Stars like a runway to oblivion.

STARS LIKE A RUNWAY TO OBLIVION BY NANCY DAFOE 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 87

By 4am I was an amateur philosopher

still talking, trying to convince a young woman

that her life was worth living, a woman

I did not really know, who happened

to walk into my dorm room.

Without citing Aquinas on “beatific vision”

or Aristotle on the “function of a human”

I instinctively knew also to avoid what little I knew

of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer in this

middle-of-the-night/morning plea, too desperate

for a systematic analysis of fundamental principles

between realms, between abstractions

this middle-of-the-night existential volley.

And the diminutive woman, who looked like

a girl of 12, blew her nose repeatedly

and countered every entreaty I made for living

as we wrestled with details, she confessed

to a life barely bearable in the rearview mirror

in which the image of a prostitute mother

introducing her to “grotesqueries” she called

the men, existed in present tense in the sense

of recurring visions,…