That evening Adam sat in his apartment, alone. The trees swayed in a nocturnal rhythm, conducted by a light wind, which penetrated through the screen window onto his flesh. The slight moisture, carried by a small rain shower falling over Newark, felt refreshing. As he deepened his breath, he could taste autumn on his tongue. It felt like death, or at least of the process of it, that inevitable return to somewhere we’ve been but can’t remember, that nameless place that stalks and haunts us, for names only matter to the living and tonight the world was not doing that.

Adam’s mind churned rapidly, even as a sense of calm swept over his body. He had long debated these disparate concepts, how one thing can be active, another sedate, when supposedly they were both aspects of one being. You can’t separate the mind from the body any more than you can twist the tongue of language. The body was created to express the mind; the tongue, language. When they worked harmoniously, music formed. When a rift occurred, discord. At this moment he felt suspended between both, a placid arpeggio spun into chaos.

His head was propped against a number of pillows; the number is four. His shoulders settled down while his legs turned slightly outward. His desk lamp provided the only light, as stars were in disguise under dark clouds and his neighbor’s living room was unattended. His cat slept at his feet while thumbs flipped pages, not so much reading as gazing into nothingness through the lens of a magazine. Someone in the distance was smoking a cigarette and the acrid scent lingered. He had nothing in the world to do, and that was exactly what he was accomplishing.

In the air he smelled Jasmine: her sweat against his lips, her neck as he buried himself into her shoulder. He remembered the first night she stayed in this studio, in this bed, under this blanket, and the thought of how good of a wife she’d be came to his mind. The thought was odd—he never saw himself cast in such a light. Getting married, certainly, as that is a dream most humans do not forget to have. But the notion of a wife, an actual person to share his life and future besides, was an anomaly. The future. That’s the only thing she couldn’t offer, as no one can really offer it, at least in actuality, not in the floating whispers of sex and promises, generic statements like “I love you forever” and “We were born for each other.” And since she could not offer something that no human possibly could, he consistently denied her full access inside of his heart.

He knew the absurdity of the thought as it rose from some familiar cavity. His mind was like a dradle that only spun in one direction. His condition was no different than any other of the male species, for as we are aware, men are creatures unto themselves, craving security while outwardly boasting independence. Their ferocity derives from some deep need for aloneness, the desire for solitude, not from a logical equation of independence but because it is where we will all end up, no one excluded. Most fail to entertain such thoughts until Death Himself raps on the door, and we pretend to have left the building. There are things we hide from and those we cannot. Men spend their lives engaged in the former while disbelieving the latter. Time soon ends all illusions.

For the bulk of his twenty-eight years, Adam has done everything possible to ensure aloneness. Recently he had acquired a new state that couldn’t quite be termed as such, a feeling peculiar yet familiar. He had been experiencing loneliness. In form, these terms appear similar; in practice, they are hardly comparable. Aloneness was a competitive advantage, the ability to shrug off unwarranted antagonism from outside sources. Loneliness was this night, the desire to touch flesh other than your own, the inability to do so. He was coming to realize aloneness had been a disguise for loneliness, no matter how much he demanded differently of himself. The mind is tricky, it can make false claims, it does so all the time, tricking itself into believing ideas so removed from reality that it then demands reality to bend to its trickery. When it does not, we suffer.

He cared deeply for Jasmine, knew he could spend a lifetime with her. He’d be very content with the life that would be. The wife she’d make would pale in comparison to the mother she would become. There are certainties and confusions in life; these were of the former. In the space between thought and would, however, is a terrible cliff most fear to gaze over. There were too many woulds in Adam’s life—how amazing life would be with another job, how beautiful a relationship he would have when committing to Jasmine, and so on. Would is a cousin of Could, words and philosophies that should be banished from vocabulary. The problem is that words are philosophies, philosophies are constructed of words, and action is described by letters though not confined to them. Adam is trapped by definitions with no key to unlock the shackles. His life is being lived between a capital letter and a period, and the repetition is slowly killing him.

How we say such things when so little of death is known! Everything we do is the antithesis of this state. We don’t fear death because it is inevitable. It scares us because we cannot define it. An infinite number of dictionaries written in every language created can be consulted and still, no answer. We turn to philosophy for solace, and that too limits us. Through the labyrinth of words we assign meaning to things like death: dreamless sleep; infinite void; the end of all roads; dark chasm of nothingness; and so on. Useless. Every one of them a completely frivolous and nauseatingly poetic attempt at saying, “We have no clue.” Powerful men stand on altars adorned in robes claiming glory in a kingdom, assuring us that to live in a prescribed manner is to ensure a proper death, as if death had rules of formality. They forget they stand on the same side as us, and what’s worse is that they pretend to hoard some secret information we are not privy to. Their false comfort will bring no warmth to any of the millions they fool, or to Adam tonight. When a man is alone, he is complete. When he is lonely, nothing can complete him.

Adam pulls the sheet higher upon his chest. Autumn was moving through her cycle quickly. Before you blinked Queen Winter would descend upon the earth, onto at least this part of it where Adam now rested. What region really matters except that which we inhabit? Summer and winter too are perceptions—when one wraps her silent death upon a nation, the other waves a mighty staff over distant fields. Some lands never know winter, others remain ignorant of summer, but none escape an ending. All will pass through the cold regardless. Adam realized the shiver was not coming through the window. It was arising from inside of him. As he stared at pictures of people he didn’t know doing things he would never try, he only saw Jasmine.

