the way time moves

A year. It hits me as I'm back out on the street, trying to make out lane markings on the rain-slick bible-black leaf-covered asphalt. The car skitters and all four tires loosen over the low spots, now full of water. I catch a reflection under a passing street light and expected to see someone much older, harsher around the edges.

Then the slow syncopation of that familiar beat breaks into my orbit -- a rapidly shrinking strong hold at that hour and for the amount of quiet rage transmitted from white knuckle, to steering wheel, to road. After the protracted intro his voice washes over in spoken word and I have enough this night, finally, to be able to listen and keep up the constant flow of my figure-eights around town. Instead of just parking somewhere, anywhere, and being overwhelmed. Instead of closing my eyes and indulging myself. The way his prose blends into the hook makes my heart race. At three in the morning the song is about as close to perfection as, it seems, any human could hope for. And I wonder if we would have anything in common. If I ever met him, what we would talk about.

And what I would want to say. What I do want to say. I fucked it all up, and I know that's not shocking but I think sometimes that it is, to me. As if I could somehow really have been a stoic if I had played my cards right. Been better about the strategy. That angel-vision that the poet talked about changed, and I had to alter the sculpture but it was too late. Parts of it were already too carved out in rock and dust and flesh and bone. And I know, and I know, and it's okay because I guess it makes me more like the half-boy that way. Like she wore the scarlet to remember. But still I catch myself, not always, looking down when I pass a mirror like I could just rely on the image I have locked away in my head.

At night, I am alone, and I hunt, and I am becoming pretty good at it. And it's when I feel the closest to being that finished vision; marble and dust only half-lit by the moon. For no one to see, and for that making it all the more important.

The lone wolf, again.

I shut my eyes and watched the light play back and forth in the ethereal blackness behind closed eyelids. The way it flickered and danced and chased itself over and over as I squinted into the corners of that un-sighted vision, watching it move until it vanished. His face appeared in the spiral of rods and cones, fragile as dew. I relaxed the sockets and pressed my vision into the image, only to watch as it dissolved back into itself. So familiar. I wondered where I had seen him before.

Driving around in loops (indulge me) a feeling settled down upon my shoulders, a sense of things, forever, being just a shade off. Like papers out of order, or finding a pen in the wrong place, but maybe only one slot over. Nothing of any consequence, just different. The radio queued up one of those songs and his voice told me about how hard life could be, how you had to be a fighter, and once you made it, well, you had made it. Spoken word with such reverberation that I had to park my car and close my eyes. And back into my old habit of chasing the lights, watching them flicker.

His face again, but I circled around it this time for fear that it would fly away before I even got the scent of it. I saw him standing in a shabby apartment, grey Ohio snow covered the span of strip-mall and shopping plaza just outside. The cold of it, the dampness, the bleakness so raw and endearing that you could spend your whole life on a shelf there, trying to protect that vulnerability from the harshness outside. I watched a lifetime unfold between we two strangers. The the bridge came on over car speakers, and the woman's voice bringing me back, reminding me how hard it was.

Car in drive, static obscuring thick beats, endless loops, isolation, loneliness. Summoned later to a house in utter distress, and I watched myself walk through the front door, order commands to the people in chaos inside, walk up stairs and into his room and beat on his chest for him to come back. Stay with us, you SOB, I know you can hear me. The medics came with their God juice, and meted out life in judicious and spartan doses. He died, and I was there to watch the resurrection.

And then later, alone again in the car, the feeling of the inside of that apartment heavy on my chest. In my mind I opened the door, walked out into the snow and on, and on. The lone wolf having laid claim to most of my soul. The lioness put up a small fight at first, but stuttered and stammered as she went, and in the end was just too tired. The wolf knew all along that victory is in the waiting. In the strategy of the hunt.

The night expired into the red and orange spectacle of sunrise, and I pointed the truck's nose westward, home. I thought about all of the doors I had happened upon, all of the lives I had bumped into, the ways I had, for better or worse, affected things simply by just being there. She will shake her head at me and repeat the words back mockingly, but so much of it is just being out on the road.

The sycamores out front.

Under my tires the street sounded wet, and every few hundred feet fallen leaves would loose themselves from the slick asphalt, kicked up by my passing like clumps of clay, into the soft, dewy median that stood as a stoic divide between east and west, despite the season. With my windows cracked, and the thump of anticipation pulsing from speaker to fingertip, the wind ushered in scents of musk, and decay, and peppercorn, and autumn. And I gave a silent thanks to Whomever was looking out, for the early and sudden departure our northern landscape had taken, into itself.

My heart stirred with restlessness, and the old fairytale song the radio selected of fox and crow and baker made me convulse to my core. I caught a glimpse of myself, reflected from streetlight onto window glass, and the vision it cast on my mind was the wiry frame of the girl in the Cheerios t-shirt. Wind-swept and sunned, with always the one wild lock curling away from the rest. The next passing streetlight betrayed a much older, slicked-down version of the feral soul. And the fox went on in his subtle persuasions....

