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We used to peel the wings from the backs of dead flies and lick them like stamps. We would search the windowsills for their tiny, papery bodies and pick them up with tweezers, but in the jars they turned to ashy crumblings. Do you remember the days you spent running back and forth through the waves of sun that struck, yellow-white, through the glass windows? They began to stretch out, like one long afternoon (What's the longest word in the English language?), one long, white road winding through hedges of green, green, green. We were in a short story that someone else wrote about someone who dies and goes to heaven, only heaven's not what he expected it to be. But we didn't expect anything, and we made our giggly circles in bare feet through a house caught in a time trap. How did we get so lucky?
Exhausted after twenty-nine days of wandering, we fell into a field of tall grass and closed our eyes tight and heavy, the scent of night air a blanket over us. Since that moment, nothing has been quite the same. The rules of physics seem to fail here, over and over again, though there is no apparent reason why. I am waiting for the day when I don't have to breathe anymore, I'll be just like a ghost, only I can choose to touch the surface or feel all the way through something.
Inevitably, the clock moved again. Lost a friend to time, just like that. Echoes of you still linger in the fissures, here. Some days they come out and move around, like they're yawning or falling out of bed, and they knock over things and stumble about so loud that I can feel the furniture in my brain being overturned. You keep trashing and trashing this place with your pretty memory, and I can't stop you, 'cause you're gone, and you'll never be back to fill the jars again.
 Nehen · Sat Nov 11, 2006 @ 07:04am · 0 Comments |
