smoke and colored glass

Sunday is as good a night as any to be at the bar, to be at any bar. This Sunday I was at the Amsterdam, five Crown and Cokes and three hours in conversation with my best friend. I have one of those; I count myself among the lucky. Dim light leaks through colored glass lamps haphazardly hung throughout the bar, made tangibly warm by drifting smoke, and we pass the time talking about how nothing ever ends up how we thought it might. I worry about this frequently. Even when you can feel change coming before the first inklings of movement are made, it's hard to be prepared.

Her mom has just had a surgery and she's here on family duty. Before too long she's leaving for Seattle and I'm afraid. Growing up seems to be a matter of holding on to things that are worthwhile even as they fade out between your fingers and scatter across the country. I'm thinking of the future and forgetting about the present, and she reminds me that this is rarely fun. I let go.

We run out of cigarettes and I pay the tab. She sidles up to some other patrons and asks for a cigarette for the two of us - it's a good thing she's so charming. Someone's dog is barking as we cross the street to the car, but it's not time to go just yet. We smoke and sit on the curb, cars drive by on their way home from whatever revelry or disappointment or habit that brought them here.

Before we leave she plays me music. She's got impeccable taste and whatever she chooses is always perfect for the occasion. It's a real talent, finding and loving music this much. There's a harp and an imperfect voice that soars in chorus, choosing impossible words that make me smile. I'm looking out the windshield and I can see the highway as the sound washes over me and rolls over the concerns in my head. Lights reflect and distort through the glass, lengthening when I blink. These are the things I love most in life, this is a moment that makes it worth it. If people sing despite vocal limitations like this, with no concern but to sing, then my problems are nothing.

disappearing

I want to be so well-liked or unnoticeable that I could travel the country by couches. If I could cook like a five star chef I don't think anyone would mind me for a few days, if I sang heartfelt lyrics and played harmonica and left quietly in the night leaving nothing behind.

photograph in a history book

When the seasons start to change is when I feel the most nostalgic. The first day the air is crisp and cold and I notice the changing leaves beckoning on autumn, the call of summer-green leaves filtering the cloudy sky and the sound of cicadas. Those days where the the slow turning of seasons becomes as apparent as the passing of a minute are the ones that dig up thoughts and feelings that slept far under the surface of consciousness.

I play old songs through my headphones and drift out the window of the 13th story. The louder the music, the more real it is. The horns soar in my ears, a chorus of voices and times long past, a familiar and comfortable feeling tinged with longing rings through me. I'm never more aware of time nor more unphased by its passing. The lyrics are a eulogy, I'm dreaming wide awake in color of late night joy rides and hours passed sitting outside a coffee shop talking and whiling away the time, counting in the minutes in cigarettes and waiting for something to happen.

The day is nearly over, the sun sinking away. When I drive home I'll sing in the car.

making peace

He didn't have it in him to make it through another Texas summer. Fifteen years outside, weathering the seasons, running and sleeping, finding ways to escape the confines of the wrought iron fence, had finally taken their toll. Sounds had faded away from him in those last months, becoming distant in his ears and soon diminishing to nothing. For a dog, it seems so crippling - I wonder how he felt with the color drained out of his world, if he could even know or understand or remember hearing at all.

We bought him at the Forney chili cookoff when I was in third grade. My memories of walking around there with my friend Beverly, who had a long blond braid, and my family are indistinct at best. Clearly, though, I remember picking out a puppy at the local SPCA's table, a fiesty little brown mutt with liquid eyes. He and I grew up together. When I was young, I spent days outside playing with him, adventuring around the block, exploring the creek nearby. As I got older, I'd let him inside after the rest of the family was asleep and give him table scraps and let him curl up at my feet while I lost myself in games or the internet or acid. I wonder what he thought when I went away to college. I think he missed me.

Last week, he curled up in the most remote part of the yard he could. He must have been tired that day. Like most animals, he seemed to know it was coming - I wonder if he thought about his life and what he would remember if he could. He closed his eyes, breathed in one last breath and let it out in a long sigh.

My dad found him still and peaceful the next day. He drove what remained out to the farm and buried him under a tall pecan tree on a hill.

death of a home

My father still lives in the house I grew up in. It's in Forney, a small town that seems to have expanded exponentially every time I go back, rural fields and pastures growing up into miles of faceless suburbs. There was a new traffic light on the farm road that leads home, there's a Wal-Mart where there were acres of grass and tilled earth.

He had redecorated the living room, clearing out the furniture that sat there fifteen years and replacing it with new leather sofas and a flatscreen television. I talked about work and my words seemed hollow in my ears, echoing in the space where my mom's furniture had been. Maybe he really does miss her now that she's across town in her own place - I'll probably never really know.

We split a pizza while my brother watches television, a dim reflection of the ghosts from ten years ago. Our dog is deaf now, sweet old creature sniffs around the table for scraps and my dad gives him a crust. Around his paws and muzzle he's got white hair now, his liquid eyes seem to reflect his age. My dad tells me he hopes he won't have to put him down, and I struggle with unexpected tears pondering the poor beast's mortality. Fifteen years is a long time to be outside.

Before I go I always visit my old room. The smell of the closet dredges up old memories. A feeling of sadness seems to cover the rooms, muting the colors of carpets and painted walls, haunting me with the weight of growing up and knowing there is no going back. Today I return home with a stack of old paperbacks and a feeling of loss.

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.