And then, I knew that I had someone to confide in, because I wouldn't have to tell him anything.
On one of my lists, a small apology rolled sideways and dropped itself into the water. I didn't know how it started. It was a list long forgotten, with hazy names and cloudy memories drifting through the air, curling, unfolding. One by one I saw the ripple move out, riding on 'OMGs' and subdued gray on profiles, so indirect and faint. I didn't know, I wouldn't know, you know? Another shot in the dark, another one bites the dust. Summed up nicely in a eulogy, compact enough to take up less ground space, for the hordes to come, but would they have enough money to pay?.
She was a memory, floating in the dust in particles waiting to be caught with a beer glass, upside-down over the table watching its tail light up greenish-yellow. At night, lights would dance here and there, a ball of branches stretching out, bouncing vulnerably against the glass, hitting its head in limited exasperation.
I asked him, and he couldn't find it, and he asked me whether they were a local band. I told him that they were pretty well known, but sorta Indie, and that most stores wouldn't have it. After I set that off, I could see him churning underneath his Newbury Comics shirt, and behind him rode waves and lines of music and lives compressed onto flat disks. I left the store, and it blew up behind me but I wasn't sure because I didn't look behind. All I felt was the shockwave muffled underneath the roar of the engine. Compression seems to be the hot new thing lately. So is depression.
And so the sky was blue, and the clouds were purple, lit up underneath by burning cities and dying people that made them fire-orange and blood-red, alien beings in the sky, about to land but not yet, hanging in space and drifting lazily. I smiled at the person next to me because my necklace had lost its owner, and I was his reincarnation. Sunsets shouldn't be this beautiful every day.
I was down, and someone dragged me out into the cold air and revived me with fifteen jabs to the chest and two french-kisses. The cold meant that it hurt, not enough to get frostbite, so I was standing in the middle of Harvard Square listening to old music for old times' sake and trying to hide my freshness with a cloak that I swirled around myself and fastened tightly so that nothing could leak out. The thing that disgusted me at that lunch table was the fact that she was talking on the surface like light and delicate water-striders that skim upon the surface without ever seeing the absence of light underneath, and nothing else. It saddened me and I had to turn away and into one of my cups of iced tea and I thought no-one noticed but someone saw me and asked me how the new soup was and I excused myself and ran away dripping.
Sometimes those hills are so hard to climb, sometimes today will be excellent and superb and perfect, and the next day will be the bottom of the bottom, the edge of the world before your ship tips forward and you see everything revealed in an instant before you plummet forever in Zee-Row-G. Terse and cold jabs to the bone that vibrate and chill and my muscles tense up and firm corners of mouths and hard chiseled eyes make their eye contact before spitting out lives on the ground and grinding them in with the heel of a shoe. "It's a bug eat bug world out there", says the spider to the fly and the joker to the thief. Irony swims its way through text, uphill between lines and under the text like a submarine pulsing gently probing questioningly with wide open eyes wrapping a fierce inborn cruelty within welcoming outstretched arms and a warm heart.
Exoskeletons tend to crush the things within, but it's convenient since brown juice doesn't get all over everywhere but is instead contained within the unmoving body of the dead. A paper towel in the trashcan and all is solved, and nobody has to worry about formal things like WhoWillTakeOutTheTrash or HowWillWePunishHim, so that the powers that be may dive down and peck at small fledglings without hindrance. I'm sleepy, but I can't sleep. I will never call again, again.
Silhouettes of people lined across the sky conjure images of misunderstandings and quaint misinterpretions that follow images like the dull disturbing probings of gentle and lumbering giants overhead who cannot understand. Small things, like requests that ask of the impossible or latex applied like makeup, except portable without the need of a compact. The late-night requests that stretch me out without anything to put me back, and when the knob turns my head turns and flashes in expectant euphoria and happiness.
The more I start to sink, the more water I push out of the way.
A hybrid of fiction and daylog, because this is how I see.