Washed Away

January, and as you would expect. The sharp and biting cold. The blue and clear sky and iced over snow. A nice day, but suicide to step out and enjoy it.

I walked across the Stewart's parking lot, wind rushing up to greet me. It pulled at my hood and forced its way down into my jacket, my skin, my bones. Miserable fucking beautiful day.

I had to work tomorrow and it was all I could think about. I had a suspicion that this was my last week there. Maybe next to last, but it was coming either way. A boreing sense of failure and panic, but relief swirled around my legs like knee deep water. The condecension. The infuriating beauracracy. Relief like knee deep water. Flowing and rising and a moment was coming when it would wash over me entirely before washing back out, leaving me only with the failure and panic. 

I had applied to other orgs and had interviews and I was certain I'd land on my feet, but the thought of it sat in me. The thought of what I dreamed this job would be when it was first offered to me. I think that that's what really got to me. The death of the dream. The plain and clear facade of it, sunbleached and rotting. 

Stewart's was filled with bundled and tight people. Some sitting at tables staring and talking to each other about whatever it is old and persistent men talk about. Some filling paper cups with coffee and cream and sugar, stirring and trying desperately not to spill it while they pressed the plastic lids over the paper rims. Kids walked quickly up and down the aisles of candy and chips, around the back to the coolers, and over again. I remember being a kid and doing the same. Aimless. Bored. Alive. I grabbed a bag of gluten free trail mix from an endcap and walked to the register. A man stood near it but didn't seem to be in line. Just... standing. I noted a level of impatience in my stomach somewhere and set the trailmix on the counter. Another new clerk rinsed out a coffee pot behind the counter. Every week lately, new clerks. He finished and walked around the barrier, picked up my trailmix, scanned it and without looking said 

"That gonna be it?"

"Yeah. That's it."

"Go ahead and insert your card."

Slipped my card into the machine and followed the prompts. It beeped, I took my card out.

"You're all set," he said.

"Have a good one, man."

My father used to say it. 'Have a good one.' Lots of people did, sure, but I remember being a kid and hearing him say it. Leaving his friend's houses after hours of watching him smoke weed and play cards in some lair or living room. 

Have a good one.

Always made me feel like I did back then. Hateful. Disappointed. Invisible. It was a symbol to me. A flag of the dregs. A banner of all I was terrified of becoming. Of all I think I may have become. I can't think about it too long. It burrows in. Instead

At the end of August when the job had been offered to me it was full of optimism and hope and freedom and color. It was the position I'd been dreaming about. I was going to run a food pantry and my mission was to make it my own. I'd be in the central office one day a week, but otherwise, I was to create something special out of it and I had ideas. All of which were quickly shot down, hand in hand with all aspects of what I just described. In October, after a month, I had brought the idea of canvassing the town with flyers to let people know we were there. I'm still waiting for that to happen, three months later. I was going to repaint the nicotine-beige walls. Make it cleaner. fresher. I suggested multiple options to the director. Still waiting to hear back. Recently I was asked why there hadn't been much progress in the revitalization. Maybe I'm lazy. Maybe I'm absentminded. Maybe I get overwhelmed. But I certainly wasn't entirely to blame. I waited patiently for the water to wash over me. Drown away these days. Birth me into something new. 

Fucking wind was relentless. The cold. Close my car door and though it had been running only minutes ago the heat had seemingly vanished. I had fifteen minutes before I had to change over the laundry. Rowan was at the apartment, so I drove back to the apartment. 

Out of the car, into the cold. Hands not fast enough to get the keys, unlock the door, get inside. Up the stairs, and into the apartment and I could hear the shower. I imagined the hot water over my skin and was glad that Rowan had this moment. I walked into the kitchen and the bathroom.

"It's me," I said, trying not to scare her.

"I was just thinking about you."

I wondered what that meant and either way it was nice.

She peeked out from behind the shower curtain, her hair soaked and matted against her head. She smiled. 

