I started at about 830 and made it home by 1130ish. The sky was dusking over as I left. Two boys in a park beside a school smoked a joint while sitting on a bench and occasionally leaning backwards to watch even smaller kids playing basketball beneath a rooftop court. Like somehow in their pot haze they found time to stop and consider what it meant to be as young as that, something they would never return to and maybe didn't wish to, but something evasive nevertheless. A slippery feeling that only happened yesterday yet now still won't come to mind. And of course I played my own voyeuristic role in this pondering their yesterday as my own and an even further yesterday through their considerations. A tireless loop of back treading.
I walked over the train tracks seperating the residential north from the industrial north and considered walking to the river but by that time it was already dark and between myself and water stood the airport and it did not seem terribly appealing. Along Columbia Blvd there is no sidewalk just a path eked out in the dirt and rock by a numberless amount of past travelers. I left my own tracks as semitrucks bouldered past me only 6 inches away and the shining constant lights striking my eyes left me in a half blind daze.
I thought about nothing. For a long time. Then I thought about women. Past and present. I considered for a moment the time you (and this you is my attempt towards anonymity and may be you or you or, well quite frankly, even you) and I sat in the car outside my house for over an hour. We were talking, or anyway you were talking, arguing more, just with yourself and the light in the lamp post kept fading in and out of electric life. It started as nothing then just the faint hint of light like heated metal and then the filament caught I guess and the street started becoming filled with its dull orange luminescence but it just kept getting more and more bright until it became just pure white light and then collapsed in itself. It was a three minute cycle and I know this because instead of listening to what you were saying I timed it. A number of times to make sure. And then, in an effort to make bad metaphors I considered (internally) how our relationship was much like that light and that here we were at yet another of those much too bright moments. They were starting to come too quickly now and it was as if we were collapsing daily.
I walked past the cemetary and tried to remember the last funeral I had attended and realized it had been Jim's. I wanted to think on this but really there was nowhere new to go with this thought and so instead I thought about how I hadn't really been to many funerals and that, aside from that most recent one, I couldn't really say that any of the ones I had been to had bothered me much. No, maybe one other. But that is what happens when you are young and someone you think you are or could be close to dies at such a young age. All this and I don't even remember your name. I drew you a picture I think. I have no idea your name.
I walked past restaurants and bars and shops and homes and spots where it seemed as if there was nothing at all.
I guess really not a lot happened. I am going nowhere but circles in my walking but I feel as if my destination is not so much the concern as is the motion. I find myself wondering how long I will need to walk to get past whatever it is I have been feeling so much of lately.
Tomorrow the zoo, perhaps.
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