Strain of Consciousness

– You came over. It had been years. How could I remember the features of you which recede into the recesses of me. The way you burrow your eye brows when trying to understand what has just been said to you? The way you press your palms together when you’re not certain about the next step in a recipe, an instructional guide on how to put together a kitchen table for two, or how to build a friendship after years have devastated memory, and the idols we build to the beautiful moments of our experience have shattered and become nothing […]

– I continue shivering. The darkness persists. The moon is swallowed by dusk. The trees stretch toward the dim light thousands of miles away. The few remaining leaves tremble in this exertion. A couple lose hope and fall in the darkness toward the grave. I sit there, on the balcony. No glasses, no throw, no sweat pants, with a book. With the book, but without light. It is the first time I think about it. I wonder how she read on dark winter evenings. It was winter when she lost her enchantment. I miss that. That first year. Her enchantment. […]

– I feel the fuzz of the carpeting against my cheek, along with a kind of numbness which somehow makes the individual threads of the material more present. The light from the upstairs floods down toward me, the way water runs down shingles in a storm. The first blur I make out, upon gaining consciousness, is completely subdued by the kind of shapeless cognizance the light’s flood brings. Everything is shapeless, yet colorful. As I rise to my feet, I feel a different form of lightness. Not the kind of lightness that leaves you without breath and panicking for explanation, […]

– I shiver. There’s a breeze in the structure. An eave out of place, one of the rafters being defeated by the winter’s campaigns. I sit upstairs, waiting amidst mostly empty rows of metal folding chairs. The whisper of winter travels down the rows and around chairs. Its resolve wanes and ignites and sometimes slams against the frozen back of chairs. I sit, shivering. I wait. I am early still. Not early in the way that fowl sometimes wakes and anticipates the sun, but I am early, in a less rigid sense of the word. I shiver and I wait […]

– There’s a crunching, like the solitary sound of a gazelle making its way through a meadow at midnight, as I cross the lawn. The dead leaves of fall fill the empty dirt spaces, a battlefield of winter. I am the giant. I am like god. I look under foot and see the fractured bits of leaves in their different colors. I shiver as I reach the driveway. There are no leaves on the car or under it, as if this were a sacred space. I open the door and leave behind the battlefield, the leaves’ and my own. I […]

– “You’re too much in your head,” I hear her whisper in my ear. I can feel the warmth of her breath, as she says this. It vibrates and tickles the folicles of my ear. I smile and turn. She’s quick. The room is empty by the time I turn. Her scent lingers. The mixture of her own unique chemistry and Burberry, a scent sweeter than any ever hosted at department store beauty counters. I close my eyes then and breath it in, deeply. I can hear her giggle, distantly, like she’s in the next room. She could be anywhere. […]