"Oh yeah?" I said, leaning in and kissing her.

It filled me with light and warmth and my father was gone. The job was gone. The cold and the wind and deathly blue sky. Only this.

I slipped my hand around the back of her neck and held her head, continuing to kiss her. 

Only this.

Technotheolinguamancy

In the evening I'm supposed to sing to a disjointed and poorly laid out room full of people. On a Thursday. At a dive bar. With a ten dollar cover. I'll sing, but I doubt it will be to anyone. 

For now I am sitting quietly behind a desk in Albany. Typing. Deleting. Pretending. Clacking randomly into Notepad and copying the results into translation software hoping I can discover the voice of God. Technotheolinguamancy.

No luck yet.

Unless all any God can utter to this pathetic and quickly rotting world now is  "fhoeihbqoiheg  jpij pijuw3rj; p poj jw0fw-0e.". But, really, what else is there to say?

Sip from my second Red Bull of the day. Check my phone. Play a number of rounds of solitaire. Win a few. Lose a few. I'm getting much better at it, now that I see that it really is a game of strategy and not luck. Maybe a bit of both.

Pick at trail-mix on my desk. Pick on flat earthers online. Pick out songs to sing later. Kill time. I'm getting fired soon anyway. I can feel it. It doesn't matter. Eat my trail mix. Fuck off. Go home and then sing songs to, about a, pathetic and quickly rotting world.

"Do you think Pizza-gate would have made it worse?" Charlie, my only tolerable co-worker, asks me from her cubicle across the room.

"Yes."

Below my monitor I have the foil wrappers of five chocolate coins peeled apart and spread out as if a small pile of gold. Next to that, a thermal mug given to me by the organization for Christmas. On the front it reads; "You Make Our Team Golden." The mug is black and gold. There is too much fucking gold on my desk. Too much gold. Two tape dispensers. To hell with all of this shit. I open the drawer to my right and set the mug in it. I open the drawer to my left and sweep the foil into it. I don't throw it away. The potential for some bit exists as long as I hold on to it. I wouldn't want to betray the bit. 

Slouch and lean my head back. Apply pressure to the base of my skull against the back of the chair. Close my eyes for just a moment.

Jolt awake. Twenty-two minutes have disappeared.

I slept about four hours last night. Rowan was over. How it goes, how it goes. Four hours and an hour in traffic, eight at work and an hour until I have to be at the dive bar to wait for three hours to play for a half hour to go home for an hour to sleep for six. How it goes, how it goes.

But I got twenty minutes in and that's something. They call it a "power nap" or some dumb shit like that, I think. I got away with it and that's all that matters, save for feeling minutely better than I had earlier.

On Friday I'll sleep.

I will sleep.

A Hand Held in a Theater, A Wisp of Steam from a Hot Mug

 Picks up. Slows down. 

A fingerprint on the lens. A wisp of steam from a hot mug. Evening, then morning as an entirely different place. A creeping ache through my legs, hips, spine, shoulders and then my head is too heavy to hold up. 

A few hours of peace. If that's what they were, anyway.

A few hours of passing seconds and wasted opportunity and thinking over and over "time is running out", being paralyzed in exhaustion and hopelessness. 

Some thought of Maine. Some thought of conversations and some sense of relief and loss together, clinging for now until fading eventually into the black under my ribs. Where it will stay, where you will live with the others, until a sidewalk or a grocery store, or a destroyed linoleum floor in some rotting dark room throws you back in my face.

Picks up. Slows down. Hot mug. Dirty lens. Close my eyes and wade through it all.

A few hours of peace.

Each moment prior stretched long and thin, pulling and ripping in dull and beige clouds until I turn the key over, drive home, and stare through the fingerprint on the lens at the wisp of steam from the hot mug. 

"The grind" is such an incredibly accurate term. A term we only really appreciate in reflection. My bones to dust. My mind to abstraction. My body to nothing. Ground up, left in small piles behind desks and steering wheels, across beds and couches and laundromats and in the backgrounds of photos where someday you will say "oh, and there they are. Don't they look happy here? I miss them sometimes."

