Orkeed

We were looking for the ghost of Charles Baudelaire.  New York was a frame of mind at that time, and it felt just like our own frames, from a distance.  Some of these things can’t be explained until they’re felt keenly, in the ribs, and even then, sometimes explanations become ridiculous.  There were occasional moments where the sublime would find its way in, as it often does, but we were able to keep it at a distance with the sophistication of our own somber moods.  We had many different words for these moods, like Inuit cultures have different words for snow, because they characterized our days.

Unsettled on anything, and open to nothing that might speak to a mundane sensitivity, we were decided on a New York boutique hotel to offer the sense of difference, and a taste that we could not help but admire.  At the same time, it would have been in character to hole up in a flophouse, but this was better, because there were mints on the pillow, and to us, that was a signal of excellent decadence.  Finding Baudelaire in New York is simultaneously ridiculously easy and terribly impossible.  The exceptional problem here is that the ghost is on another continent, but we had ways of making the gloom come to us, and we beckoned.

Night was a time to beckon, and day was a time to mourn the beginning of another cycle that would last at least another day.  There were plenty of like-minded travelers, looking for the same thing, or the same thing under a different name, and we found a home among the goths.  It was beginning to turn into something that might be pleasing to continue, and we were nervous to be on the verge of something like happiness.  We listened to the New Creatures while contemplating a dismal future over a glass of green poison.  After some months passed relentlessly, I found a job at a bookstore and she started to play the juice harp in a Marshall Tucker revival band.  That was the saddest day of all.