The sound of a person getting everything they ever wanted and still feeling chasms inside. Do you love me? Do you love me now? How many heaps and helpings of love can I pile upon my plate, scraping it frantically back on to the platter as it ooozes over the edge of the table? Gobs of it, grotesquely overflowing. Love, everywhere. Somewhere a voice belting loudly, like Levi the Poet mourning the last dying breath of his Christian upbringing. “Oh God, my God! Wherefort are thou, you un-graspable, guileless...nothing?” I’m tap-dancing, grinning, on a sunny rainy day, one of those bizarre ones that seem impossible every time they happen.

Wherefore art thou? Why so serious?Wherefore! Howfore? Whofore? I am not a poet, forced to resign myself to bluntly hacking out words in lieu of the feelings only I can feel.

I can’t believe it turned out like this, life. It was meant to be much more muchy. Much more muchness. Wherefore art thou, meaning? Why so serious? Things fall apart and I stay together, always together, always together. I tear at myself with personality tests and sad movies, yet I stay together. Brow-beating belligerence, the only way to feel something.

Our father in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Wherefore art though? Why so serious? I texted you a thousand times and you sent me a few packages in the mail. You said to hold on, to keep going, as if you were off handling other business in a far away land. Why so serious you say? Haha. It’s the bounce in the step of a man with nothing to lose, the face of a father who’s lost his only daughter, the mind of an elephant without its memory.

I vacillate between ideals and despair. Death by a thousand swipes, bleeding the hope out ‘till it’s a dried-up effigy of a person, smiling and nodding and laughing on a first date, two people never to speak again.

Its a fragmented, disconnected, dissected, off-beat, off-brand, off-target, awfully isolating existence in a world that prefers connection on clubhouse and pornhub to a second date. Wherefore art thou? Why $o sErioUs? :))))

It’s not an essay about love, you fool, it’s an essay about quarantined hearts, inaccessible to one’s own psyche for fear of contamination. Therapists rebranded bad as “maladaptive,” so let’s recite an ode to maladaptive behavior everywhere, maladaptive behavior for all, maladaptive behavior ‘till death do us part, dear, dear reader. Things fall apart. Do you love me now?