download: a smattering of The Faint
My eyes aren’t working as well as they should. I open them and I still see a lovers sweep of dark hair or a hand bound with a silver ring. I looked up to the sky last night, remembering something Gavin told me. He knew a woman once who was a stripper and a whore who wanted to be an astronaut so she could be alone in orbit around the Earth and look down at everything. No one would ever touch her again until she wanted them to, until she came down in a screaming fire ball of atmosphere. She’s a scientist now, works at a particle accelerator up north some. Walking up a dark street in the middle of forest, I looked up at the sky last night and imagined myself there, as I do every time I think of her. I picture myself alone and glued to a port window, a cold hand pressed against the glass, my hair tied back and my body curled in on itself. I know I would be crying, that’s my only certainty. A fetal position stabbed through with something aching and nameless. To look down on the world, no horizon visible, only the blazing curve of globe, it would hurt me to be that alone.
Immoral, wanting to call you on the phone. You left me slick with children dead, with a cold bed in the middle of the winter, with half a dozen unpaid bills. How hard is it to maintain integrity when you’re a disgrace?
Today is hiking in Lynn Canyon, a deep cut of wilderness attached to the side of this little city. Half of humanity lives now in cities.
That, to me, is beautiful.