see it.