I've lived under a cloudless sky where everything is literal, weather by the calendar, all drama internalized. I prefer virtual worlds, perfect one dimensional riverbeds, shining day and night, a meaningful grind, empty of needs, empty of want. The shoe-leather world is a spinning wheel, a destructive boredom, an empty wallet. I can't vanish anymore. I haven't seen fireflies in so long, heard a cricket, been prickled by green leaves. I see the sun. Sometimes. Gold scattering behind gray feathers. I sit on this concrete couch beneath a tree planted exactly eight feet from its neighbor, its leaves too sparse to shelter me from the rain. Tick tock. Silver bird with rigid wings crosses the sky at escape velocity, up into a future I don't share. I'm more attuned to the crows on the lamp poles, croaking over the roar of traffic, or the silent seagulls who've traded their beaches for dumpsters. The sun has risen into the clouds again. There's a gap, like I could reach my hands into that warm sky and wrap my arms around a treasure worth holding, a story worth telling. It's that imperfect future that drives me forward, that unwanted kinship with the unfinished, the incomplete. But a backlit pixel closes the synaptic gap and mocks my analog heart. It's time to clock in.
August 22, 2023
