How is it that the far off whistle of a train can sound mournful and hopeful at the same time? I want to travel to that intermediate place, borne away on legs of steel, as the whole world passes by in one great blur. One way or another, I'd like to end up somewhere in the light. I don't care if it's a sunrise or a sunset, a streetlamp or the moon. Perhaps what I really want is to go back to a place that feels like a beginning, a place where my head is in the clouds and my toes are in the sand. I doubt I'll ever know the answer as to why that distant whistle conjures such great longing. Perhaps it is enough to imagine an ocean breeze. Perhaps it is enough to want goodness in one's life.
For just a moment I get to peek inside your mind, but it's not really your mind at all, is it? It's your heart, your soul, your innate fire of life typed into a formatted text box. You've posted it not knowing if it will ever be read, if anyone will ever care, and yet there, here it is.
Here I am too. You are beautiful, you know it, I hope. No, I'm not talking about your mirrored reflection or your countless sexy selfies.
Those words, there, here- they show me all the beauty I need to know.
Timpanies, softer than an overture of the most valiant decore. A swafting miracle which runs faster than a boar in the forest. Chasing dreams, the tiny spores, emanated from leaves, their sun-fed cores, while God takes his lean, and watches the stores open and close and open and close and he wonders why he made it all. Though he probably doesn't, because from what I've heard, he's a bit of a know-it-all, thinks he controls it all, even though evil's here, betraying his supposed personality. And through it all, I'm here, watching you all. Enthralled by the movements of time and the calls and the whines of the world and its intelligence. Elegance drawing forth a healthy core of wisdom without action steadily declining to corruption without nurture or limits or the bravery of own self to QUIT IT!
And the beat goes on. Somebody writes yet another song. Evolutionary projections roll along, and I'm here.
Sometimes the sound of fire in winter reminds me of finger-bones cracking. This warmth does not comfort at all.
"Save your seeds, friend." Movement behind me, but I don't turn my head in acknowledgement.
"Dig before winter." My voice sounds as flat as the dust-fields around us.
Another thin body, dark skin, a familiar still-quiet shrouding intent or thought. Same short hair, same everything else - when everyone appears the same, death becomes a blurred, reoccurring dream. Death cannot touch Nobody.
I feel the question build before they release it, a black smokescreen shimmering in the inches between our legs.
"Are you really leaving, tonight?" They are as still as I.
We do not glance to meet each other's eyes, our features masked by the same blank red. Take away the human features, and less attachment occurs.
"It doesn't matter. Nobody cares when Nobody leaves, and Nobody ever comes back after."
A wrist-snap in the flames. It has been weeks since we last heard coyotes and I hope it means they gather somewhere in the darkness, howling for the moon and plotting an attack. I fear it means another species returned to dust.
"I-I would scar myself. For your absence."
In a society contingent on sameness, identifying marks ostracize you immediately. People fear the strange, unique, out-of-ordinary -- fear always roots into either love or hate. Emotions of any kind have no place in a dying world, too much work need be done simply to stay alive.
"I feel my presence as a growing darkness and sterile soil."
For the most part, we have our language paired to easy, familiar phrases. Simple, short, direct, but full of a bleak poetry; we grasp vainly for anything both beautiful and permanent in this world where everything withers, straight down to the bones, to the vaporeal soul.
The fire tires of breaking bones, begins to settle down into itself, pensive, a wonder and wait.
"You are the soil to my roots. Beyond our dust is simply more dust. What do you expect to find but Death?" They stand on top of a dangerous, teetering house of matchstick feelings and their voice shakes to the foundation.
"Nobody knows that for certain. I know nothing for certain anymore and I have less and less to offer every day. Cull the weak laws no longer apply, but those laws did exist for a reason."
"You are anything but a weak shoot to be culled--"
I cut them off before they can continue. Tonight we will not tread footsteps into the past. Tonight is the first night of the future.
"If I am anything at all I am a weakness here. If I become I, singular, I belong beyond the dust."
"There is no beyond the dust." Sometimes anger sends off a palpable pressure, a heat. The fire picks up, feeding from it.
I prod it with a long piece of rusted rebar, a skeleton from days past, perhaps a skyscraper. I wonder if it remembers the cool of low clouds, dreams of fog as it begins to turn red hot in my hand. I throw in a few more compress logs, flames jump awake, startled and hungry, throwing sparks to the sky to spite the hidden stars.
"I will simply accept the dust my soul is made of if that is the case."
There were no protocol expressions out where our words hung now; our sentences become weak and naked if not rehearsed. The fire returns to bone-breaking and this time it sounds like spinal vertebrae.
The silence plays in and out of the sparks, pokes a hole through the dust-colored clouds above, the hint of a star, maybe. They never seem to look at the sky, never head-back wonder like mine. Feeling that sheer awe at once was, what is now.
I shake my head. This is not a night of past.
"If there's nothing to change your mind, I have something I want you to take with you," they say at last, their voice flat as mine now, house of feelings swept away in a sandstorm.
They shuffle around in their big, baggy, dust-colored pocket. Skirts are the most practical thing in the life-long desert. When they pull out their hand it shakes -- whatever they hold, they hold for dear life.
"I don't know what it is. I don't know if it's viable-- but here," they grab my hand, shove something small and hard between my fingers, into my palm. Then they grab me around the shoulders, our heads pressed side-by-side together, closer than we have been in a long time.
"Save your seeds, my love."
With that they push away and turn, head up, shoulders squared, disappearing into the darkness beyond my circle of starving yellow light. It starves with me, starves like the miracle I hold waiting to sprout in my hand.
I shiver, and I'm uncertain if my stomach rumbles or if it is my heart.
