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Sport 41: 2013
Patrick Elliott — The One With Tents
Patrick Elliott
The One With Tents
Just because I don’t believe in freewill does not mean I do not love you. I maintain a fiction of freewill to love you in. It’s not hard; I spend most of my time there anyway.
Do you remember how to open a beer bottle with a lighter? I taught you in a sea of tents, we wove through a sea of tents and dark rain. It’s easy in principle; just dig it off like turning a sod, but the trick to it is faith. You have to believe it: the inevitability of your success. Set in chain a series of events, from faith, down your arm, ramping up your wrist and off into the night with a pop. Then you smiled and you kissed me, you thought I was mystical and you loved me. I felt like I was mystical too and I loved you back. Everything had turned upside-down and all the tents, lit from within by torchlight, hung around us like dripping lanterns at a party cut by rain. Two wet moths. We found my tent and hung in there glowing, careful not to touch the sides. Most of the tents are tiny houses now with wooden boardwalks laid over the muddy paths between them; I worry about that mud, full of bottle caps and string. Yesterday afternoon I climbed up on the roof and looked across that cobble of wood and tin and glass, hustled into being by the dreams of its own bootstraps.
Just because I like to come up here alone, doesn’t mean I don’t love you. I maintain a fiction of freewill to love you in. It isn’t hard; I spend most of my time there anyway.