a difficult time

an easy recycling of a difficult time

They landed carelessly on the bench and caught up. A duck waddled past them and floated itself in the pond. The lamps were beginning to respond to dusk, and passerbys grabbed their coats around them to keep warm. Not a second went by where a leaf would not take flight and spiral to the ground, and the path was crunchy underfoot. They drank tea from paper cups and decided how they might make use of the night. There was a rooftop to situate themselves with a lesser known vantage of the skyline, west by northwest. They could hang their legs over the ledge and let worries fall away. They had known one another for years, yet it never felt stale; sometimes united, other times more divisive. The lights on the skyline got blurry with tears, still beautiful in an abstract sorta way, the shattering and scattering of every straight line. An easy recycling of a difficult time.

lucky kid #2 (companion piece)

Quiet life on softened streets, all the bad news backed away. You lucky kid. I washed my hair with 100,000 molecules. Each one like the full moon tonight, lighting up life in all the right ways. I made it to the site. I could peacefully fold my legs up under me on the couch facing the east,  the house where nobody’s home, facing, pinching my slip as I picked it up and let it go hang around freely, pinching myself. You lucky kid you. All the pages were viewed, in a free sweep of eyes (not mine). To be sure they really existed, outside of myself. Not so easily destroyed by water, heat, air, time. Thumbs rubbing the ink to a fade I can no longer describe. Each curve of every letter like the full moon tonight, lighting up life in all the spectacular finishes. Flourishes. You lucky kid. Thinking of a friend, one I haven’t even heard of in years, a keystroke away, a daydream, attacking a search engine with a heart on a saturday in America, one truffle at a time, pulling lightly on the ends of twisted plastic until the whole thing rolls over and out, examining the condition of my condition, remembering the ionic bond even if it hurts. Life I love you.

forever stamp our hearts

I could only hope now the spirit would work through me, to communicate the occasion of my life to the world I called my home. Proprioceptively. Indelibly. This hope, alone, was proof that I existed. Lord knows an all points bulletin inquiry had been submitted. A missing persons report turned up nothing. The first 48 hours had passed without a trace. And many 24 hours more. Until I was all but forgotten by my own flesh and blood. Long, long ago.

Sadly, I failed to pull a Houdini. Found myself locked within the walls of my own invention. Cooled and conditioned and stored. Downloaded myself on to some standard thumb drive. Hitchhiked my way through obscure constellations. Abstracted myself on a concrete canvas. Canvassed myself to an unknown cause. Freezer burn soon permeated my experience of myself. I got lost in my own rolodex. The librarian indexed me somewhere between z and a. I became an asterisk without a footnote. An aster-risk to the whole federation.

Then, suddenly, harmless to myself and others. Disambiguated. Inanimate for consecutive years…

then, suddenly, released back into the stream of consciousness, which converged with all the other datastreams to form some packed coaxial cable of infinite beats per minute into the teeming, elemental, ocean of life. Sulfate. 

The iron man and maiden had taken their toll on us all.We swam, ran and cycled through the seasons. Whatever would keep us above baseline. Heartlessness in triple digit heat scorched the soul. Prana, the breath, had been weakened by years of celebrity chain-smoking, bequeathed to the masses. We waited around, shiftless and innumerable, for some unrequited missive to forever stamp our hearts…

somewhere between hope and faith…

for what seemed like the same amount of time. 

-Katya 08/13