Wednesday, October 3, 2012

Hermosa


Driving away is harder than running.
Running allows the time to pass slower. The destination is farther. The taste of salt lasts longer on red sunburnt lips.

But to slam the door on an old Jeep and take off is too much momentum too soon, especially for something that you wish would hang in the late summer air forever.

It is not so much of a road as a string. Something that connects something else, ties it together for safe keeping; at least until the knot becomes loose over time and the string breaks into threads as thin as the friendships that could once sink ships and while you miss that body, that laugh, those shoes, that one hair that never stayed in place as much as he tried, you can't miss it because it forces that to surface. It forces you to acknowledge the fact that there are others like me. You were another blink of those eyes that once cried for you, another sunset that he can watch out his window every evening at 7:38 (or 6:38 when the light grows shorter).  You are a grain of sand on that beach in Hermosa and she's there with her toes in the ocean and her short blonde hair not free enough to be carried in the wind.

You're not sad.
You don't miss it.
You don't miss the faded almost-white denim and the feet soft from sand.
You don't miss him it.
You don't miss it.
You don't miss that road, the string that held your hair back from the harsh wind and the string that held your hand to his.
You're not sad.

I don't miss it. 

http://myconstellationprize.blogspot.com/

Tuesday, September 18, 2012

Flight

Supposing is an awfully awful thing to do.
Acceptance: Now that is much more appropriate.
Wonder: Maybe even better. 
This is where hunger is essential, and thirst is only ever satisfied with another crash of another wave, is where the deepest of sleeps is possible.  Even then, who sleeps nowadays?

Fingers and hair curl oh so naturally, and the wind seems to be enough for breakfast. Clothes become soaked and crisped, drenched and parched repetitively but in the best sense. Worries have mostly to do with whether the nearing waves are full of dinner or predator, although either are welcomed with open arms and sails. 

Perhaps the easiest supposition is that this will not last forever. After all, what starts this abruptly will certainly end as such. 

"Let's be nothing," she says, drunk from sun and sangria. "I hear it lasts forever."

Their voices float across the salty scape and drift along, effortlessly yet purposefully, through the atmosphere, past the cumulus, and into whatever they believed was above that for the moment. Not heaven exactly, but some place where it is always dusk and their glasses are never empty and the music is one guitar that he plays not well, but decently, and skins are always tanned, and everyone has a way of communicating without too much certainty or language in general.  

I suppose we flew there, to that place, in that time, but I wonder still if I could call it mine.