I had forgotten where I was. The plane window twenty minutes stationary on the tarmac showed me hills. And I felt guilty that I had not been looking at them continuously, strengthening my ability to retain the image, for recollection later on the gray paved high street.
What else is out there?
The translucent feelings are all the same but what they lay on top of – the undercurrent they drift over, the base of their colour – oscillates between wanting to stay and needing to leave.
Wanting to stay smells sour, like pine needles, poisoning the earth below evergreen trees, increasing acidity in the soil ensuring nothing else will grow.
Here I feel a deep love for anyone who has ever gripped my hand, sunk their fingers into my waist, wrapped tight around my shoulders and made me jump. Even those who tried to hold me under.
We jumped from that jetty a hundred times that summer, in ridiculous sunglasses, angry with each other and excited, each time sacred, as only the entrance into water can be. Aware of myself as one whole piece. All functions in agreement; no breath, then gasp. Become alive again at the surface, let it drip off you, form puddles on fiborous grey wood, and exhale, walk barefoot to the warm car and soak through the seat.
(I thought he would have that car forever.)
The jellyfish that proliferated in the ocean this morning will be flat shapes in the sand by dusk. Thin, dull membranes, like tissue paper. We are becoming set in our ways. Practicing behaviours that will be hard to change, sitting by the water, singing as ever, unbothered by the sun’s presence or unpresence.
Needing to leave feels like tearing fruit flesh from stones and skin.
Any warmth that can be, will be with haste. And in cooling we find reasons for letters never sent, for holidays abandoned in planning, for paintings unfinished and dusty, soon thrown away by new tenants.
What draws me to this? Or the thought of this? What’s good about it? There isn’t much really, and there certainly isn’t anything new. I have been though it all, dredged the river over. It just is.
I won’t read in to what I’m told I shouldn’t. Allow these days to marinade in the sediment 10 years old, settled yet restless to touch tongues with the air in the bubbles rising through the spring water, become silt, then mud on the bank, grow grass over and nobody would ever know the difference. All clarity in separation diminished under a heavy footstep, a circular gesture, a wave, an entrance, a re-entrance.
The lady beside me holds the seatbelt buckle as if it is a foreign object, turns it, bewildered, like a rubix cube. The man at the window closes the window shade, but it doesn’t matter because the hills always look the same from these windows, whether you’re staying or leaving. The difference is that this time heartbreak is not certain, only possible.
