city skeleton

Every night, I drive by tall cranes hovering over the skeletons of a new shopping center. Red lights blink from the motionless beams, the cables hang slack, waiting for the return of their operators the next morning. Beneath these sleeping builders I see concrete and steel forming repeating geometry, the structure that will support the finished tower unseen - holding up the hallways created by cubicles, behind the walls with bland art, forming the basement delivery bay. It almost seems embarrassed with its innards laid bare, eager for the workers to return and continue stacking and forming the massive concrete frame and ready to house people in their desk jobs and busy shoppers underneath.

Driving by at night, I wish construction would stop. Frozen like this, I want to explore the construction that looks suspiciously like a ruin. I want to play hide-and-seek between the pillars and climb up the steel lattices all bathed in the eerie fluorescent lights that stay on through the night.

From the road, the shadows are compelling, telling me a story of the city growing and changing. Old edifices were cleared to make room for this new complex, and someday it, too, will be cleared away. The city is always growing and dying and changing itself, always expanding. Building replicate like cells out beyond the borders, pushing and growing further as the interior constantly renews. I wonder whether these cells are normal.

a fever

I was getting chills even though the heater was on, struggling to maintain warmth in the apartment against the cold outside trying to work its way in at the seams. My stomach was swimming. There was a dull ache in my head that hurt at the corners of my eyes when I tried to look around. I stayed on the couch for about three days.

Fevers always make me consider my body too much. Laid up and trying to increase your fluid intake while getting some rest, there's not much to do but watch television shows you've seen a hundred times and become uncomfortably aware of yourself. Just the difference of a few internal degrees changes the entire world, calls to mind the real fragility with which we're all hanging on to existence. It's something marvelous and terrifying to remember how perfect the conditions have to be to support the weight of just this one consciousness. I slipped in and out of sleep those three days, fevered dreams bleeding into reality when I woke up coughing and needing more water.

I don't like the doctor. Sometimes you end up having to go whether you like it or not. He looked me over quickly, asked what was wrong, prescribed antibiotics, and then a nurse gave me a shot that almost made me faint.