Bloated

Bloated. Eight blinis, two boiled eggs and a packet of ramen poking out here and there between thin muscles stretched over a pushed out belly. Pushed.

Stretched wallet over a beer and two eggs and a packet of ramen. The money comes slower than the food. At least the chickens keep laying.

Slow steps in slow rain drops and tarps pulled loosely over grassy bales, heavy and heavier with rain.

A night of breath-rite strips and the smell of a late night slim jim snack, snuck, sneaked in a bag from the land of the slim jim, that little packet collecting what's left, coagulated loveliness, coerced into slim little packets of salt and spice.

A burp. Two shakes of the pepper had been enough. One would have done it. One here, one strip across the nose, opening the senses to a days worth of collected smells, seeping slowly into blankets and carpets and curtains, curling about the floor and settling into clothes unfolded, unstacked.

Curled in one place, one solid space, one clear path of air and roadway dust--air for brain, air for dreams, light falling from stars falling from falling grace and--

Scrolling

I lost an edge. Somewhere, in between the monitor-lit nights of scrolling. Somewhere there we lost that tone of adventure, that heaviness of Technicolor painted across swathes of sky too vast to be contained.

We oo and ah at the latest advances in screen technology.

HD sharp enough to cut your retina they say.

Your life won’t be complete without 60” of wall covered by our screen…no 70”…why not make it 105? And we are impressed.

And we cheer. And we roll out in the millions to place 60” windows on our inner walls, noting the grass stains and stitching on the butts of tightly clad balls of muscle called football players.

Windows to worlds we label reality, hoping, hoping that this larger-than-life-sized scripted reality would shine its light deep into our living rooms, bathing the couch in dreams we thought real. Dreamed real. Desperately pleaded to be real.

Has the irony not yet dropped? Is it still falling like the way the glass in the screen is falling, its viscosity unnoticed and unperceived until our eyeballs have fused with eyelids and we’re lying in our Sunday best below the sweet grass, grass in RD—Real Definition—that unabashed yet unproclaiming earth?

Does the sky not stretch beyond five-feet? Can we capture it in a room?

Does your child not sparkle with ten-trillion pixels in every smile? Can we capture it in a lipstick commercial?

Does the air not move past your skin in euphoric unbridled chaos? Can we capture it in a box fan?

Where does interruption end and production begin? Where do light flickering shadows leave their mark? Where can my fingers be worn by the reigns of a coaxed beast and not by the scrolling of a little rubber wheel, promising me the world?

Going back to what was

The campus looked wildly different. The old student union had been demolished and the new one was raised a hundred yards back and off the center of campus, opening up the campus mall in a sea of fresh cement and plant life. The muddy little creek that used to run by the parking lot now flowed through the mall.

Inside the student center everything looked fresh as well. It even smelled fresh. As He made my way along the hallways, he discovered that everything was still called the same thing, but nothing looked the same. “The Cabin,” a dark and dusty windowless lounge reminiscent of an old dive bar was now pushed out to the exterior.

He made his way over to the library to at least physically orient himself to something that was the same. Same bricks, same layout, even most of the same paintings were still on the wall. Yet here there were small nuanced changes, like exercise rooms in the center of the library floors sporting an elliptical, a treadmill and a bicycle. “Mind & Body Fitness” it said on the door.

Many of the buildings indeed were the same from his days there at the turn of the century. Yet he found that none of the old feelings were. None of those feelings of timidity or bashfulness. He realized he was no longer afraid to succeed. Afraid to simply approach life and say, “Hey.”

He used to dread the thought of approaching someone, afraid of pushing out over new ground and opening a conversation. Afraid to open his own weaknesses and shortcomings to the cutting edge. Afraid to let that block of wood be touched by the sharp blade that would loosen the masterpiece within. Those days where he sat hunched, defending himself against the knives that wanted to cut away the corners and chip away the dross—the very things that held him captive inside its walls.

Even as he was afraid of success, he was afraid of failure. Afraid of what it would do to him if he tried and came up short. So instead he never got started.

