Good People

Someone Great Like Socrates

THERE’S MORE THAN ONE REASON I tied you to that bedpost.

If you recall, it’d been raining. That’s first and foremost.

Also, the bathroom and how you were always in there cleaning it.

I can’t count how many times I found you hunched over the tub, your hair up in that bandanna, listening to the stereo loud and scrubbing away to the rhythm of the music.

I can’t tell you the toll this took on me.

There’s so much I can’t tell you.

I needn’t remind you that neither of us was in good health nor spirits at the time. I think I was sleeping sixteen hours a day and you were up to a quart of gin.

All of this taken together could devastate anyone, I think.

I, like you, am human. Like you, I know nothing.

The rest we can sort out later.

If there is no later, please allow me to say this: Be careful who you look at on the subway. They might want money or to kill you.

You have to question the mentality of anyone who willingly looks at another on the subway.

Someone great like Socrates would say the same thing had he lived in the city.

If you get yourself killed, I would count it as an unspeakable tragedy, even if I don’t know you anymore, even if by then you’re already dead to me.

Socrates himself was put to death on a subway, I’m almost certain.

He made the mistake of looking up when someone asked for everyone’s attention and they made him drink hemlock for his troubles.

This isn’t the kind of information you can get just anywhere.

You know what you’re giving up.

Do you remember the time I tied you to that bedpost and we discussed Socratic paradoxes and the peculiar ways of the world? I believe I was accused of something horrific and I needed you to sit still long enough to explain myself.

I believe I made myself clear while I was applying the ointment.

The gist was have you ever boarded a train and gone someplace because why the fuck not?

Maybe to see what a new life might be like on the windy side of an old one?

Maybe to get away from the panhandlers on the subway, to say nothing of the philosophers and murderers?

To say nothing of bedposts and slipknots.

If you do this, remember me to any perfect stranger once you arrive and tell them what I’ve always told you, that I know nothing. Tell them, in spite of this, I said take special care.

Always, please, take very special care.