Sometimes I am just trapped under the fucking sky.
A speculum of sweating and oath-making, expectations for anomalies, anomalies of expectations.
Many years ago I tried to put something into writing. It became a performance of mourning, then muted, then mutated, then an initiation into another stage of mourning, a steep slope of late-morning haze and tears and learning to pronounce words that describe more precisely the un-blueness of the night sky after the sun has set.
The sun has set.
And here under its cushioning and smothering mania, marbled onrush of clouds, and to avoid all the confusion I stare ahead while driving then snap random photos of the outside with the windows rolled down. The sleep slope leading down to the river, to the shore, home.
The sky is vast and infinite and impoverished and oppressive and it is awe-inducing and beautiful and petty and devastating.
Here’s the thing: I don’t know what I want.
I also don’t have the energy to keep trying again and again. My heart is sore and tired.
A lot of what is said, I can’t ever trust again.
There is a past that I can’t ever trust again, and the devastation of multiple and repeated devastations, the abuses on a heart, just can’t ever be forgiven or forgotten. A tennis racket leaning against the wall. Words. That’s where I lived once. Among words. And after it all, I am a different person, happy, perhaps, but stretched across this city in a different way.
It is today.
I am glad it is today and not yesterday.
Today I melted in the heat and then was put back together again. Today I clung to hope and then was ravaged by it.
Today I expected nothing and fell flat like the sky, separated sky from water, heat clinging to my skin and a knock at the door like an interrupted scene.
Today we will all linger in our dreams for a little bit longer. We are not ready to wake up yet.
One must sweat first before initiating any contact with a ghost. It is the heat that cements the pact, muted voices unmuted by touch and heat and speculation on the color of the sky.
Last night the sky was stretched out wide, open, moving, laying on the sand next to you as the water rushed loudly and car headlights attempted to break the silence of the sky. We could see the stars and the sky and the stars in between the stars, and in the prolonged gaze upon that vast out-there, we could see it all moving, turning, rotating, blinking in and out of existence. The sky moves and we tremble. The sky moves and we sleep. The sky moves and often, we don’t notice, but when we do, it is a reminder of the promptness of the universe, that it all continues to move whether or not we notice, whatever speed we are moving in our every day.
Can you remember the anomalous quotation marks in the sky, the repetition of stars and patterns that stroked against one another and asked to be connected.
Of course we connected the dots, you say.
How could we not, I say.
And in this exchange more hope and stringing of lights around trunks of palm trees. Listening to Bad Religion and the image of palm trees as candles.
Keep reminding me how you feel. Reminders are necessary.
Highlights of clinging.
A clinging species.
Sand.
Let me know that you can imagine the future too. That I am not alone in hoping for the possibility of a future. That you can see past today and tomorrow and wonder about the beyond. Together.
Let me know that you might walk down that steep slope with me, wherever it goes, and in the cold or heat, letting the sweat cement any words that might be uttered in a gentle breeze.
Remarks repeated. And again, the heat. Trapped under it all.
We are bound by it.
The sky.
And that is all there is to it.
