reckoning

At 4:30 this morning, I couldn't breathe. I sat up in bed, mind foggy with the tail end of a dream, and coughed for what seemed like an hour. Then I struggled to find myself in the comfort of sleep again, trying to ignore whatever was wrong. It didn't work. In my restlessness, I ended up on the couch. I laid there the rest of the night, listening to crickets and cars driving past in the world outside the window. The trash collector came by at some point, breaking the relative city quiet with the subdued thunder of the large metal garbage bin. My cat sang a song to something I couldn't see, clicking and chirping with the intensity that only a crepuscular animal can have that early in the morning. Richard came downstairs ready for work and left the house. I just stayed on the couch.

Today a friend sent me a song about loneliness and working on and on until you're old and wasted and used up and your body just stops. Almost everyone I know is hashing out this problem right now - I guess we're just that age. Why does the future seem so bleak when our lives are really just beginning? The longer I'm alive the more I feel trapped, the more it seems like the most enjoyable times are already behind me, the more restless I get. I think growing up is unfortunately sad.

I've been on the couch all day. The cats have been sleeping, curled up, lazily stretching and purring. If they can find happiness within the tight confines of this apartment, then it can't be too much of a stretch for us to find it in the confines of a job, a few nights at the bar, and a few good friends, can it? I try to take the comforts where I find them and remind myself that I'm only as trapped as I'm willing to be.

grey and grey and grey

For the last two days, everything has been grey. The fog closed in around our building yesterday, truncating the world and containing it within a half-mile dome. I imagined the block an island, cars below me on the highway disappearing into unknown waters, our building the only beacon of a small civilization. When it got dark, UFOs hovered next to the roadways, orange otherworldly light illuminating the fog around them. It was almost eerie how still the fog made everything. When day gave way to evening (much earlier than it felt it should), the world felt even smaller. Driving home I could hardly see the usually bright neon signs on building tops and brake lights in front of me appeared disembodied.

mix CD

On Tuesday, a song found me. The melody crept in on the periphery of my mind, the profound and soaring horns caught me unaware and carried me off from my work. When a song finds me, it often happens like this.

It followed me this week, chasing after my car in traffic early in the morning, haunting me as I tried to focus on writing documents and e-mails. When I went home, it was there from dinner until it echoed through the slumberous halls of my mind as I tried to sleep. Every now and then, a song comes along like this and stirs you.

Last night I got in the car at 11, sitting in the emptiness of the parking lot with a CD in hand. With the keys in the ignition, I sat for a while in the inadequate fluorescent light and still air inside the car. Everything seemed to anticipate the sound of the engine, some dynamic event, the start of some grand adventure. I never turned it over. I took the CD I had made and trudged back inside the apartment. I put it down on the counter with the spam mail and went to bed.

picnic

Every day I take the highway home. Four lanes of inconsistent speed and frustrated drivers just trying to get home to appreciate the few hours they've got left in the day. It's slow every day unless I'm driving home late at night.

Today something was different. Everything was slow, people were honking at each other, and even I grew tired of my air conditioner deciding to turn itself off. This is all the usual. What was new was the cause of the today's slowdown. Usually, it's a wreck. Sometimes it's just the natural confusion of hundreds of cars all with their own plan trying to be the fastest instead of making way and cooperating. Today, it was bears.

Some loud and careless truck had managed to lose a plain cardboard box right in the middle of the highway. In what I can only guess was the chaos of the impact, bouncing off a windshield as a car swerved, the tape could no longer hold in the contents, and stuffed teddy bears all in different vivid colors exploded onto the highway. When I drove by the incident had already passed, and what remained were bears - blue, yellow, purple, red, all sorts of colors, laying motionless on the packed road.

awake on a plane

Night is just a big shadow. I rolled the idea around in my head. Planes are little boxes full of forced meditation for me. I can't sleep on them, no matter how long the flight, no matter how drowsy I try and make myself. All of us strangers flew from day into night somewhere over the East coast, a physical transaction leaving the sun behind for dark and quiet.

When you're moving through nighttime, flying hundreds of miles an hour over the cold miles of Atlantic, time takes far too long to pass. I got to know the passengers around me even though they were asleep, devising stories in my head about where they were from or what they'd had for breakfast. The guy to my right was heading home after a short business trip to Dallas (why else would you go there anyway?), where he hadn't even had time to have a decent meal. An old couple nearby were traveling the world, trying to fit it all in while they still had the time. A little girl near me had as much trouble trying to sleep as I did, and she leaned over to see what I was playing on my DS, never saying a word but watching intently.

