when I'm done with it.
I watch the news and feel like they must be making a mistake. The weatherman says a cold front is coming in, shows blue swirls moving across the ocean and reaching the state of Florida. He says in a serious and hopeful voice that the high is not going to "exceed eighty-five degrees" and the people in the city are thrilled, they put their jeans on. They think that winter is coming. They zip up their jackets like they've never been fooled before, like a lack of foliage is meaningless that the marsh lands are made of Holy water, tennis courts & tumblers of crush iced.
I realize that it's time to go, that my time here has once more added up and come to an end. When the weatherman makes me feel like a teenager again & my letters to men talk about the difference between Brooklyn, OH and Brooklyn, NY I know things are ending. Some era that I created for myself, some brief period of time where I drove in an SUV to get my Starbucks coffee & I used the elliptical while watching programs about when animals attack, it was part of something that I am not part of anymore. There is a disconnect. I still answer the door and talk to the missionaries, I take all of their pamphlets and make them promises that I know I cannot keep. They roll up in wheel chairs with crippled children and I look them in the eyes, swearing to God.
It doesn't mean the time was wasted, it doesn't mean that the time was spent poorly. I feel grounded in other places. Men worry about my wanderlust. I remind myself that long distance phone calls are just phone calls, after all. It was important to pump out those words and be the vessel for that piece of work. To read all the books I could about railroads and the men that built them, about the towns that were burned down and about the feral children who were raised by wolves. No, it's not a metaphor for anything, I am reading books where children are abandoned in the wilderness and then they are raised by a wild pack of family dogs, two great apes or sometimes gazelles. I am making footnotes on the side lines about how these children could never be taught how to speak, that they could barely learn language. That all the cases end the same. That in retrospect the narrative does not refer to them by name but by case number. I read about psychopaths, go through the checklist. I write down names, make charts, stop looking at my vision board. I take the dog to the park & I read the paper. I clip coupons and then never bring them to the store. I want to leave but I don't know where I am supposed to go.
Everyone died suddenly in September. The weatherman acts like that's none of his business at all. He doesn't care about my face or your face or the funerals, he wants the breeze, at night he feels like he is freezing. But I haven't been this hot in years, I'm sweating through my wife beater. I'm folding up my shorts, wanting to tell the man on the TV that I've learned so much about leaving the sunshine state & so little about where to go when I'm done with it.
I realize that it's time to go, that my time here has once more added up and come to an end. When the weatherman makes me feel like a teenager again & my letters to men talk about the difference between Brooklyn, OH and Brooklyn, NY I know things are ending. Some era that I created for myself, some brief period of time where I drove in an SUV to get my Starbucks coffee & I used the elliptical while watching programs about when animals attack, it was part of something that I am not part of anymore. There is a disconnect. I still answer the door and talk to the missionaries, I take all of their pamphlets and make them promises that I know I cannot keep. They roll up in wheel chairs with crippled children and I look them in the eyes, swearing to God.
It doesn't mean the time was wasted, it doesn't mean that the time was spent poorly. I feel grounded in other places. Men worry about my wanderlust. I remind myself that long distance phone calls are just phone calls, after all. It was important to pump out those words and be the vessel for that piece of work. To read all the books I could about railroads and the men that built them, about the towns that were burned down and about the feral children who were raised by wolves. No, it's not a metaphor for anything, I am reading books where children are abandoned in the wilderness and then they are raised by a wild pack of family dogs, two great apes or sometimes gazelles. I am making footnotes on the side lines about how these children could never be taught how to speak, that they could barely learn language. That all the cases end the same. That in retrospect the narrative does not refer to them by name but by case number. I read about psychopaths, go through the checklist. I write down names, make charts, stop looking at my vision board. I take the dog to the park & I read the paper. I clip coupons and then never bring them to the store. I want to leave but I don't know where I am supposed to go.
Everyone died suddenly in September. The weatherman acts like that's none of his business at all. He doesn't care about my face or your face or the funerals, he wants the breeze, at night he feels like he is freezing. But I haven't been this hot in years, I'm sweating through my wife beater. I'm folding up my shorts, wanting to tell the man on the TV that I've learned so much about leaving the sunshine state & so little about where to go when I'm done with it.