I wrote two hours and a crash swallowed it whole. My computer is ill, it comas randomly, running out of memory at the drop of a digital hat. I sit by its bedside table and grasp its mouse hand, fighting to keep it alive, wanting to save my precious information. The jazz corrosion can continue, the hiccups sound almost like part of the music, but the text, the darling text. I require it to live and am disappointed. I get as far as copy and do not make it to paste. The pointer jitters, frightened of the oncoming onslaught of frozen time. I imagine the words sitting helpless, paralyzed and looking out, knowing they will be lost once I finally press the button. Waiting for when I flick the switch on the machine and they die.
What happens to the deleted words? The keystrokes that have been backspaced and edited out of existence? I imagine them just out of reach, perhaps each letter queuing to be reborn in another word, another phrase.
This afternoon I mended ragged long velvet and sent off letters on-line, the needle in my lips while I typed. I expected it to be more difficult finding clothing to wear to both an office party and a fetish night. I had time still to spend getting ready, I had time for the rest I so needed. Sleep crashed, fell, upon me, with darkness and dreams I didn’t like. I woke from rest with the sound of a girl sobbing. She was young and inconsolable and I had missed meeting my friend and the beginning of the office party. Michelle was fine, hadn’t been left waiting in a lifeless lobby as I’d feared, but in fact decided rightly that as I was not there right away, then unconsciousness had caught up with me. One hour down, many more to go. I got ready, my secret santa present wrapped and socks found, six o’clock, but it never happened. Fear took me and stopped my hand at the front door lock.
Part of me had counted for that, it’s winter. If there is to be a worst time, this would be it. I hadn’t counted on my contingency plan failing. The person who was to call didn’t answer the phone. Mistakenly assuming they were on their way, I waited until it was too late to drop by the restaurant, too late to go to the show. I built this night to be my night out, a self gift of something I would enjoy before I left. A goodbye to this city with an evening to prove it’s not all that bad, commiseration for empty evenings structured in front of the computer. Rather, I’d been stood up and cancelled on by two others. It bothers me that my happiness seems so inextricably tangled with this. My earlier day was full of joy and I can’t seem to reach it now. When I remember today will I think of the bright giddy morning or the crushingly depressing evening? I think in my mind I will carefully separate the two with my subconscious. I slept between the emotions, so they will be different days. That was yesterday, this is today, the sun has naught to do with it, there is a stretch of desert between. I have never questioned why sand is always in old stories about sleep. I understand it. Grains of it pattering from one end of the timer to the other, sand left in your eyes by the spirit of dreams, it’s a nowhere land. I get it.