the Nail

I stepped on a nail, in a board. It went in a half-inch. Bright red blood, puddling in the basement filth, splattered on the debris. I balanced there, with my shocking stigmata, electric red flowing off my toes, and I thought of you. I thought of you in the middle of the salt flats. I thought of you when I touched the burnt forest corpses on the mountainside. I bathed in the darkness, naked and vulnerable, a knife nearby, and I thought of you. I thought of you not long after I eased the car around the goat dying in the road; it cried out its fear and pain, cutting me deeper than any nail. In the black night of the interstate, in the lonelinesses of strange cities, in turmoil and in doubt, inhaling the sweet drunk blossoms of spring, walking the wet littered pavements of fall, I thought of you. I’ve been a fool, and I know it.

“Love knows no virtue, no profit; it loves, and forgives, and suffers everything because it must. It is not our judgement that leads us; it is neither the advantages nor the faults that we discover that make us abandon ourselves or that repel us.
It is a sweet, soft, enigmatic power that drives us on. We cease to think, to feel, to will; we let ourselves be carried away by it and ask not whither.”
(Sacher-Masoch)