Reverie /

From some long-lost Monday

It's only when the words won't come, a settling filter of dust, lost particles of thought vanishing upwards in the glazed-over light.  It's that time of morning, the brief and sudden flash of energy and then back to exhaustion; the dissipated idea atomized into the same particles of boredom. Not boredom, exactly, but a kind of frustrated recklessness, compounded by the temperature inside and the way the sun never really rose because of the clouds. This typewriter thing, it can happen anywhere, even two thumbs can click together some kind of fantasy, half-awake and slouching.  And I saw them staring so hard at each other from across the train that I thought they would break, typewriter and all. The loving and the hurting in their eyes, I shook off; it was too heavy. A thousand possible meanings to carry silently in a day, wondering and wondering.

Chroniques New-Yorkaises

États-Désunis

À la fin les mensonges ne me font plus peur....

Yet somehow this is never true, not yet, not here, gliding past the same landscape over and over again, rumbling train of yesterday through swamps that remind me of nothing but those summers we spent together, sleeping at your mother’s house and the way we explored your hometown as if it were a distant land covered in castles that beonged to us.  But the suburban mythologies drift by, my thoughts drift out the window although it’s sealed against the fresh air.  Shivering for hours inside this corridor of napping and delusions, overheard conversations and frustration.  If only all the houses and trees looked differently, perhaps my mind would allow us to remain whole.  But instead I am seized by the speed with which we plummet forward, or sideways, or south.  What decay can take place with such velocity?

Seized by a familiar anxiety, I slump backwards and begin to rest.  My shallow breathing is an attempt to cut off oxygen, maybe I can freeze time in this freezing train.  

I remember noticing the raindrop inpurities in the glass on the subway on my way here.  It was as if it had melted, once, and congealed again in a dozen perfect round bumps on the window.  The boy beyond the glass returned my gaze, but he didn’t know that I was admiring the tiny distortions created by the refractions behind him, not the perfect shape of his Bengali eyes.

So many disparate thoughts; the lightness I feel when I am far away, pursued by someone else with a lot to prove, the sunlight on the train and the gazes of strangers:  I refuse them all.  

And what about all the things people say to each other, unconsciously, over a beer or some other agent of oblivion? Those phrases that flash back the next day for no more than a moment; the space between an inhale and an exhale.  Then they’re gone, a waste of time, last night’s arbitrary posturing. 

Some spaces are so vast that one can even hear the echoes of time reverberating between the trees, stretching back and forth until the landscape is distorted, pulled like a dredge across what was the incredibly smooth surface of a lake.  Rippling and damaged, these places crease and change, their planes bent and folded into increasingly abstract forms.  A forest of regret springs up in the crevice, and soon dies away, leaves fading fast-forward into dust.  I am always walking through such a landscape, sometimes in the city, where the often-round sky transforms into a trapezoid, perched upon some building.  Nobody notices that the surface holding up the clouds suddenly has a sharp edge simply because they assume the sky is round, like always.  

But we aren’t in a city at all, so from what depths are these images surfacing?  We are on a train, or I should say, I am on a train, cutting through fields on either side of the tracks and creating an imperceptible breeze miles away.  But my mind is wandering across those very fields, maybe it is really my mind that creates the imperceptible breeze, despite the fact that I cannot tell what temperature it is outside since the windows are still sealed against everything.  All the front porches proclaim that I’m in the South, some houses even have cabbage patches and every so often I pass a farm, black cows roaming in the space so vast that one can even hear the echoes of...

The light sifts through leaves of trees, settling and making them transparent.  Years ago I was a child, somewhere in Maine I was alone again, waiting outside a motel.  Some time later I was shivering at the train station in my hometown, my mother was late to pick me up...

My mind is climbing all these trees, countless trees and vines and leaves, fluttering like green butterflies, millions of them flying all at once to create the mirage of one whole tree, shimmering in the deserted expanse of my mind.  Cathedral of green butterflies all glittering at once, stained-glass windows shattering and coming back together soundlessly.  The faintest friction of moth-wings, nighttime flying across this tall and bright place. And these are only the visible things!  Just think, with everything else that’s there, think about the summertime we could build!  I keep saying we, but really it’s just me.  Maybe if I could find you, in whatever life, maybe in ten thousand years we would build this world together, as we did when we were children, or when you were a child and I was nothing but a thought.  And now, all the forgetting in the world does not erase those precious days some years ago, kept in my pockets like sand from the last day at the beach at the end of the summer.  

It is something like when I used to go to my family’s house in Ohio, as a child.  Nobody else had ever lived in that house except our family, so the smell of my own family, that combination of clean laundry dried on a clothesline, warmth, and dust from the attic used to permeate every room.  The beams of the house infused our clothes with it, and when my brother and I would stay for a few weeks, we all started to smell the same; Aunts, Uncles, cousins, and my dad, who carried the warm scent of that house with him always.  After some weeks, when it was time to go, Aunt Susan would hand us neatly folded stacks of our clothes.  I would always carefully wrap one shirt deep in the folds of everything else, and avoid wearing it for as long as possible, so that when I sat in my room alone at night or on a lonely summer afternoon, I could take the shirt out from a drawer and inhale that house; a summertime spent in the soft arms of family.