John Michael is filled with inexplicable joy. It is a joy that builds, and it has been building for several years, but it is only very recently that it has exploded into a new realm of inexplicable joy. This is for a number of complicated reasons that happened by chance to coalesce together in time.
But now his happiness is consuming him. It is wrung from his feet when he walks and wrought from his nostrils when he breathes, reflected in magnified degrees from the light running wild into his pupils. Everything from John Michael radiates and booms and swells, pushing forth into the world in a swirling surge of questionable sincerity, questionable only because this new level of inexplicable joy is so radically new to him that he cannot bring himself to bow fully to the notion that this John Michael is truly even John Michael.
This joy is strange to him particularly because nothing is going particularly well for him these days. It goes, it goes, but there is no brilliant thing that has tangibly changed around him. The joy brings big smiles on him when there is nothing really to smile about but the wind and its gallivanting into his body. They are big grand smiles. Banished and despised are simpers, no wry grin on his face anymore, but big grand openings, great invitations to his happiness. It is enough to set John Michael on fire. Enough to bring on an urgent sensitivity that is so riveting it is almost sexual. Where another less recent version of himself would twitch, an anxious twitch, his current body will swell and rise, a sinful-feeling tingle that reaches the root of every follicle of hair. It covers him, and traps him in the sense of overwhelming, inescapable, and paralyzing pleasure.
I suppose that in consuming it is also becoming. John Michael is turning into nothing, nothing but a practice ground for glee to spread its wings and swing its hips and not have to answer any questions like why, or for how long. He is nothing at all but the very concept and outlet of happiness. Nothing, or perhaps everything, for it is as if all feelings and stimuli are churning within him at once, churning in the vacuum void of his soul and riving him from that old beast who tried filling it with single, unannexed emotions. These sensations are even the bad ones, which when thrown into the mix are on some universal perspective still great things because they are definite things, and I can find no other quality truer and more pure than definition. And so, by some vantage, John Michael is now becoming either nothing or everything, which perhaps makes him a character and not a person, because if he is nothing or everything then he is understandable and noncontradictory, which are two things I know people are not. And maybe this would trouble John Michael if it did not bring him so much joy.
Nevertheless, there is still the vague notion in John Michael that everything he has been lately is stacked together like hundred dollar bills on a summer day, and any breeze, this one or the next one, might send everything loose. But as he thinks now in waves of joy and not in time, it is of little bother to him.
Classic Robert. John Michael is a kick-ass name choice here. Interesting twist of concept on the much more common having-every-reason-to-be-happy-but-being-down-in-the-shitter type.
ReplyDeleteThis sentence, particularly the final clause, is bomb:
"These sensations are even the bad ones, which when thrown into the mix are on some universal perspective still great things because they are definite things, and I can find no other quality truer and more pure than definition."
At the beginning, to turn critic on your ass, would be to change "wrought" to "expelled" when referring to the propulsion of happiness out of John Michael's nose, since wrought requires drawing out, while I feel you were trying to show that the happiness was pretty much exploding out of him.
But good good stuff nevertheless.