back to writing.
It hits you sometime after the white-collards, half drunk off of boardroom-discussion martinis and self-dissatisfaction, switch from daytime running lights to night beams on the lazy drive home. A moment’s glance captures a reflection on the dashboard, spattering the secondhand light from traffic signals across your cornea like the star-shaped eye of polished moonstone.
It hits you as the music plays. A sound, a signal, a seemingly painless penetration of melody that, while you’ve heard it eight million times on road trips and at parties-not frat parties, but the intimate get-togethers involving unwatched movies and unfinished drinks, and far too much conversation-this certain song suddenly becomes the moth fluttering in your face.
Caterpillars were never this annoying.
But the cocoon is as reusable as a broken match on a wet cigar, and the creature has already had a taste of flight. There’s no going back.
And so it hits you.
The capillaries shallowly hidden under your skin burst to life. A momentary warmth spreads from the base of your spine to your face, a blush. Not a blush of embarrassment, but of the feeling that you’ve been caught with a secret, with the knowledge that at that moment, in that car, driving down Windsor Avenue to the light at 24th, you are alive. And the song you sang not five minutes earlier is now unsingable, because whenever the chorus iterates a second time, your voice drops out like a penny down a dry well, and tears slowly gather at the inner corners of your eyes as every tendril of muscle in your back turns lax.
The masculine form of crying. Grasp the steering wheel more tightly while losing control.
It is a confusing sort of ecstasy mixed with deep sadness and solitude and appreciation of the moment. It is the taste of liqueur stolen during childhood. A sweet intoxication that requires watering down the rest of the bottle to keep it a secret from the world. A taste of poison to detoxify the larger whole.
And death tastes good to a foreign tongue.
Hold on.
Recombine the two faces of the half. This 2nd-person indulgence with the displaced narrator, the “I”, reluctant to emerge for fear of being found lacking. You can never be sure that your most original thoughts are creative; you never know when the stoic watchman will let down his guard, and your conscience will reveal your innovative perceptions as merely the recycled pieces of another. Don’t betray your inspirations. Save the trouble. Use “You”. Blame the reader for your plagiarisms. Fill him out with your frailties and strengths and burn him down with no consequence.
A self made effigy. Vulnerability smoldering at the stake.
Afterwards, all you find is teeth and tin cans, batteries thrown in by short-term campfire kids. Brilliant bits that shine in the sun amongst a sea of clean gray cinders. Eye catching, even attractive, to all those who never saw these artifacts before the blaze, when these glints of metal were part of a greater whole, not just the surviving pieces of past-year parties.
Not frat parties. The intimate kind.
I am nothing but teeth and tin cans.
It hits you as the music plays. A sound, a signal, a seemingly painless penetration of melody that, while you’ve heard it eight million times on road trips and at parties-not frat parties, but the intimate get-togethers involving unwatched movies and unfinished drinks, and far too much conversation-this certain song suddenly becomes the moth fluttering in your face.
Caterpillars were never this annoying.
But the cocoon is as reusable as a broken match on a wet cigar, and the creature has already had a taste of flight. There’s no going back.
And so it hits you.
The capillaries shallowly hidden under your skin burst to life. A momentary warmth spreads from the base of your spine to your face, a blush. Not a blush of embarrassment, but of the feeling that you’ve been caught with a secret, with the knowledge that at that moment, in that car, driving down Windsor Avenue to the light at 24th, you are alive. And the song you sang not five minutes earlier is now unsingable, because whenever the chorus iterates a second time, your voice drops out like a penny down a dry well, and tears slowly gather at the inner corners of your eyes as every tendril of muscle in your back turns lax.
The masculine form of crying. Grasp the steering wheel more tightly while losing control.
It is a confusing sort of ecstasy mixed with deep sadness and solitude and appreciation of the moment. It is the taste of liqueur stolen during childhood. A sweet intoxication that requires watering down the rest of the bottle to keep it a secret from the world. A taste of poison to detoxify the larger whole.
And death tastes good to a foreign tongue.
Hold on.
Recombine the two faces of the half. This 2nd-person indulgence with the displaced narrator, the “I”, reluctant to emerge for fear of being found lacking. You can never be sure that your most original thoughts are creative; you never know when the stoic watchman will let down his guard, and your conscience will reveal your innovative perceptions as merely the recycled pieces of another. Don’t betray your inspirations. Save the trouble. Use “You”. Blame the reader for your plagiarisms. Fill him out with your frailties and strengths and burn him down with no consequence.
A self made effigy. Vulnerability smoldering at the stake.
Afterwards, all you find is teeth and tin cans, batteries thrown in by short-term campfire kids. Brilliant bits that shine in the sun amongst a sea of clean gray cinders. Eye catching, even attractive, to all those who never saw these artifacts before the blaze, when these glints of metal were part of a greater whole, not just the surviving pieces of past-year parties.
Not frat parties. The intimate kind.
I am nothing but teeth and tin cans.