It is not impossible to siphon off a bit of brain and bobble it around, spin it and aerate it. Make the story of things as they are and serve it up yet again. Just give it a stretch, it’s not so far off from taffy to begin with.
It’s late. I am tired. I am thinking about so many things that I have not thought of in a long time. Justice, wedding dresses, walking the rest of the plank on my own. I am also choosing to set all the thoughts aside and just listen to the trickle of worries spill until I hear the thoughts behind all tIt feels somehow, at 11:30 p.m. like you are sitting on the day’s windowsill as the earthly set designers change the scenes around you. Draw in a tree and drape blue and purple leaves on its arms, pull out a curtain of evening sky and stud it with zirconia, paint the middle distance until it pulls the eye into infinity.
You’re alright. You’ll bob back up. You’ll come a’right. You’ll end up alright. You are all right right now.
It was Friday, and somewhere on the periphery, a terror, somewhere further out, a war, somewhere at the furthest of the far edges, an end.
But here, we put dresses on drunk women and send them careening down the street in new, orange-brimmed sun hats. Here we send women who might have been ourselves away empty-handed, shrugging as they offer themselves up for inspection. Found wanting, “Twenty pounds,” they assert, and I’ll be back!” No, I say to myself, you won’t. But…for a moment, we nod at one another and hope together for it. For the grand possibility of alteration that gives you some illusory sense of future satisfaction. You will if you would. If you cared to. It might in a realm of all possible outcomes. So, we try together and we don’t judge the reason we’re trying.
Isn’t it funny how the things we swore we would never do come to us so easily now as a way to get by, pass through, ease the coming and the going? We don’t question it. We just softened in our insistence until the demand to be upright is that taffy to the touch and the demand to make life go just that little bit easier is as hard as diamonds, inviolate. I’m turning into a bitch in front of our eyes.
This is growing up.
You say it won’t be like that for you, Peter Pan, but it will if you would. This is the ladder and we are the salmon. We only know what we know to know.
I wouldn’t mind you turning up now, Petro, peeking out and clambering up to sit starward with your Tinkerbell, here on the windowsill overlooking the new day. Glowing in the moonlight, near shitfaced on 100 proof belief that we exist and all is as it shall be. It shall not be, but I would not mind playing it out till the bottle breaks and the sun asserts itself once again. I wouldn’t pine so hard, I think, if you would just cut the cord betwixt us and let the lie be the blade. But some time ago you insinuated, you inveigled, you turned up. Now, I have truth and a long chain on this particular manacle. And a key in my hand if ever I care to run away from it all.
I will, Peter, when I care to. I will.
