—WHEN YOU GET THAT FEELIN’ YOU WERE BORN TO LOSE, STARIN’ AT YOUR CEILING FEELIN’ THE BLUES 

  

 

No More Tears

 

My desk won’t stop weeping. 

It says it’s sorry for being boorish, but authenticity and solace are elusive when you’re made of nothing but wood and gold-knobbed drawers. 

“Even the lacquer top is a hoax,” my desk says, “a kind of burnished seal to keep everything stuffed inside, all those appalling secrets and scorched memories.”

My desk’s eyes have seen so much, yet now they will not look at me, tears pulping out like liquid regrets or ripe spigots of shame.

We’ve been together since Jesus, since the dinosaurs. Before then even. 

My desk and I came out of the womb as one, conjoined, until a day when the axe just fell and split us.

We’re friends and lovers, thieves and saints, confidants and jealous stalkers. If we weren’t together, we’d be charcoal in a pyre or else floating at the bottom of some slate-gray lake.

I rub my desk’s cheek, shoulders, then belly, as if it’s a needy pup, and so my desk sighs a snotty sigh due to all of the earlier wailing.

I could lie and say I’ll be back to write more tomorrow so that my fingers tapping on the keyboard reverberate against the tender chest of my beloved desk, but my desk knows me too well and, after all, isn’t it impossible to lie to your soulmate?

What my desk doesn’t understand is I have nothing new to write about. I’ve told every story, wrung them inside and out until they’re nothing but chaff and dry spittle. All those words about isolation, a shitty childhood, nightmares chasing nightmares chasing nightmares, not a solitary happy ending materialized, so I’m hanging it up for good.

And that pyre I mentioned earlier? 

Well, it’s high time to burn. Both of us. We’ll go out blazing.

My desk can probably smell the sloshed gasoline on the carpet and walls, the viscous fumes, but there’s not a peep about it. No more tears either.

When I strike the match and flick it down the hall, my desk breaks into a pleased grin, as if it’s been made of sunshine and rainbows all along. Yet another clever hoax.

“It’s time then?” my desk asks.

And I say, “Yes,” as a river of flames engulfs us, mercifully, one long lick at a time.