For a day and a half, I become obsessed with T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," in which Prufrock, the "shy, cultivated, oversensitive, sexually retarded, ruminative, isolated, self-aware to the point of solipsism..." representative of the modernist man is crippled by an overwhelming question. This I'm not so sure why.
Mostly, I think it has to do with pretty vowels and cold metaphors. Words like magnets in the dark, an embrace that tugs and pulls. Then life tumbles through, and when I ride my bike to and fro, when I carve out the city from road to mall, from bridge to wall, from skyscraper to the moon, leaving a trail of heavy wistfulness, I feel Prufrock weighing on me with his receding hairline, his yellow face.
"Oh, do not ask, "What is it?'"
I do not know how to respond when my hairdresser says, "you have lovely lips, did you have them done?" I do not know where I am, when I hear smatterings of Chinese outside my bathroom window instead of "hello, hipster, tea party." I do not feel the weight of slangs in either language. Like Prufrock in love — or numb to — I move, I go, I simply charge, and fumble, until—
"sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown Till human voices wake us, and we drown."