Opening to the first page of a book while waiting for the subway. Abiding uneasiness creeping inside me. Hot, sunny outside. Holding a card from a nearby Mexican restaurant to use as a bookmark.
Reading, it begins, "On the August night in 1933..." and my mind darkens. I look up. What I see is an evenly lit subway platform, dingy and filthy, barely populated at this time of day on a Monday. People stand calmly, waiting, bored, eyelids heavy from being in the sun.
So my mind isn't darkening, but slowly growing creepy in a familiar way. Something in me rises formlessly. I feel mist climbing evenly from a wide trench, somewhere behind my back.
"I've spent a lot of time in that part of life," I remember an old poet once saying to me slowly with a fixed smile, as we stood in her kitchen. A fixed smile of openness, a fixed smile of boundaries. A fixed smile like a fence or a cloud, levitating. What is important but a stone, or a person like a stone, existing for thousands of years.
The wind blows,
my eyebrows,
distracted now.
I have dropped a lot of things in the garbage. In these ideal moments, I feel like I'm running free. Seems as if everything would fall into place through this tunnel, this thick tornado, wind and garbage.
Later, on the sidewalk, walking to work, I think of a hand reaching out from a hole, twisting to grab the surface and pull it inside. "I'm afraid to die."
What does everybody else do? Sometimes you see it glance off them, a bright flicker, something to get away from.
My shadow, cast in front of me on the pavement, evaporates into a dot.
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