Angel City Revisited
She likes to do her laundry at 4:30 in the morning while a light rain falls through the full-length street level window. Watching sidewalks slowly turn slate gray. People pass by in a hurry, shields pointing upwards protecting them from light, protecting them from life. She's never owned an umbrella. The shelves in her apartment are filled with old and well thumbed atlases. On almost every page you'll find black ink tracing interstates like arm veins. Trips long past, trips never taken. The few friends she had would describe her as silent, if anything. But they don't know about the long and random conversations she has with grocery clerks, security guards, janitors. People you're not supposed to know anything about. Fast food places will no longer deliver to her apartment because the deliverymen always come back late, if they come back at all. There's something about these winding talks that spurs people to movement, that hits a migratory vulnerability in the center of the chest and the back of the brain. Her talking will turn you into a grenade. You might go on for two or three days like nothing happened. Sooner or later it will hit you. You won't be able to sleep because your bed is too comfortable. The surrounding rooms close in, comforting, much too comforting, pulling the light out of you. You'll start to sever all attachments without even knowing it. Wear marks appear in your carpet. And one day you just go off, and then you land. Shrapnel in the sand. Maybe they think she's going with them, though she never says anything of the sort. Never says anything at all, really. She won't cry with an audience, and even alone it's slow. Never the pressure release of a broken dam, but rather dropped ice melting slowly on the sidewalk. Like she's holding something back, but she's not. She's never held anything back. Things simply don't come. She has photo albums full of people she's never met. Pictures clipped carefully from the back pages of third rate magazines. Wallet and frame families smiling vacantly at empty space. People that don't belong to her.
people that never will
people that never will