He only saw Jasmine, but we might add that his thoughts were consumed by Inez. Jasmine brought him life, yet one that did not inspire him. It brought him security, momentarily. The problem was that there was no mystery. He craved warmth and tenderness. Instead he chose uncertainty and darkness. We wave our hands hallelujah in divine rapture until the temporary bliss subsides. Then we return to the secret comfort of discomfort, where Inez whispers soft words like “hey” and “there,” and the dagger in the heart, “baby.” He rubbed his hand down the front of his right thigh, stretched his neck into the pillows, and craved her touch. The cold air breaking through the screen could not temper the fire, nor could the ice inside his heart warm his chest.

He had to tell her, but he didn’t know which her to tell, nor what to tell the her he decided to tell. He didn’t even know what to tell, which was why he swung acrobatically between emotions. What he really wanted was for someone to make the decision for him, to make his incertitude evident, so that he no longer had a choice at all. It just was. The simplicity of that statement, it just was, cannot account for the duplicity of his mind. If light and dark didn’t dance, we’d never know there were choices to be made. Then things wouldn’t be so hard. Yet if no hard plagued us, no easy would exist. Mountains would never be formed, nor stones solidified, and then in the gelatinous terrain of softness the earth would have been made. It would be an earth we did not recognize, however. Things would just be, plasma and water without gravity. That’s great for swamis and monks. This story does not concern them, however, even though enlightened beings have to pass through these waters. If they did not, they would never have arrived at the conclusion that there is no conclusion. Life simply dances and we along with it, wondering when the music will end. As much as we desire the music to stop, we don’t want really want that either. Nothing is more frightening than silence. We’d prefer to hear words we never want to, rather than be suspended in the emptiness of no words. Better that everything we never hoped for in life would manifest, rather than nothing at all to happen.

Could nothing really happen? Adam had no desire to run into Inez at the bookstore. He had been completely content with Jasmine. Or had he? Shadow once told him that we call things into life through unconscious means. If that were true, then it wouldn’t be so much us calling them into life as life calling us to join it. Right now that idea was too much to think about, for it implied there was a life before us, just as there will be another after. It took away his aloneness, the only thing he could claim to be his own. Adam refused to feel paranoid in the safety of the haven he had built, this small studio filled with music gathered from around the world, in a small enclave of Jersey City. The area was being gutted and revamped for incomes well beyond his own, yet he had arrived before the real estate revolution, before the transformation of lead into gold. The lead inside his heart weighed him further into his four pillows. In a city expanding, he contracted deeply inside of himself. The region was breathing a noxious air that even autumn could not quiet, and he stood on two sides of one uncertain timeline. He was trying to enter a womb that would bear no more children

He turned the page. Two thoughts had arisen the moment his eyes had met Inez in the aisle of The Strand. The first was danger, the second yes. As he straightened his back a bit he could not remember which arose first, that of danger or the confirmation that he would move willingly into it. When a fire blazes, our first instinct is not always to run. Deer are not the only animals to be caught in headlights. Moths purposely commit the suicide of lamps. These two thoughts were simultaneous, neither preceded the other, they came connected and would remain so. At least this is what he told himself, knowing full well we can trick ourselves into believing anything, like the story of a man being born of a virgin or arks crossing parted seas. Fairy tales are not for fairies alone.

The kamenche blended with the wind. From his speakers, Kayhan Kalhor’s Persian melodies spoke secrets Adam craved to understand. That was the power of music, why it held him in a trance. Words were deceptive; instruments never lied. If they did, you turned off the stereo. Humans were not so easy to manage, even though we are instruments of our song. Most humans didn’t have a button when you needed them off. Harder than turning others was muting your own mind. As the minutes passed, Adam continued to scatter thoughts like clouds dropping water over Newark. He heard a plane landing, or taking off, in the distance, even a foghorn blare in the stormy night at Liberty Harbor. Everything was still, everything moved, there was movement in stillness. His body remained immobile, partly from the sounds of Iran, partly from the comfort of the mattress supporting his tired body, partly from the clouds of marijuana circulating in his lungs.

How badly he still wanted the choice made for him, knowing of no way to avoid suffering. If he chose Inez, danger lurked at every turn; he would be offered no comfort. If Jasmine remained at his side, another danger loitered, that of unfulfilled desire. Make no mistake: both are created by the mind, by bodily cravings and emotional yearnings. An answer is not clean-cut, by any means. We all know the downfalls of desiring, we’ve known them ever since we began to demand others to be our property. As long as history does not lie to us more than it does, this has been a long condition of humanity. Adam needed to figure out which brought loneliness and what promised aloneness. He knew the conundrum would reappear, in another Inez if not this one. Humans are archetypes of gods, and the gods were as confused as us. It could be no other way, as it is us who write them into reality. If the gods were to write, their stories would not be told in words, but rather, in the actions and minds of humankind. Our translations of them are expressed in language, a rather limited communication that never really arrives at a point. Right now, Adam didn’t want a point gotten to. Tonight the silent yearnings of two bodies on top of his own would remain unheard, one who he could burrow inside, the other who would devour him. Either way, he was seeking a womb. In all this stillness, too much chaos lurked. The only shelter now was sleep, long in coming as Adam turned the lamp black.