It was all so clean,
perfect, a world away I watched rolling by. Bright
pools of light over soft angle slanting ground to swallow cars into a deeper half dark. It kept me quiet and wanting to half think but mostly
feel. It was so pretty, the lights panning at different speeds nestled with towering
concrete slipping away. Laying back in the grass on a slight incline, all that is sky and just a little bit trees is before me. And
mosquitos, closing in without pretense wanting to leave little
welts. Welts to pretend scratching around the perimiter is not quite as naughty than right on the bite, scratching that feels so satisfying. Parents parting crying melting to the ground limp children, coaxing peace back on
crouched knees and hushed voices.
It grows quiet at night, the world falls to rest in parts until most all is latent waiting for morning to bloom. I
record my progress through the evening then
morning hours as methods to distract myself. Keep my mind from thinking, it has grown wild on me and lapses into dangerous frightening circles.
She used to read books like chain smoking, I still do.
I dream of being
pinned between the wheels of a boxcar and the wheels of a worker truck, of being pursued and hunted. Not with fear so much as a constant straining against these boundaries. I bike along the side of the road trying to avoid breathing in the exhuast, trying to keep mud turned to dust in the air by hot steady sun out of
my eyes. Squinting and I still get flecks in them as the cars bolt past, I am sometimes carried forward more easily in the wake of a passing
freight-liner. It creates an envelope of air which negates the oppressive wind I must pedal against. The
miles roll past quickly, I watch forwards most of the time occasionally looking down to the asphault streaming by.
Sitting on the porch steps in the sun I hear a rustling in the
bushes next to me. A leathery tail vanishes under some dried
leaves. More rustling and the head of a
mouse pokes out, small glossy black empty eyes searching, or maybe not searching. It stands on its hind legs and
nibbles a small chunk of something held in tiny hands. It darts out of view and I go back to eating my dumpstered bagel with peanut butter, drinking water out of a cracked beaker. I can roughly
calculate what time it is by the proportion of stairs engulfed in shadow to stairs bathed in sun. It hints at a simpler time, where individual parts of life may have
fit together into one coherent whole. Daily routines interlocked and striving toward a specific unity, trying to get by. I know that all of my
moments strung together equate to the same thing in a sort of absurd parallel, the interrelations are much more obscure though. Somewhere in the
back of my mind I am always trying to puzzle these parts broken and floating together. Sometimes the words of others hint at the same thing, wrenching sense from these pieces instead of letting them settle into the patterns of
chance they indicate. What if we just let go once forever?