It feels like the world has a head cold. Nothing serious, but a constant, slow drip. You dreamt of floods and you drive in rain, and you can’t get the right wiper speed without the plastic blades whimpering against the glass, but your music is just right.
The world outside is wet but the rain still spits as if to hold back.
There’s a heat shield on your car’s undercarriage that rumbles at 1500 and 3000 rpm that reminds you that everything slowly breaks. Since the car has no A/C, you crack the windows and your forearm gets pelted with small cool drops of rain, so you close the windows again to shut out the world. When you do, the music comes through more clearly.
“… with a broken sink for a face, and a head that just takes up space…”
If you sat by a fire today, you would think about warmth but you wouldn’t really feel it. It’s the kind of day characterized by a retreat upward and inward. There you are, sat huddling, cloistered in a crucible in your mind, but you don’t shiver. Sat as if to give yourself a hug.
Driving on a slick highway down through Hartford makes you think of Boston. You realize you gauge how well you know a city by how much you’ve drank in it. By this measure, basically all of Connecticut is family or a close family friend. New York, having not killed you yet, is like your oldest childhood friend. Denver is an acquaintance—Memphis a high school bully. Boston a rich cousin.
Then you think about how bad a measure of knowledge that is: witnessing and judging places via the dank monotony of dive bars, the stickiness of their floors, the staleness of their air, and the accompanying haze of spending time in such places. It’s not that you don’t know any places, just that you need to recalibrate how you embody the knowing.
And then you reflect on how little you know, and how little you ever could.
Then you think about old friends, or people gone from you, and how unnatural it feels for you to let go. People, places, things. What you lack in memory for specifics you have for feelings to excess. You don’t know what you ate for breakfast there, but you remember the majesty of looking out at the Rockies every morning the week you finished your MFA. The pathetic desperation to become something worthy of the tuition you spent to be there. All the shame you felt for bad decisions, and how little you felt for your few accomplishments.
You remember what it was like for it to rain on your birthday and for that to be a big deal. You remember other things you wish you forgot and have forgotten most of what you wish you didn’t. But you don’t drive to work in reverse.
“… you’ve heard the road to every truth. it’s just a cul-de-sac…”
How boring life would be without thought.
Someone told you recently to be kind to yourself. You’re unsure but you think you might have rolled your eyes. Not because the thought itself is wrong, but because of how unnatural the impulse to be kind to yourself comes to you. And the more you think about it, the more you think you’ve unconsciously ascribed some sort of nobility to flogging yourself, mentally. Some sort of sense of superiority distilled from the habit of never giving yourself a fucking break. But any judgment that has become reflexive and governed by a rule lacks true perspective—how can you trust any of your interpretations of things if your default is to blame yourself? It’s the flipside of always blaming others, on the same valueless coin.
Purposefully vague.
“… if we don’t know better, no will we try…”
You park at work and the sky opens. Deluge at last. As your shirt darkens to a different shade of grey, you’re grateful for letting the world in. It’s less about you and your retreat inward than it is about being grateful for the people and things that help you get out the door. The lunch she made you. A kind word. Quiet. The dignity in basic work.
The world might have a cold, but now at work you commit to watching the rain fall through your window and try to fall into a gentler reverie. It’s only Tuesday—it could hurt you but you won’t let it.
“… you are a beam of light, maybe that’s why your battery runs dry…”
matt nilsen 