Things

Sometimes I dream that I'm swimming in a sea of eyelashes, all their soft little tips are brushing my skin. In the middle of the dream I switch to doing a half-assed kind of backstroke, legs beneath all those lashes, and I look up at the big eye in the sky staring back at me, eyelashless. I've never known what to make of dreams or the smiles you exchange with people that you never meet.

S: I'm going to take a shower, so I don't have squirrel droppings in my hair.

Everyone in the world has more time than me. I don't know how this is physically possible, but it seems it must be so. Yesterday I watched an old man with a cane tapping his way down a cobble stoned street and a butterfly clinging to the moss on an old brick wall just flexing its wings. Somehow they had nothing better to do, no old flame to see. And there I was all busy like I always am, watching them.

On Mother's Day:

M: I was going to buy you flowers today when I was out.

S: Ah. (Hugs).

M: But I had already spent all my money on pea gravel.

S: How much did it cost?

M: Enough that you didn't get any hydrangeas. It's at times like these that I fear I'm getting a bit too tied down.

Perhaps it's as you suggest. Perhaps everything I've, no we've ever done has been entirely wrong. Like that time I sat by the river and tried to think of all the different words I could use to describe its particular shade of black. Perhaps you're right about that summer I spent in the woods killing baby birds to help a native species survive incursion. Perhaps everything I've ever done has been like that summer, trying to keep away from the natural way of things. But I think that last night, in the middle of that terrible movie about producers and cats, when I reached out to take your left hand in my right, I think that was the first time I've done anything right. And if you had just squeezed back I'd think that you agreed.

"Look down your shirt and spell attic."

Sometimes I sit beneath the oak tree on the street and practice spelling words backwards. It's as if I'm preparing for some quiz that is never going to happen. evol. That's an easy one, and don't know if anyone ever really means it. tcepsmucric. That's probably a harder one to define, but it's the exact way that I was watching you when you got on the bus and kissed that person who wasn't me on the daeherof. Sometimes I do it when I don't want things to be true. I have this idea that if I could get everything spinning drawkcab. That's a really easy one due to the context. That maybe this time, I won't be on the street at mid day, cats yowling in the distance, gingko trees dropping crappy blossoms, spelling words that you won't ever read.