Domenica

    I spend today wishing for facility but not grinding to find and expose it to sunlight. Opening windows to breathe in fresh air, hear the disconnected street sounds, feeling the heat of bright sun warm my neck does not replace real action and movement. The sun travels, the wind moves through cities, into nd out of people, changed chemically and pushed further by gravitational moon and tides. I let them was over and through me, altering little with my labored, weak willed breath. Intentions of others unlike myself spur a slight movement, or I would lounge, mute and un-expectant. I traverse on territory not my own, listening to outside footsteps in the hallway, muted by my thin door, and wonder if the others hear my deliberate movement intentionally or unintentionally. Either prospect scares me, I have no right answer to this question. I live so as not to trespass, I shuffle unseen unnoticed. I blaze a quiet trail and obscure my footprints by mopping, dragging palm leaves behind me. How should I act? I have hacked out a hollow in their single life and crouch, barely moving, so as not to arouse suspicion of my presence. When I leave, thoughts spring quick as weeds of returning, "Have I been missed?" When I stay, thoughts lurk as the table leg stubs a toe, "Do I impose on their life?" 

     So I wedge myself into a place of impermanence. I, the wasp, flit in to breath new air, escape for brief moments when they become chilled. I feel magnetized to the center of the house by some force of expectation I create out of dust, or mirror this desire. Differentiating would most likely impose: one conversation too many for already stretched-thin moments between for what they really live. Transient and transitory, the seventh of 12 or more. The help. I must appear helpful without encroaching, desirable in work but not too interesting as a person. I balance on the edge and could fall, to where is a non issue, I can slink beneath a new covering until lost and unattractive as a prospect. One week ago, this thought freed me and equaled endless possibility for the next 10 years. Now, suddenly, I feel old and running close to an unknown future. Part of me begs to nail it down. A desirable future is almost unimaginable in any practical sense. I think of one happy vocation and fear sparking a tinder that flashes brightly, then burns out quickly as newspaper. Worse, I imagine stoking tinder endlessly, producing only thick smoke that eventually chokes my breath. I want to write for a living and sing for the love of it, but so do a lot of people.

     I want to bleed my thoughts into open air and subsist solely on the crumbs. I have established--I feel happy anyplace only with food and a small corner. I do not desire progeny or a partner in this crime-life. What is left for me but alone and alone? Some other person may simply add to my desire for obscurity, may douse my thoughts of life with thoughts of them. I grow weary of protecting my ambitions from destruction and running from attachment gracefully to protect the shallow hopes of others. If only I could walk through the street unmolested by peering eyes, I could walk not as a pawn-as an eye unshut by that fear. The constant worry of interacting with people grates on my freedom and blots out the sun. I live too guarded, too tentative of perception, perspective, expectation, but mostly--inconveniencing those mindless masses. Society sticks my feet to the ground as tar, winding up my legs as vines, binding them motionless. I am a torso, sinking into thick muck, blinking to communicate my stress--"Am I displacing the muck? Diluting it with my tears?" I tremble, controlling shocked convulsions into muted tremors. My last air escapes overhead, through the mass that swallows me, in bubbles. My life works through too thick gravy, pops on the surface, and splatters on the stove hood.

     I have stories to tell, but time waits not in a coffee parlor, or over dinner. I should eat, everyone finishes and my risotto grows cold--the equivalent of covering the chef's masterpiece with ketchup. Scratching these tiny flashes of memory carves a gash through time. People would rather eat than listen to some story not their own. So, I write.