And then the sky lightened. We hurtled toward the sun while the light turned the clouds below us into a landscape that I could have walked on. The tiny world inside the capsule of the cabin woke up, stretched, yawned, and drank complimentary orange juice off of a cart pushed by an aging flight attendant who had circled the world hundreds of times.

When we were about to land, a special announcement was made amidst the usual instructions to buckle and place our tray tables in the upright position. Today was Linda's last flight. After thirty years of service, thirty years of flying around the world serving small cups of orange juice and pre-packaged dinners, this very flight was Linda's last. A smattering of applause sounded out, just a few people clapping after thirty years of what I know must be one of the toughest jobs in the world. I felt special then, to see this lady cry and thank the passengers nearby.

don't you ever write poetry?

It rained last night. It was a welcome break from the sweltering, nearly immobilizing heat we've been having. On my way home, lightning arced back and forth across the sky and the rhythm of my windshield wipers gave music to the British lady delivering news over my radio. I was going to meet my best friend at a bar, a sort of broken down place in the broken down part of town. My favorite kind of place; it's the kind where you have drink after drink and take polaroids that you'll look at again years from now and feel a dull nostalgic longing for the good ol' times.

I parked in the sparsely-lit gravel parking lot, treacherous and uneven from years of neglect and full of puddles with depths indiscernible, and made my way to the unadorned side door to the bar. I could already smell the smoke, and there was a phantom taste of whiskey already on my tongue. Thoughts of seeing my friend, who has moved away to another city, rolled around in my brain but were suddenly interrupted.

"Don't you ever write poetry?"

Startled, I turned to search for the source of the distraction.

"Do you have a pen?" She was shorter than me, thin and dry as a stalk of wheat in a drought. Dark circles framed her eyes, her voice had a desperate and unsettling edge. I didn't have a pen, I knew that. I told her. "You have that big purse, and you don't even have a pen?" She indicated the large and beaten-up messenger bag that I always keep with me. Making a cursory exploration of the front pocket, I turned up with nothing, as expected. "I really don't, sorry..." I kept walking toward the door of the bar, wishing that I hadn't left the pen on my keyboard at work.

"Doesn't anyone write poetry any more?" More quietly, almost an inward remark, she walked on. I wish I'd had a pen, I haven't read any poetry in a while.

it's not permanent

Driving north on the highway to work early in the morning, I'm just one little cell in an artery suffering from some serious cholesterol buildup. We're all hustling past each other to deliver our oxygen all over this city, exiting the highway off into lesser arteries and turning off into capillaries until we reach our destinations, then traveling small paths on foot until we're spent and weary.

The lady on the news with the smooth voice drones on about the already mounting temperature. We're under a "heat advisory" through the end of this week. I'm trying to stay awake, trying not to think how I tossed and turned last night and hardly slept, hardly got a refill of the oxygen I need to carry out my tasks. A red truck that's seen kinder times passes me on the right. I must be going too slow. On the side of the truck, in handwritten letters on what must be a large white magnet, the phrase "don't take life so serious, it's not permanent" is scrawled in bubbly green and black marker. The man driving the truck has a cowboy hat on his head and a cigarette in his hand, and as the truck passes I can feel the bass of whatever he's singing along to.

At the end of the day, used up and tired and worrying about the next day already while I traveled back up the vein, was when I remembered the cowboy's hand-crafted message. I smiled.

very small leaves

I like my eggs cooked over-easy, but I don't cook them that way. I always end up making scrambled eggs. Whether this is because I enjoy watching the yolk spill out from its membrane and combine with the whites or because I am a little afraid to try cooking something new, I'm not sure. They always end up scrambled.

Three is more than enough. I stood at the stove, barefoot and in my pajamas, gently cracking open the shells on the side of a dish. Sometimes the sound the shell makes when it finally gives makes me feel a little sad inside, the wet crunch and crack as the sides are separated and the contents slip out of their fragile home and into the bowl. Some of the shell always ends up in there and I have to stick my finger in to chase it up the side - it never seems to work with the fork, always slipping back away from the instrument.

