Strain of Consciousness

-“Where am I?” The question came to you as you stepped past the bathroom’s heavy door. Following it, you laughed at yourself. A silly question it was. It wasn’t a matter of displacement, but of clarity. As you had entered everything had been nothing more than a blur. Now, after staring at yourself and blinking your way to focus, retinal focus, you could see the small coffee shop clearly. Admittedly, it did not seem familiar, being a place you seldom visited, but had enough familiarity for you to recognize it. You glanced around once more, taking in the facade, the […]

-In the coffee shop, the on-campus coffee shop, not the one where you’d meet your friends to hold study sessions, but the one you seldom visited because it was usually overcrowded, you immediately felt the shift in temperature. Now it felt like your skin was thawing at a radioactive frequency. And in that second, as the door was yet to shut behind you-the two of you-you closed your eyes and wondered if this was what food felt in the microwave. The thought was drowned in the sound of water falling. You honed in on it and realized it was not […]

-It kept you warm that winter when you purchased it. It fit snuggly; yet loose enough to be the most comfortable article in your entire wardrobe. It was only the rain, which led successful campaigns against the cotton and wool fibers and concatenation of frays that wrapped themselves around your frame, from the soft bundle of the hood-folded, a make shift pillow at the back of your neck-to the tapered end hanging half way down your bottom, an inch from reaching the V from where your pants’ legs grew. It was the rain that proved the sweatshirt was not in […]

-The image that comes to mind is that of thread. Not thread wound into something sizeable, a bundle of weak frays, but rather thread in its abundant weakness, the thread that frays. The fray that tugs at the armor of a sweatshirt slowly convincing other threads, knit tightly, to give into their weak constitution. A chain of frays that become the slow unraveling and eventual demise of that sweatshirt, the one you wore on those occasions when you felt you needed a little something, some kind of reminder, perhaps of an accomplishment, perhaps of your value, that little emblem, that […]

-They were sitting, the two of them, at one of those small booths. The kind with the fake wood paneling and worn cushions, loose from the long years of people sitting and shifting. The kind you find in small mom and pop restaurants that try to pass themselves off as the kind of place you should visit in your Sunday’s best. It was a warm day in the unbelievably arid summer. They had been sitting for quite a while. Between them; several jokes, tidbits of what may pass as conversation and witticisms-the kinds of which they were both fairly prone […]