December 17th, 2004
110319370220716587
Backspin
And you’re running down a street, or at least you thought you were. It seemed like something worth being upset about, or maybe that’s just the way it was. Behind the smiles and the handshakes and the numbers on the papers, the people all went home to families. Families big and small, of pets and children, of shiny plastic figures and lovingly hung posters of idols.
It was just a life. A life for everyone, that came together stitched in more than several places, that tugged and pulled and jostled and wore, painted over and rolled up, each piece large enough to look at closely but so small in a field so big it might just as well have been the sky.
High schools and linoleum, drop ceilings and balsa wood airplanes. How many times did we stand behind the football supply shed and walk through shadows, not listening to lawn mowers and overpasses and delivery trucks stopping and rolling in front of the 7-11 where long ago we had bought baseball cards with stale, talc paper gum after someone’s mother drove us back from the duckpin bowling alley?
It’s not a memory, or a promise, or anything else, it’s just the result of all your actions coming together at one point in time which may seem like the peak but fifty miles down the road was just a plateau, a service station where your mother went until thirty-five before learning how to pump her own gas. So you may have sat in the back and lost the head to your favorite action figure in that little hole where the seat belt comes out, or maybe it was your brother, the younger one that cried when you fell and chipped your tooth on the warm, rough pavement next to your very first front yard. You punched him once, or maybe a lot, and it hurt him, and it hurt you, and you grew up with some space between each other but at the end he’ll probably still share something in your eyes that won’t die.
So maybe you’re laughing, or dreaming, or life is a dream or something glib someone once said in a class that at the time was so important but now you’ve long forgotten the name of the teacher. Laughing is needed for living, but you’re living now whether you’re laughing or not, or in a pool or not, or walking across the deck of rusted cruise ship carrying a thousand bacchanal college students and a handful of old men with video cameras, all so some poor, smiling, sweaty guy can refill your water glass to send fifty dollars and some strange letters back to his family in eastern Europe.
It was laying on her lap in a darkened room, or driving down towards Pantops listening to the only half decent radio station in town, twitching with the excitement of power steering and a pair of dark eyes in a bucket seat. With another bicycle crash you flew past the handlebars, over a fence and into a tree, because the rain was coming down hard and no one slows down at the Fourteenth Street light. But you still played soccer in the muddy snow at night with a lanky boy, a few meters from the same spot you rolled in the grass chuckling about how hot someone was while riding your youthful ability to break down alcohol and the fact that no one was going to leave you for a girl at eighteen.
But you were going to do it, and you did, but you didn’t, and it hurt someone who cried but was big enough to still accept you for it four years later. Someone you’d swear at once you’d never meet but then have the chance and get excited only to see it play out entirely not how you were expecting, because you’re not the only one moving out in some direction. Outward and upwards, people’s lives come together like a zipper, then split apart like two helium atoms, swirling around and through the air, away, shooting off like a star never to cross again and then on one chance in a million come crashing down to the earth in the same place together. That, or just looking at a picture and imagining it.
Still, there are moments of alone that stretch on for so long maybe they weren’t even noticed; moments that were spent with an eye on canvas, or a heart tearing along a broken, frayed edge at the horizon, leaving a wake so narrow no one could remember what it even remotely looked like two years later. So the ink would swirl on paper, or charcoal, and there would be a girl, or there wouldn’t, and you had just dreamt it, because you had beat up U2 tapes grinding in a battery cover-less Walkman. And those tangents would come to sting, like the prick of a needle leaving beyond a hollow toothache of regret and wonder, molars taken but to where? Worn down with polish in the necklace of some high brow lady attending a show you’ll never hear of, and it started because you were supposed to just follow your dreams, whatever they were in a jar on a table, something you couldn’t have until a draft card.
With so many events pigeonholed into a small space, it seems quite impossible to equate those years with anything other than paradise. And the paradise rots, or more precisely burns, like a Polaroid on the wall, taking the beaten down sun every day for thirty years just to the right of the old, wooden paneled television. If you could pull the colors out of the print, all you’d have left are pastels, the Easter fallow moments with the occasional deep scratch through the upper right corner which you either live with or decide to cut off completely, making it unbalanced and misshapen in its smooth, analog perfections.
And all those promises came between the ages of fifteen and twenty-three, across the backs of a long string of plaintive tunes sung by youthful balladeers bottling a spirit that sears just like yours and wants to live, to scream, and cry through all history: LOOK-AT-ME… With the crashing coming afterwards that too was a blanket, jagged and broken in places, smashed like the cab of your first and favorite car, turned over in a ditch on Christmas Eve with your brother, coming back from getting some egg nog.
To let it go, and so to fade away. To let it go, and so to fade away.
I’m wide awake, wide awake…I’m not sleeping.
