Saturday, September 27, 2003

Do you ever wonder, dear reader, whether you’re in the wrong time, the wrong place, maybe even in the wrong body? In a laundromat in another time rests a self that fits you better, and passersby gather around it and wonder along with you. But you’re stuck in the too-long moment, asking what could’ve been and what shouldn’t have been and who ate all those breadcrumbs you dropped when the road diverged.

Then you muse, “I could reinvent myself,” but reinvention died a disco death and it won’t come back, ever. You look outside as the balcony windows flash by and guess how many stops are left: 319, not that anyone’s counting. Sometimes your voice, your pen, sometimes they protest like a twice-revved engine, and the whole room fills with the chorus of why why why. And so you hum as the blurry trees and plane-free sky play audience to your autumn nocturne.

People trickle in, first one, now two, three. When occasion strikes and often when demand is sharpest, you catch a glance welcome and terrifying, accurate and labyrinthine, and it pierces you and shakes you to your toes. Yet when you exhale and when you are still, you find your pen uncapped and your voice no longer silenced.