i'm graduating
Eyelash. Bottle. Mother. Road. You name things and you name things and you name them again but still the words never jump the intricate wires from your eyeballs to your brain. (Wednesday). In the seven-am quiet of your complacent suburb you used to have a routine, wash, rinse, repeat. Squint your eyes so as not to see too much before you’re ready even when the alarm first cries out you feel what you look like and it’s horrible. But not today because you can’t remember how to tie your shoes. Really. Come on. It’s a fucking shoe (it looks like a tiny neon spaceship.) Shoelaces. Do it. What are these clunking shells encasing my feet? And what are feet anyways, and what is my body doing here, and how do I even know this is my body and where does my mind end and the rest of the world begin? On the bus (Thursday) you hand the bus driver these bills all crinkled from your pocket and you just don’t understand in the deep wet fog of the morning what they are. Bouncing on fluorescent plastic you fold and unfold foreign green slips in your damp hands. Until they have no meaning. Outside bodies sway walk lumber float you can’t connect them to yourself. People getting in and out of cars, like parasites moving from host to host those great black beasts, sedans. Early hours of the morning and you’re naming things and naming them again, the English language doesn’t help you think and seriously and for the first time you wonder what would really truly happen if you fell forever crazy. Language language language. Language. Like when you repeat again the same word to yourself and no matter what it is it sounds like you sound like an alien like a child with no idea what you’re saying and for a moment you think you forgot how to speak in tongues you’ve known all your life. Just like that only with vision instead of words. Your favorite book a curious collection of paper in your hands, still damp, still creasing. (Friday) you don’t recognize your handwriting anymore it slides across the page juts at strange angles and winds its way around your skull. You know your way around as if you studied a map, friends faces full of nooks you never noticed before. A party, a collection of kids all stuffed into this one little room with holes he punched in the wall, walking there in the dark you realize the absurdity of your legs, walking there through a garden of concrete where streetlamps cast terrible descending shadows turning corners. Loud house strange music you’ve never heard but it makes you feel nostalgic. Nostalgic like your favorite chords at age 13 with braces stretched across your teeth, a swelling feeling in your chest threatening to overtake your tiny body. How do these kids make these sounds so natural, bring themselves up into this room packed with smoke and bodies? Dance because you remember how you danced, drink and remember how you drank, but really just watch and silently name things over and over and over. Couch, water, song, stairs, sex, cigarette. Even the cigarette has become incomprehensible and this is the most chilling lungs imploding and you don’t even know why. Sitting in a circle on the scratchy floor so late at night as if you’re inhabiting another world altogether, you know, so late the night detaches itself from the rest of everyone’s lives. And a boy you used to know is passing a foul-smelling brownish bluish bottle talking about reality television, oh yes you remember this, you say hey wasn’t that the guy who go aids? Yeah. Mmmm Silence. The kind of crushing silence only nights like this are capable of delivering and you touch your hair and you rub your eyes and everyone is slumped one way or another. The kid you used to know touches his hair too in a sleepy kind of way and says I think we’re all going crazy and you just stare at him he bites his lip. Its like its like its like……..someone laughs upstairs. Kid clears his throat it’s a gravelly burping sound. Says it’s like we know this is the very last time we can do things this way, it’s the end of our childhood, we can’t be, like, so careless. That’s why we’re all going crazy. And you just stare at him and he clinks that blueish brownish bottle against your knee and it’s the strangest thing you’ve ever seen, a terrible twisted composition of glass and light.