I got a letter in the mail from someone whom I helped. When it happened it was no big deal, in my retelling of the events. A call came out, I was a few blocks away, Grace made it so that I was there in seconds to watch myself climb out of the car, yelling at the bad guy to put the bat down. He did, and as always, when I dig into my bag of tricks for the grown up voice, I am amazed that it works. It was just something that happened, a solitary event in a string of calls for service. Like my sister, it was just one switch that I managed to flip in a night where it was mostly dark. The letter was all broken English, to the point of being painfully ironic. I always knew that Lenny wasn't supposed to survive in this world. There are some things that are just too fragile, to naive, and when you encounter them they make your bones weak. And if you nod your head in understanding then you have been there. And if not...

He described what he felt, being trapped, and what he thought his only recourse would have been, flawed as maybe his perspective was. He pictured himself crawling to the floor of his van, head underneath the backseat to protect the most important of his ephemeral organs, while the bat swung up and down like a pendulum from a nightmare. Where time slows down and you see everything unfold in perfect detail, but are powerless to prevent a second of it.

And finishing the letter I stood still for a moment. Rain pitter-pattered off of the metal roof overhead, and the hiss of radio static next to my left ear punctuated the heaviness of the world that was pressing in on my back, my shoulders. I realized something I had not before. As I drive in, there is a stretch of highway which is some kind of catalyst in my mind. As soon as I cross over it I begin a measured out number of Our Fathers and Hail Marys until I feel sated and begin pleading my case. Mostly it is that if something tragic has to occur let it at least be understood, and always there is the moment when I plead for just a second to come and tell her that everything is okay, and that there is a reason, even if it is impossible to understand.

Love is more thicker than forget, more thinner than recall, more seldom than a wave is wet, more frequent than to fail.

And in the end the fox gets his share of the goods and I find myself again in the early morning blackness, navigating streetlights from end, to end. How we walk the line, and do not even consider its existence.

I ramble, but permit me, as I have had far too little sleep and perhaps too much waking for rumination and self-deprecation. There is regret, surely there is. I wear it like a brand across my chest. But we have to get up and dust ourselves off anyway. You do not have to be good, remember. You are, at least, unencumbered.

Invisible to the eye.

Windy, dark, silent, prowling, the beat dropped and his voice scratched in and I surprised myself, even, at how quickly the melody transported me to another place. Another time. It was snowing out, cold, and the wind shuddered against panes of glass -- the weakest point in our fortress against the outside world. A scent, me laughing, and the always pressing forward, always crushing momentum of the clock. My descent down the rabbit hole this time was sharp and sudden, and painful when I thought it couldn't hurt me anymore. My heart beat at all the wrong speeds, and my fingertips went cold, then numb. I wavered on the border between wanting to be sucked back down to languish in the regret, and feeling around in my pockets for a match and some accelerant to just be done with it all. But there were no answers at the crossing.

The wind kicked up and as I drove my figure eights, the melody still pressing down, I looked up and watched the largest size of balance ball one can purchase roll calmly down the main intersection of town. I reached up, turned off the radio, and the memories, set alight every blue and white flashing strobe that I could finger, and parked my car. In the darkness of the pre-dawn I beat the hell out of the balance ball until I felt that, were someone watching, they had probably gone from thinking that perhaps they should ask if I was okay, into shutting the blinds and sequestering the children away into the basement until the danger had passed.

And I wondered, if it was Grandpa Z or J who put that giant, ungainly turquoise piece of inflated rubber in the street. Or maybe it took both of their cunning to come up with such an effective way of putting me back in my place.

I corralled the ball, a sort of suburban tumbleweed, in the corner of an empty bus stop shelter. I climbed back into the driver's seat and switched off all of the dancing lights, pedal to floor, resuming my figure eights. The streets led me down the hill and to the lake and I turned off the car and all of its noise, and sat at the edge of the water so that the bottoms of my boots stood on top of the whitecaps when they broke. Strong wind, big waves. A freighter clung to the edge of the world, with Orion keeping a steady watch lest it slip off into oblivion.

I sat there until the freighter had slipped away and the bottoms of my pant legs were soaked. I thought about the fox, and his lesson that you are responsible for what you have tamed, and how we so carelessly try to tame whatever enters our gravity. With no plan, or empathy, or love even. We cast big nets, and discard whatever was caught by happenstance. I wondered, in my self-deprecating way, if the rose had survived his absence, and I hoped in my childish heart that she had. I watched the lake froth and churn, and I vowed to myself that I would be careful about what I tried to tame, and that I, myself, would stay wild from now on.

And it was a lonely decision. But, I have found, the good ones usually are.