words.strung.together

1. 1. you ever sit on the bus in those window-facing seats, and you angle your whole body to look outside, and there’s the tree? it’s her tree, it looks just like her tree and it’s been thirteen years and we’ve both grown older and sometimes you miss your childhood friends. but you miss them not like a yearning for warm days and cackles and footsteps that don’t fully originate on the sidewalk but along the middle of the cul-de-sac in circles at four feet five, acquiescing to nobody’s orders but imposing cars leaving and entering driveways, instead, you miss them like staring at the crumbling in your hands. it’s dust, it’s everywhere and you can breathe it in but it amounts to nothing. and she won’t visit your city because it reminds her of you. and it has been thirteen years, isn’t that enough to forget? but you don’t. because an eating disorder doesn’t have an expiry date even when it’s gone. and the music of our teens grows so nostalgic they become classics, and thirteen years ago is your generation’s Breakfast Club and you’d replay it all the time if you could. rewind to the best parts, play it again.   ////////  it ain’t gone, baby, it’s just not living.
   2. when the days are grey and mildew-y and damp, i think of this vision that looks a lot like the Barnes and Noble near Greenwich but it’s not totally it. maybe it’s the big picture window that confuses me in these dreams, but i’m not sure. and i think this is where i might die, or where i feel like i’m living, or maybe this is a memory i don’t remember, but i think fondly of this window. i imagine when it snows, it must bring some rush back into me, light me back alive if i was ever on the edge. it doesn’t feel like home, it never did. maybe it was a stopping place, where you rest, but you don’t call it home, because it means you must move on eventually.
   3. what would you do if you won the lottery? and i think easy, i’d buy a house, i’d invest, i’d travel. would i keep a job? of course. i could go to school and not worry about tuition. and when i don’t worry i grow reckless, when i worry i grow restless.  and the world is a blank slate because suddenly i have everything to lose, and that’s why you don’t see lottery winners on top 40 lists, that’s why they don’t run for office (because there are other things they can do), and i’m not sure how i could mess up my blank slate but baby i would.  my blank slate is power washed, hand dried. amnesia spreads among all my friends about all the things i’ve done wrong, and as for myself, i can’t pause, that would be the biggest test you see. i can’t pause so i run, so i rev, so i hit go. i’ve got to do something and it would be my demise. strike a match and arson doesn’t begin to seem like the right world. explosion? no, too abrupt. this is a gradual burn, but it isn’t slow.  you don’t know how to do yourself in until it’s o p p o r t u n e. what a word, huh? almost like fortune. just almost.