it’s a lovely, but lonely kind of day. feelings, words all lining up down my spine. up? down? but that’s silly, i’m forever changing my mind, rearranging the things on my shelves, the mismatched ledges in my mind. alphabetical order, largest to smallest, date of publication—methodical ways to deny that you have humanity thrumming through your veins. nineteen years and counting. counting is one of those things you do on lovely, lonely days.
i’m not wishing for anything anymore, not drawing on anymore sidewalks with red chalk, pretending things don’t wash away in the rain and run into the gutters in colorful puddles. i’m not counting on things to last.
one, two, one hundred thousand, serenade me one hundred thousand times and perhaps after one hundred thousand and one times, i’ll feel something. one day i’ll know what to make of all these jumbled afterwords and afterthoughts and afterfeelings.
an afterglow, an afterglow of life—that’s what it is. but that’s lovely, awfully lovely and lonely. you have the vague feeling that something happened, a dream of a dream, an afterimage of the inchoate, of the things you can’t look at directly but peek at from behind your eyelids in your sleep. a blurry, impressionistic kind of chaos that up close looks like nothing—is that life? i have one of those, i’m told, running straight up and down my back.
up? down?
