we woke up to an astronaut kidnapping, “how future is that?”



Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

As I hung up the phone, the silence bloomed and spread petals of unease, beautiful enough to be mistaken for a memory. Art film freeze frame on a slow pan scanning the room. I let out a breath, banishing the illusion, in an attempt to force my sharp disappointment to fade. It didn’t work, instead it settled deeper into my belly, as if I had been eating something bitter.

Then Shane called and kicked my sorry ass. The beginning of the end. It was a terrible time to be at the party.

I get out of the cab, familiar in my city, trying not to wish myself elsewhere, trying not to transform the crowd around me into strangers, the cars into rickshaws, the breath in my body into words of goodbye. I turn around, refuse to walk in the opposite direction, but do. I fall into the flow, swing my eyes away and forward. The yellow car is eventually lost in traffic.

Once moving, the ghost of old poets take me and I understand, finally, how a person could walk into the ocean, how they could continue walking, slicing into the waves like a knife, until there is nothing but water.