De-spair

I lay there with sparkling glass all about me.  The sun could blind a living eye with this glaring prism of light that is alive itself.  Concrete is warm as leather-soled shoes stop on the sidewalk across the street.  Cigarette butts, gum wrappers, and spent leaves lay around me.  A paper cup with orange and yellow flowers sealed beneath cracking wax is blown against the curb under his paused foot.  The wing-tip is untied and has a hole in the great toe.  A white sock peeks out, surveying the air.  A lost pebble under the ball of his foot nears him to craziness.  No briefcase to put down before he sits to the curb.  No hat to tamp against gravity before he leans over to remove the stone.  My eyes see him but my brain just lets him be.

The metal taste in my mouth is like a penny hidden under the tongue.  I can’t spit it out.  He looks at me like he’s done something wrong.  Hair flutters in his eye, then mine.  And mine.  Sand from the concrete presses into my cheek as he examines his sock.  His mother doesn’t know where he is.  Mine thinks I’m at work.  Of course, she’s thought the same thing for years, or weeks on end; at day’s end.  Days end.  For that’s where I was.  When I was.  When I was there, the world spun as it does now.  It still spins.  The world spins still; it spins not moving, still.  If you can know something like that, I guess that’s what it was doing, when I was, and doing.  A feather, still.  His old tweed jacket has holes in its holes.  Cigarette burns in the arms with the lining appearing without.

My ears still ring; the blood yet flows through the tiny capillaries near the surface of my skin; it is still warm.  It tingles when a car drives by.  A truck makes it louder.  And, he sits, not knowing what to do.  The wheels on the chair spun for only a few seconds.  They were startled, too.  And the glass, it was whole and unnoticed when it was clean.  Now it’s lost its pane and its absence draws a crowd.  It is scared, fallen to pieces, broken near into sand.  Lost.  He sees the people looking down to the street.  He sees the clouds crawl past the horizon.  The building leans toward him so he rises and looks about.  Not away.  She thinks I’m at work.  He saw me fall silently to the street.  That pain is gone.  That pain has severed the feelings that had been severed so long ago.  Happiness fled itself.  And drawn away.  It screamed as I walked past, “Come here!”  Don’t leave.  Go away.  The grit in the street crunched beneath his foot as the siren’s car approached.  It left whole for another place, its tail following behind.  The tiny hairs picking up the static dust.  The lint and fiber of nonsense.  Nonsence.  Nonsents.  Non-scents.  Non-cents, he went bankrupt.  Fell out of life.  I fell to the street.  He just fell out of life.  And went away.  They are lost.  Do you look around?  Does it sparkle in other places too?

The clouds are lowering a story at a time.  Birds flew past the ledges without second thinking.  They dropped their things in flight and landed in other places.  We’re not the same.  The chair flew out and took me with it.  Anger seized, seized, seized, seased, ceased, teased, teized, seized me.  In a rage the clouds swept me up.  They tossed me higher and crashed me harder than clouds should.  So friendly when viewed from the park grass.  They threaten nobody there.  So soft, like cotton candy – over-used simile.  In the end.

His split finger-nails had been chewed down to the quick.  Dirty fingers housed the nails and brushed the hair out of my face.  The flattened side of my head didn’t feel flat; it didn’t ache either.  I saw ants on the sidewalk, undisturbed they were.  Undisturbed they were before I saw them, too.  I had hidden in the bathroom, sat there so long that my legs had nightmares.  The fan overhead drowned-out the speakers on the wall.  The walls heard the speakers, but they didn’t listen.  They kept on standing there, fastened, undisturbed, too.  As dust falls, it sees its friends lying about, keeping a place for anybody else who might happen to drop in.  They collect, one by one.  Slowly there is a film of their bodies, covering whatever they touch.  Are they happy?  Water washes them away.  They’re weak.  The chair just took me like I was weak too.  I only meant to hurl it at the window; then it grabbed my tight, angry fingers.  White knuckles tensed the blood away.  The weight just took me like I was weak, too.

I smell vinegar from the mustard on his fingers.  There is some yellow, too.  The breeze replaces my hair.  The breeze misplaces my hair.  Our moms ought to get together.  His doesn’t know where he is, mine thinks I’m at work.  I succeeded today.  Now I’ll nev

*****

This is a Favorite re-post from September, 2009.

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