#589: Alena (just.this.thought)

Instagram has my number.
I keep seeing videos
from Alena. All of them shot
identically, a close up
of her entire face,
the frame starts just below
her clavicle, the top
of the frame just barely
misses the very topmost
point of her head. The
lighting is always the same,
and the backdrop, the same,
minimalist, nothing detracts
from her face.
She wears very light
make up, maybe none,
and it must be said,
she is beautiful, and young.
But her schtick, the sincerity
of which seems undeniable,
is to recite at first, over the top
of soft, percolating, soothing
piano music, some
famous piece of wisdom,
a single sentence quoted
from a great writer,
Schopenhauer, W.S. Merwin,
Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka,
and then for just a couple
of minutes or less, she will
riff or expound or elucidate
about how this piece of wisdom
resonates with her, usually
beginning with the phrase,
“and I thought. . .” or “and it
made me wonder” delivered
almost in a whisper, in the
way you would expect
to be seduced by a lover.
But lovers don’t typically
quote from wisdom literature,
not real ones, not mine.
And this isn’t an erotic
experience, although, I suppose,
it could be. Mostly, watching
her subtly animated face
and listening to her gentle coo,
I find myself mesmerized;
I can’t look away, and half
the time I’m not even sure
I receive the message, so
blinded I am by her perfection.
I thought for a minute today,
watching her quote Heraclitus,
“no man ever steps
in the same river twice,”
that she might not be real.
There’s no obvious tell,
but in this time when truth,
not beauty, is in the eye
of the beholder, all bets are off.
If she were not real,
would I be any less smitten?
Or, would her actual personhood
make my devotion to her
any less substantive than it is:
a thin, ghost-like fantasy either way.
I’m trying to simply hear her words
over the top of her excruciating beauty.