Intolerable Vulnerabilities – fictions
I.
There comes a time when being referred to as “sir” by 100% of an establishment’s wait-staff is no longer over-polite and ironic respect, but simply a pronouncement that in these contexts you have no peers.
Eventually you’ll be skeletal, perhaps before too long the way things are going, you’ve never been difficult to avoid.
And it’s never been easy to know what you want – are you being selfless or self-protective in the attention you pay toward your lovers? Are your emotions inaccessible (some stunted empathy) or over-attuned in such a way as to pay your own processes no mind?
Whatever the case, you’re threatened.
And now you are old, sir, and alone. And both nothing and everything is safe, because you are no one to lose. And any potential of personal contact – some sort of opening – would inevitably create leakage, exponentially multiplying your probabilities of loss.
If only it could be viewed as sport – this frolicking across the page. (It’s not).
Who lays the trail
in the white sand
of the page?
Who explains it?
-Cees Nooteboom
You. Not you. Here. Not here. Ever trapped in beginnings because of so many ends. At this age, sir, you must force it. Opportunity becomes a consolation called survival.
No one is fooled, particularly not you, sir.
But she reminds you of something, probably someone, which is no help to you, just an increase in the accumulated weight of what’s past. You’ll go on, because why not? – You are nothing to lose.
Polysemic Stupor 
And we all go on, no? Accumulated past in the pack. Vulnerability is the rub and the reward. As Cohen wrote, the cracks are how the light gets through.
We become rubbed thin and fragile, or tougher than we look – old leather, finely cracked, no longer mirroring any pride, any care.,its own nature (to hold old bones together, to have some guts). Slipping into a role,where we become comfortably bedded in, but invisible and fading. A worn path.