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.