Tuesday, February 20, 2007

Waiting

I am blank minded, bushy tailed, tall, awake. I am waiting for... I am waiting for reinvention, for capitulation, for absolution. I am waiting. We are all waiting. I have, in my bag, one lighter and four fat cigarettes, all cancer and not caring. Fuck it, we are all going to die anyway. That is not the kind of absolution that I am waiting for. Not in the least. I am waiting for beginnings. And endings too.

I am riding sky high, racing down the highway to the thump thump of tires and the hum of the engine rocking my car baby style into oblivion. I am not driving to where the sky meets the earth, to meridian, to God because I don't believe in that and I have only a third a tank. What with gas being up to three bucks like it is, what else can you do? The wind is blowing my cig out and pushing smoke in my face, and I am waiting here in motion, not standing still. Because maybe in waiting you have to move a little to what you want. So now I am moving in any direction, an unfixed vector unsure if I will get reinvention, capitulation, absolution.

Multiple choice test with nothing that can be excluded. I am pressing the graphite into powder around the (b) bubble, but this time I have not clue. I'll make a star pattern with the dots. Hell, question seven I'll answer twice (c) and (a). I was going to go wrong anyway. Why do I flounder so when I know that this is something that I want so badly in this time. Everything is so acute lately: the smoke stinging my eyes, the mummer of the highway, the prick of the graphite underneath my ring finger coloring the unique groves that tell the world that this is me!

I am clunking quarters into a payphone. Fuck! When did a phone call become fifty whole cents? I am trying to connect. I am trying to absolution and capitulation if I can't get reinvention. People don't change - just whirl round and round at this speed, being squashed toward the equator into a big bulge. Earth: the perpetual carnival ride.

When we were kids, you and I would pack ourselves into the Scrambler with Denny from next door, sliding back and forth. Always with Danny in the worst seat where he'd get crunched the most and the ride whirled. I would get you sick on neon blue cotton candy, and your little girl hands would reach for mine all blue and covered with the stick of sugar and saliva. I didn't know any better than, and I surely don't know any better now, even with all of the education behind me telling me nothing about the world and nothing about you. It's not like I've got your long brown hair and big eyes in my mind like a giant cliché anyhow.

I am wishing for a lot of nothing. I am curled up on the old corduroy couch thinking, "When did they ever make couches in corduroy?" Mom gave me the old couch for Christmas, and first thing I did was tear off that plastic cover that she used. I'm not covering a couch with Saran Wrap. I don't want crinkling every time I move, not when I am trying to do some of my serious thinking, like now, when I am wishing for a whole lot of nothing. I am figuring that nothing is all I need to get out of my problems. Plus, then I won't be waiting for absolution, for meaning, for damn anything at all to come my way. Maybe not even waiting for you, still a little girl to me - a sugar coated gumdrop in your pink party dress. The one with the toile at the bottom and the lace sleeves. You always liked things a little overdone. And if I clanked that whole fifty cents into the phone and got your number from the operator in a flat voice, then, even then you wouldn't want to hear from me anyway. Always, who would I be to you?

I am waiting for growing. For the active verb of grow. I am waiting to be. It's not quite a new beginning. I was at a rest stop off 91. In the stall, in a decidedly female hand (odd) was the statement "I don't feel that I need to be alive," ink smeared slightly as if a hand had run across it. Waiting may be hard but never that, Baby, never that. Keep your cool, Baby. I wish I was coming to get you.

Again. Driving into the meridian, I feel like floating - like nothing at all but a dandelion seed in the ebbing air stream.

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