We had it then— not just the embedded depth
of soul love, but glamour right on the ground,
as the formation formed by which Mary and I spent
all of our nights together. Our route— West
Philly to Logan Square and back— took two
disparate locales, made them whole, out of
a sense that they were meant to be wed, just
as we were; Logan Square with its sleek, modish
urbanity, West Philly with its rusticity, climbing
ivy, plus the obvious inversion of a well-worn
media cliché against it. By New Years Eve, 2003,
there was so much gaiety in the air, we’d pierced
a hole in the obdurate, obtrusive surface of human
life, to find ourselves in a tropical paradise—
I relate to it, now, as a clear demonstration that
Heaven on Earth happens. In Abby, we had a soul
sister; in the large co-op twin on Baltimore Ave.,
a safe haven; my flat in Logan Square created
a different, representatively recent kind of stage;
all were playgrounds where the dope, pills, every
thing else was shared by all, as all of our bodies
were for each other and no one else. The profound
ecstasy of that New Years was that a bunch of
artistic misfits found ways and means of being
completely at home in the world, against constraints
that needn’t have been there, with a serene sense
of what it might mean to live forever. We were
right, then and there, to be who we were, & we knew it—
Adam Fieled is a writer based in Philadelphia. His books include Opera Bufa, Apparition Poems, Equations, and the manuscript-in-progress Something Solid. A magna cum laude Penn grad, he edits P.F.S. Post.
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