He sat down at the edge of the lake and he pretended that it was a mirror that he might throw reflections into that would never come back, or which would at least store them under the jetty like a floater for some other visitor to the crime scene to discover.
Love, or its twisted close cousin lust, can seek to aggregate complications as armour, to protect it from revelation. In the mistake of secrets, and collapsed realities of anonymous valentines, lives that were possible can be added to the whitenoise and fail to be the songs that need to be heard.
Choices flutter down like mapleboats, caught in front of his eyes by sun-dogs, that turn them into fireflies, which burn up and turn inside themselves like an explanation that cannot find an external referent.
He believes in a God with retrograde amnesia, who lives in the moment, and whose plan is as briefly realised as a hedonist’s drug-born gateway into a glimpse of the truth. He sees himself as never able to capture the eternity of that evanescent moment that evaporates as soon as it is spied.
He lights a cigarette, places it on the dock, confident it will not start a fire, and allows the breeze to roll it into the water. He unknots the friendship bracelet and casts it out over the water.
He stands up naked and he walks away from where he was sat, and he has left it all behind. Picks a name from the sign on the house by the shore, and calls himself Erewhon.