You are currently browsing the monthly archive for June, 2007.
Maybe we’ll spend the rest of the season drinking coffee too late in the evening, watching and chasing the space station through the crisp darkness, talking about skies without roofs, and giving curt farewells while making small dents in our memory.
Yesterday was full of sensations that one usually only encounters on rare occasions, and when they do appear they form small pockets in the day that come on like a dull headache. To experience many in one day? A definite head(heart)ache.
The look of intense anger and passive frustration written all over a face, seeing a pair of brown eyes that seem to have walked out of a photograph, a summer mid-morning that smelled like the last day of school, the look of the sand by the lake hanging about in great mounds beneath the swings, the sound of a voice with the smallest undercurrent of being disturbed, a hand running down my arm after a hug, the blue twilight permeating the van as we almost glided, the feeling of the evening air washing over my face as city lights passed by drowning in the first crepuscular stages, the feeling of crying creeping into my throat as I lashed out against what I’m fighting, being wrapped in my down comforter and imparting deep fears and wonderings that I let next to no one ever hear…
Just small things that wrap together to become some kind of bittersweet whisper.
Why are you back in the kitchen?
Some might say I don’t give people enough credit. On the other hand, I think people tend to give themselves too much credit.
I’m sitting on my front porch at about 9pm. The warm, clean, summer air wraps itself around me for a moment, and then soars up to keep the heavens above me alive. The lines of flowers in the yard and the outlines of the trees from the forest across the street have deep blue light falling softly down them. There are firecrackers going off in the distance. Besides the occasional car that drives by, the evening is completely unadulterated. Just the wind; the warmth.
What I can say right now is that I’m better. Not so much better as in better from a sickness, more alike to a better state of being. I’ve finally thrown away a part of me I should have gotten rid of a long time ago, and I’m starting to get the threads in my life unknotted and back into organized ribbons.
We all have to be arsons of ourselves; otherwise there’d be no such thing as progress.
I have a feeling that a lot will change soon. It’s like the first act of the summer is over, and we’re in the middle of switching scenes. Some characters will leave the play forever, others will reappear, even more will reappear as phantoms; those from the past that play such small parts that you can hardly remember they ever showed up again.
And so it goes.
A conversation I had with my boss this morning was a catalyst for the play allusion. I stopped in to grab the camera to take pictures of our new employees. He asked how my graduation party went last weekend. I told him it was good.
“Lots of people, lots of food–”
“Lots of gifts, money.” He interrupted.
“Hah, yes, lots of gifts and money.”
“It was odd to see all of my little worlds all together in one place.”
After that the conversation went on for a while, talking how the change in people close to you is drastic between his age and mine, and just general retrospect as to people in our lives.
A couple of weeks back I was at a bonfire at Alex’s house hanging out with some friends on a Friday night. We wasted our time burning old school papers, playing Euchre on a makeshift table made of an old, wet door and a wheelbarrow, and letting the heat of the fire burn one side of as the other side froze.
“It’s sad.” I said, sitting with Stephen against a tree.
“Hmm?” He asked with his throat.
“In five to ten years I won’t know any of you.”
I looked to the boy sitting next to me, and then corrected myself.
“Well–most of you.”
There was immediate protest. I heard Alex say:
“I don’t know about you, but I’m not planning on going anywhere.”
Ah, and if it were only that easy? To not go anywhere. To keep our lives small, to awake from the night and not be shaken up by dreams, to not let people explode. Never let our souls grow restless, or school and our jobs partake of more of our life than we do. To always sit by bonfires with highschool friends burning away pieces of ourselves; watch softball games with no bases; skate on little ice rinks made by the city in the park in the Winter; and in the summer sit on our front porches, breathing and writing until daybreak.
I don’t know about you, but I wish I wasn’t going anywhere.
