Moonhead, by Andrew Broder:
did you hear the one about the day the moon fell to earth?
it had a crater exactly the size of a human head on it
and it landed on my head and now my head is the moon.
or the one about the day a thousand lives from now
when we return as a team of archeologists
and discover fossils of ourselves in a former life
on the day we spurned our nervous twitch
and found our yearn to hint at winter bliss.
on the day the stars sang the national anthem of sweaty disbelief,
of coelacanth teeth, to scream loud enough
to shatter the roof of a coral reef
and the shrapnel ground up into paint
for robin’s egg colored dream and root beer float,
second hand flavored drool absorbers
and the words “hope” and “home” that sound the same,
smell the same as the day the doe caught a sad snowflake on her
tongue and melted it in an instant
and it tasted like the blackhole’s wild-eyed longing for light,
whether from the starts that radiate
or the planets that reflect it or the eyes that reflect the reflection,
or the eyes looking into those eyes and seeing the reflection of the eyes,
which if all goes according to plan,
will outlast the universe itself.
..::..
Lung is talking about bussing me down to Las Vegas to meet with him and Natasha somewhere near the end of November, and then traveling with them to the Salton Sea, finally to pick up the letter Kyle left there for me sometime last year. As November closes around me and the sun drowns in fallen leaves and crowns itself in flash flood puddles that mirror the endless gray sky, it feels less like a blessing and more like a fairytale already told, like somehow I missed it between one blink and the next, as if these places never really exist, but only hover over pages of books and mimic the careless sheen of photographs, haunting our collective conscious in a waking haze of forgotten days as long as winter dusk.
Out there is the storm, strangely calmed, another twist in the river, another chapter of life. Here is a pool of known days, painting, adjusting, David job hunting, tinkering with very little, watching a movie at home every two days. I’ve said yes. Of course I’ve said yes. I’ve missed Lung, his crackling humour, sharing our puzzle-piece twin set of anger and frustrations. There is no other answer. Now it rests on my workplace, if they will let me leave for a week, to work away for five days. If it all works out, I’ll bus down to Seattle after work on the 21st for Robin’s party on the 22nd, then catch a bus to Vegas from there on the 23rd. My fingers are crossed, my fingers and my heart and my bones and breath. My hope is an elephant living deep inside the cage of my chest, pressing against my skin, forged out of a cello’s long humming strokes of sound, invisible until an answer arrives.
Until then, I won’t know myself. I’ll be a string of notes without direction, as crazy eyed inside as unexpected blood on the hands, a tight rope walker with her lover on the other side and a den full of sharp toothed, hungry lions below.
Meanwhile, Antony and I are e-mailing back and forth, a piano falling from the sky. There’s nothing quite like home. Apparently he arrived in Montreal just over a week after I left, and he’ll be there until half-way through December, far after I would return from the south. Tag, you’re it. Unexpected, how life plays these games of just missed, all the way through, both directions. If he sends me his address, I’m going to try and make sure he gets another palm tree, to keep in touch.
Some times I am lucky and an entire week can go by without missing his laugh. I wonder, occasionally, that I am so changed within since we met. Given all that is fixed, will I ever want to be able to walk away again?