One left to go. It felt heavy in my hand. I tapped it on the bowl and started to peel it apart, and small speckles of black fell on top of the eggs waiting in the dish. You never expect that when you're getting ready to make some scrambled eggs. I tried to keep the egg together and brought it close to my face. It was dirt. Just dirt there, in the egg, filling the white abscess of shell.

So I watered it. I put it in the sun near my desk. I didn't expect anything at all.

i felt like an island

I felt like an island on Saturday. When it's before ten in the morning on the weekend, time seems to crawl. When you're standing in the entry of the cafe down the street and waiting, I think it stops. The sign on the wall near the entrance claims "53 Maximum Occupancy" in faded letters. People crowd around the door, listening for their names, looking longingly at the coffee counter.

You can see everyone from the doorway - the elderly couple sharing pancakes and bacon with strong black coffee, college kids who couldn't sleep anymore for the headaches pushing migas around on their plates, the waitress with with the nose ring who's been on shift since 4am bustling between them all. The smell of breakfast makes it hard to wait for a seat. A young girl in pigtails lets her mother know that pancakes are the only thing that can cure her hunger at least four times before I'm led to my table. She interjects into her parents' conversation about Important Things, only to be shushed while the grownups talk. I think she just wanted to be a part of it.

freight elevator

The public elevators in this building are much like other public elevators. They're small and dimly lit, they've got mirrors on the back wall to hide away the idea that you're trapped in a small metal box, and they make an unintrusive "ding" sound right before they open. It's the freight elevator that I like.

The freight elevator is hidden around behind the others, closed off by a nondescript door. When you call it, you can hear the old machines groan to life behind the solid metal door that clanks open when the elevator arrives. It's lit by three bare florescent bulbs glowing behind wire cages that have begun to rust in place. If you look closely, you see a small hole in the corner of the ceiling, the pitch black of the elevator shaft peering in from behind the blades of a dull metal ventilation fan.

It shakes when it moves, it stutters to start and stop like some great weary beast of burden. It growls and complains as it secrets away janitors, dollies of plain brown packages and postal employees with electronic scanners, and smokers from the public eye. The walls inside are hung with heavy-duty black covers, patched with electrical tape and dotted with tears, to protect the surface beneath, but I'm not sure from what. Peeling back the shabby armor reveals graffiti, thin and worn scrawls in pen declaring past visitors. I added my name once, joining myself to the dozen or so who left their own traces. I imagine someone coming years later and seeing all the names in a different context, when the building is abandoned and broken down.

basement animals

The basement walls in my building are made of gray concrete. As they dried, they were held up by long wooden planks; you can still see the imprint of wood grain that lingered when the concrete hardened and the boards were pulled away. Years of wear have required patches of new, darker gray concrete to be applied to hide cracks and deformities. The patches hide the wood grain pattern and assume shapes that you recognize if you're down there smoking a cigarette and thinking.

An eagle with two heads soars on an updraft over a lion that roars up at him, standing on his hind legs and wishing that he, too, were flying. A man at a desk is working so hard that he isn't aware of a large, furry tarantula that is descending on him silently. There is a huge prehistoric lizard ponderously loping across a cold gray river. Florescent garage lights stand witness to the soundless parade, casting small shadows over the textured surface.

I wonder what they do when they close the carport door, when the building is locked and dark, when I am not there to see them.

good morning, horse

I had to fuss with the lock to get my key out of it, like always. It never seems to want to let go. Maybe it's caught on to my own reluctance to leave the house for the trek to work and is just trying to help me out. The weather has been warm and muggy since the rain stopped, and outside is a vibrant spectrum of greens buzzing with all sorts of life that seems just as confused as I am at the damp and relatively cool Texas summer.

Still groggy and grumpy, I walked down the sidewalk toward the parking lot. There's a little valley next to the walkway at the back of the complex that is covered in grass, sloping downward towards a drainage stream. The kind of place you'd have picnics if the drainage was a real stream and not stagnant runoff. Right there, partially obscured by the willow tree and not ten feet from me, was a horse. All the way there, in the back of my apartment complex, in the middle of Dallas. A horse.

I waved as I walked by, and he stood there calmly and regarded me from the shade. I had to hurry or I'd be late for work, so I didn't stop, though I'm almost convinced I never woke up at all.