December 12, 2005

Stationaryphobia (Or: read between the lines)

Everyone always has to be somewhere.

The whisky and water sat on the table. It made marks on the tabletop like ring-worms on the wood veneer that had peeled away from the particle board at the edges of the booth.

And we all want to be somewhere else.

I looked across the table at the girls we were with. They were sitting up straight and looking down in the indigo glow of their cell phones, holding them like squirrels hold nuts, sending messages with their thumbs to somebody somewhere else.

The only way to be in neither situation is to be moving towards one or the other.

I stood up and walked out of the bar and into the street. Orion leaned to the left in the sky south of Ventura. I put my back to him and walked up Main street. The street was empty and the fluorescent lights flickered under the awnings of the mattress store that was going out of business.

I always end up at a different places.

I walked into a bar that had wedged itself inside a plywood box between a pawn shop and a T.V. repair store. The wall behind the bar was a mirror printed with a repeating wildlife landscape. Hanging above the reflection of me was a clock. It floated above me in the mirror like a thought bubble. Habitually, I adjusted the time to Mountain Standard, and then into Eastern Standard. Then I finished my beer.

I always leave for the same reasons.

I walked toward home and tired to enjoy the stillness of my neighborhood. The way nothing moved like it were a living photograph. They way the edges of the moon soaked through the sky like teardrops on a love letter. The way I walked alone down the middle of the street completely, beautifully, free and alone in the middle of the night.

But i couldn't. I couldn't see anything. People and places filled my head that were sleeping and waking up and getting covered in snow and rusting and growing old and were doing so everywhere but on the street i was walking down. I wondered what the sunset looked like in cleveland and how cold the water was in Virginia, and if the UPS trucks were stuck in the snow in Denver.

Then I stopped walking. I stood still and looked up and tried to realize where i was. I looked down the street in both directions.

I wondered how long until I made it home.

Posted by Todd Roeth at December 12, 2005 12:16 AM