After Kiri

It's high time somebody did this to me. The sun shines quietly today as if to say it's okay to continue from 3000 miles away. Though it's lonely, strained, about you and everything, the day will remain refusing to be dark whenever you look like the light inside of the fridge where there is no useful food because it was your first time here, and I wanted to take you to as many of the great restaurants as I could before you went home.

It's the difference between writing with a pen and typing to a keyboard. Both are immediate, tactile, but one allows for the width of lines to change. Like riding a bike for the first time in five years, I am delighted to remember, without trying, the feel of pedal teeth on bare feet and just how fast you have to go up the side of the curb on West Garden Drive in Phoenix to catch enough air to clear the sidewalk. Metal on skin leaves a mark. You risk nailing the tree in the only grassy front yard, but it's worth it to sail over the concrete. Say you do eat trunk and find out that the gooseneck pad is worthless; there's something about being sore down there that makes the next time you fly more breathtaking and the days of recovery like remembering your first kiss with your jaw wired shut. You know, after you roll around on the ground and puke.

I flipped a lucky one over this morning the way you do and felt like a teenager trying to like country music because she's cute. Not two hours later I picked it without looking and took it to the steps by rote and by myself. It took two tries to put enough gas into the rental to get it back to half a tank. I still wasn't exact and erred on the side of spending more just to be safe. It was worth it.

This time Cape Disappointment was amusing, and again we went there and came back unscathed save for that mosquito bite on your chin which was okay because it could have been somewhere else. I wasn't lying about the sushi. I laughed a little inside that you drank from the mug with the picture of the cat still in the bag on it. You were a day late, and we were both several dollars shorter, but it was easy to forget because the new coffeemaker worked like gangbusters, and we stained our teeth to a part of my past you never had the chance to see.

See? I was alone then and in front of so many people. I used to tuck in my shirt even. You just had to let me rest my head there in the gutter for five or ten minutes or days or years. Pedestrians aren't allowed on the bridge because the winds can actually blow them off. Maybe I knew how to drive all along. I dunno, but I know we both do now. Yes, the metaphor is as transparent as pale skin, but I like that you can sometimes see the veins underneath. If I spent all my time looking for opacity... Actually I don't know what I would do. I've lost my train of thought again and I'm faltering. Train of thought derailed, silly and predictable like high school poetry and other hackneyed examples.

Wasn't there a lighthouse on one of the boards in that game? I can't remember, but I guess it's not that important to make all these associations as if somehow life didn't have meaning without them. Because it still does. At least now it does.

what's on:
"Halo" (The Cure - Friday I'm in Love)