A Thought, In Passing

if while sick, sad, angry, frustrated, she still enchants me,

what else remains?

Opposite

What is the opposite of the tip of the tongue?
Buried beneath teeth, hidden harmlessly in the esophagus
Known but unwilling
Able but unaware

What is the opposite of being stuck in the back of the throat?
Hurled forward like javelins wobbling
Burdened objects midflight
Inaction meets unopposable force

The opposite of the nick of time is
Every other moment ever.
The opposite of beating a dead horse
Is a lot more complicated than bringing it back to life.

The Cheque Comes

As we creep closer to cliché:
I feel I must set straight some items on our tab.

Like the way I catch you looking at me
As we sit silently on the subway.
Or when we walk.
Or as I am absorbed in my plate of food.
And out of the corner of my eye I feel you
With a half-smile and photographic eyes.
Staring through my stupid serenity.
I must protest; my guard is not up around you.
You see my soul.

Like the laugh that tumbles
from your lips so frequently in my presence.
A noise so satisfying
That the ability to generate it
Is stupefying.

You ask me, sometimes:
(and I return the favor on occasion)
Doesn’t this or that scare me?
I tell you honestly:
When we are together nothing scares me
Except subway rats
And the perpetual danger of killer statues.

When we separate small doubts creep;
That scares me.
What spell have we cast that insulates my brain from fear?
The answer to that question lies in cliché:
And as I’ve said, there is a tab to be paid first.

What Are You Thinking

The table’s candle can’t burn fiercely enough to illuminate us beyond what the lights show
You smile a sort of half smile and break our gaze
I fixate on the way that your cheek curves to your chin
The way that your neck flexes lightly as you blush

The words come quicker now
To spend time with you is to feel warmth emanate from within
Burst forth from the deepest part of my form
Making me sleepy, full, content

You are at the center of my mind
Like a bonfire
When I move away from you
From here, from now
It gets cold and dark.

Worth It

A neon-orange inflexible plastic ball repeatedly smacks into my face.
The spectacular moment directly before impact, where silence exists but for the crinkling of leaves under my tensing shoulders.
I prepare for launch again.
One orb in each hand

I exhale

My left arm shoots up, weaker, less accurate. The sphere rolls off of my fingertips and soars upwards.
I am perfectly still

I inhale

My right arm shoots up, full of fury. Unleashed from my palm, the ball barely grazes my outstretched fingers.
Though both headed in the same direction, the first ball must sense its doom. Though travelling upwards still, gravity insists on imposing on its flight, and it slows.
My arms have both crashed down to my sides, and I brace for impact, the electrifying crack the flying globes make when one pushes the other higher in midair.
The intensity of the moment is too much. I squeeze my eyes shut and listen.

The balls miss each other, their trajectories simply off, a fact that eludes me in my child-like anticipation.
The first ball lands harmlessly a few feet to my left.

I open my eyes.

I exhale.

The second ball hits me in the face.

I inhale.

I start over.

For You

I didn’t do anything I wouldn’t have done
If I had never met you
This is who I am
This is how I’m happy

This is about you
But it isn’t for you
It isn’t for you

This wasn’t my plan
I was going to be in the city and single
and at peace
Ha
Peace

And now I replay every sentence I said
And I’ve already decided to hate how I acted
Yesterday I was the ideal boy
Today I’m clingy, insecure, too nice.
Today I trip over myself running from my feelings for you
Will you judge how quickly I turn back around
When you decide to call my name
I will.

Damn it.
This isn’t for you
But I’m writing it for you to see

A Year of Light

In moments of great stress, every life form that exists gives out a tiny subliminal signal. This signal simply communicates an exact and almost pathetic sense of how far that being is from the place of his birth. On Earth it is never possible to be further than sixteen thousand miles from your birthplace, which really isn't very far, so such signals are too minute to be noticed. Ford Prefect was at this moment under great stress, and he was born 600 light years away in the near vicinity of Betelgeuse

That quote is one of about 10,000 quotes from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. I must have read the series of Hitchhiker books all together around 50 times or so, and every time I reach this passage it strikes me as something that would be true. That is to say, if space travel were something that was happening, this phenomenon would be all over the place. Douglas Adams, I concluded, must have been from space.

Now that I’m older I begin to understand that passage in a far different context.

Individual memories have always shifted in and out of my head – presently floats along bee stings while picking raspberries at our old house, and now meeting the teenage mutant ninja turtles when I was five. Each present-time stimulus dances around my sub-conscious, whirling rapidly until it finds a memory to connect to; that rock reminds me of my stitches in 7th grade, that lamp post of a house party in high school.

Now I find entire eras, entire genres of people, floating in and out. I’ve been a part of so many communities that it seems I can’t keep them all in my head simultaneously. NFTY, three summer camps, Public School, College, Salt Lake, Israel. Further sub divisions – oh these are my Boy Scout public school friends, these are my hiking Salt Lake friends.

I am not yet a quarter of a century old and some eras of my life seem poised precariously on the outskirts of my memory. I have a strict policy of only accepting facebook friend request from those I know personally, and yet my friend number sits at over 1500, a number that is at once both reassuring and daunting.

And that’s the crux of it, I suppose. Today is the anniversary of the death of a person who at one point existed within a community that solely owned my heart. At no point did that community relinquish its grasp of my heart, but slowly others grew within it, and that community, though still a part of who I am, no longer has full possession. That realization leaves me feeling…guilty. Almost as if it is a betrayal of my friend that what bound us at one point plays a lesser role now, less than ten years after the fact. If I intend to live a long and satisfactory life (and I do) then what do the states of my past relationships say about the future of my present ones?

There are some days where I feel like I am 600 light years away from my home.

May her memory be for a blessing, this year and every year.