He was suddenly overcome with the desire to go back. To wipe out the dreams that haunted him—the ones where he showed up to class to discover he had missed half the semester and was now receiving a failing grade. The ones where five years had simply slipped away and vanished.

He would open those nightmares to reality. Ground them in the truth. Drown them in movement. Create in time a physical reality that would stick, even in his dreams.

A look

He held it for awhile and then looked out over the dying hill. Exhaling he could just make out the swirl of dusty air that quickly unfurled like a flag being lifted in a breeze.

Groundness

No one knew where the turnings would take him. Not above, not below, though maybe just to that point where sinking, sputtering, the world would spin and ebb and flow and he'd travel just that like--half in and half out, bobbing along in the currents circling a full earth. Many were like that, adventures that is, like that full circle, or full Y, drifting that way then rounding back and moving off again to return years later to familiar waters, old haunts, packed ground trod by the footfalls of a million others and yet beneath it all still recognizing his own faded impressions upon the soft ground.

It's hard to make yourself return. It's hard to retrace and recover ground you thought you'd never lose. What is it that makes us yearn for the old patterns of our thoughts, the ruts we thought we had finally pressed on and over, the ones where we had worked up the courage to climb out of the trench and force our feet over contested ground, the bullets whizzing and popping over our heads. How do we make ourselves look back down that hill once gained and see the bodies we left behind, the ones we said we'd never leave, even if we had to drag them over miles of enemy ground? Sometimes we look back and see our own body lying there and are glad it died, glad it left itself among the thousands of others who also fell on that hill, on that battle ground. Glad we could let our souls leave the once occupied shell that we thought we could never leave, never escape.

Pushing on made him feel better. Better but with that tinge that always starts in the bottom of the gut and works its way to the edges of temples, raising microscopic hairs like the planting of a flag on newly captured ground. Missing, if for nothing else, familiarity.

Infintesimalarity

And then I knew one. Not realized, but one, standing, eating breakfast, wearing her hair in a braid, in a scrunchie maybe, maybe even lying in the arms of another maybe, maybe praying with bowed head, with eyes that shone through closed lids and lashes kissing the sky. Sky above me, sky above her, the same sky, sky the same but from different angles – she sees it one way, and I, I another. Yet living, walking, churning out dashes of movement behind us, show us where we have been and zooming out, stretching back can be seen the paths growing ever closer, winding over oceans, maybe pausing for a moment before they waltz and spin and buzz like a bee out across fields and plains under oak trees and ashen skies, twirling and pining and perched on the edge of rocks we feel that same earth that grows under our feet, standing firmly planted now, for an age or now, then on our final paths, jaws set, hands curled in fists of purpose, hands effecting the change on the world, a world changing and melting in our paths, land hewn in two by movement to where we both shall meet in a final and wondrous crash…

Does that comfort you, knowing the world is small, and all horizons curl over one and the same earth, like a scoop of butterscotch ice cream, ever melting smaller, hope growing stronger, knowing time pushes all things into one microscopic moment? Does that pique your curiosity, ravage your brain, dispel all half-truths and release all captured moments intaglioed in classics to dance across the imagination, and swirling there and growing until overflowing the small cups we sip at tea?

The end of the world

He stood in the yard, engulfed in a deep fog. The red hill stood somewhere in the thick, looming larger unseen. It was easy to imagine this as the end of the world, and in a way it was – the end in the middle, where all ends meet, pushing their way up tall mountains and settling finally in a valley. Small orbs of light seeped into the air from neighbors’ houses, a network of lights, connected to the neighbors beyond, finally dying out at the edge of the village.

A chill settled in, the kind of chill that quivered the deep tissues in his chest. His exhaled breath rose for a moment, then dropped like a stone through water, flipping and tumbling to the bottom of a pond full of damp air. He wondered why moments like this made him feel queerly settled, like the days could roll on and he would be content to stand, stand unchanging and unchanged, waking in the morning, hauling out the waste water, filling it again, running cold water over hands in a basin, emptying, filling, trudging to school, lolloping home, a circle of being, being in this cloud sunk into the village ground.