“Descending the hill, my only thought: ‘I feel like this was inevitable.’”
I wonder at what point this became something I did. The scene keeps replaying in my mind. The house passing by slowly with unbearable intensity. What it feels like is gravity, which is hard to explain. When I saw the house my reaction was to laugh. A single, sharp exhale, and then nothing at all. It passed by me like a wheel on fire. I dazzled in the blaze, sure I wouldn’t get hurt, but felt a tinge of horror to think where it came from.
Descending the hill, my only thought: “I feel like this was inevitable.”
The rest of the ride is a blur, but I can guess the route I took: I connected with the main north-south drag that flushes into my neighborhood. To get there, more blind turns away from the house. Eventually a liminal sign, something on the border with this neighborhood and everything else. One is Catholic school that lies right on the edge. The main building is white with sky blue doors. The trees out front have bright green leaves. In spring, the leaves turn the color of lemons. Other trees in this neighborhood: cypress, laurel, nectarine, plum. Various kinds of palm. Less lush: gray trees with brittle leaves I don’t know the name for. All sorts of bushes. When there are flowers, for one season they are purple, and another they are white.
The sidewalks even out again. They ride close to the road. The road here is better paved. A train runs through this area and everywhere I crisscross the tracks. I park close enough, almost four blocks away. I don't think while walking. I empty out my mind so I can hear everything. Headphones in so no one will bother me, head lowered, but not enough to convey total absorption — a vulnerability. I don’t convey toughness, either, which is enough to provoke many men. Also because I’m not tough. What I listen to instead — a breeze rushing through the trees. Electricity running through the wires. People up at all hours in this neighborhood. I listen to them, but don’t pry. The fullest sound I hear comes from my feet. Grass, pavement, dirt, gravel. I trace the wall with one finger separating this alley from a carwash, gravel under my feet. Crunching. Two block to my home.
I don’t know if a light was on in the house, but this time I noticed it has shingles. I ascertained the details with vivid clarity. While I walk, I run through the image again and again: intricately grooved, the way the slow drip of runoff creates canyons out of rocks. A record of time passing by the house as texture, in the rest of the neighborhood, runoff. Canyons at the heart of the city. The shingles were thick as banana peels and I imagined just as soft. Like the entire house is just a membrane, thin as a moth’s wing.
There’s a transformer on the ground. It exploded several nights ago and now lies here, untouched. I stop before it. There’s less than a foot between me and its broad, black side. Somehow we haven’t been without electricity. I think maybe the transformer was a dummy that simply fell like a ripe fruit. Electricity coming from somewhere else.
At the moment my rear tires met the road that connects to the house, I clicked out of the disjuncture I felt at the coffee shop. I didn’t click back to how I felt before, but into something else. Not entirely new, and not more deeply disjointed, but a disjuncture still, slightly shifted. I remember feeling this for the first time as a kid. I crouched in the alley made by the east fence of my yard, wood, and the west fence of the huge lot that then stood empty, chain link. A three-house-deep run of land that belonged to no one. I liked to stand stiff with my hands up, back against my fence and facing the gate, through that, the field. I imagined myself as a suspect in a round-up, or suspended in something like amber. The point was that I was somehow trapped, and on view, like a butterfly on a pinboard. I had crouched down to investigate the assortment of crunchy, discarded plant parts and received a sudden shock from my foot. A thorn was embedded in my sole. It was easy to extract but the experience left me exhausted. I remember being in a blank state for what felt like too long. Even at a young age I knew my body’s response was too much for that relatively low amount of trauma, but nothing could be done. I waited for the clouds to pass, and when they did, I felt another way. Not the way I felt before the thorn. This startled me, but again, that feeling soon got sucked into the vacuum that replaced feeling inside me. Somewhere I imagine all these feelings pinned, one on top of another, light filtering through hundreds of pairs of wings, beating, interrupted, creating a color that is muddy, creating a movement that is subtle, explosive.