Ground into nothing, slowly under the weight of you all. Of this all. Of all.

Picks up. Slows down. Forever until stops.

A few hours of peace, increasingly sparsely touched with flecks of hope, of weightlessness, of indifference. Where the pressure subsides and the clouds part and the pull relaxes and for a moment, usually only that, a memory of what it is to be alive. Some idea of luminescence, far away. A struggling photon to dream of.

A hand held in a theater. A kiss as you wake. A thought of you for being you and a smile beside it.

Some idea of luminescence. Here and now and we know it isn't always. It isn't forever. It can never be once it no longer is, but; here. Now. Love. Joy. Hope. 

A few hours of peace. Spread out over years. Keeping the dream. Keeping the piles of dust from blowing away completely. Slowing the grind and relaxing the pull and though a wisp of steam from a hot mug, 

a few moments of peace.

Picks up

slows down.

A hand held in a theater.

The Day has Slipped By

 Pit in my chest. 

Three and a half hours left on the clock. Sitting at my desk in a beige office under yellowed fluorescents. My director in a cube near by, speaking loudly, forcefully, cheerfully to someone on the phone. I've finished all of the work that I can handle for the day, finished it a few hours ago, and now I pretend. Click the mouse and type at random intervals. Hear footsteps and adjust my posture, stare intently at the screen.

They don't stop. They walk out of the office and into the lobby. First carpet, then tile. I watch it happen in my head and I relax again.

The window next to my desk has a large steel grate covering its lower half. I can see the wall of a slowly dying row house next door. Disembodied and dead branches creeping from out of view. And grey sky. 

Grey sky mumbling some intention of permanence. Shambling through the so-far snowless winter. Soaking into me.

A pit in my chest.

I wrote and deleted a number of paragraphs here, each highlighting some fucking cloud in my brain or poison in my blood or crack in my bones. Heartache and disappointment. Failure and loss. But, it doesn't matter. None of this does. No one needs to hear it, no one wants to read it. The rot in me grows and spreads.

Pit in my chest.

Grey sky mumbling, shambling. The minutes pass as hours and years from now, 4:30, I leave my desk and I pull my coat over my sweater, leave the building, and walk to my car. Turn it over. The mechanic says I'll need a battery soon. I could buy it. I don't. Buckle in. Turn music on. I don't hear it as I drive the interstate traffic for seventeen minutes. I taste blood in my mouth and I realize I've been clenching my jaw, who knows for how long. 

Unlock the front door, climb the stairs to my apartment. Throw my things on the couch and stand. Stand in the dark living room and inhale. Close my eyes and exhale. Again. Walk to the kitchen and sit in a chair at the table. Stare at a grey spot on my left hand where in seventh grade I was stabbed with a pencil by Dan Rice. 

Minutes pass, moving as seconds now that this is my own time, and now it is dark outside and my house is dark. I forgot to turn lights on.

Pit in my chest. 

I don't turn the lights on. I don't stand. I've only noticed. My apartment is getting smaller. When I moved in nearly two years back it was so large and beautiful and open and now it had become cramped and collapsing. Stale and suffocating. No moments of peace until sleep. Hopefully there is sleep.

I look at the clock on the stove and it is almost nine somehow. 

The day has slipped by me. The evening. My time. And tomorrow it will happen again. The day after, again. And so on. You know, I know.

Can't die. Waste of life, of possibility for something else. Would make my family sad. So day in, day out. Like all of us. You know, I know. So I go.

I brush my teeth. I take my meds. I make tea and sit on my bed and read for a while while my tea cools and then read for a while while I drink tea. Some nights I meditate. Some nights I try to meditate and can't turn off the noise, the screaming, the static, the choir, but I try.

Tonight I only read and drink tea.

Ignore the pit in my chest. Pretend it's worth going on.