“But as it is, I am simply conscious, an animal in pajamas.” -Billy Collins
When I was a kid, Summer was my favorite season with tall rattling cottonwoods and the bite of chlorine fumes and my neighbor and her friends who were always three years older than me. There’s a collage of images: praying mantis in a pickle jar, foxhole by the railroad tracks, stolen cigarettes and porno mags. I’d hold my bare forearm next to my father’s all dirty and sweaty to see who’s darker. Before dusk, the tightly permed moms walk the block as the concrete cools. I’d monitor the goings-on of Scott Ave. from the hush of our thick Oak tree. Knowing all. Running things, I felt. I really did.
The blisters subside & Autumn is my favorite season. There’s a practical magic to, every year, trees’ leaves patiently waiting for that only moment of red, orange, and yellow. And there are uncountable leaves. Though, I’d like to pick One when it grows. I’d like to know it & the limbs from which it hangs. I’d like to greet it regularly throughout the year. Most of all, I’d be there when it makes its silent, insignificant detachment, descent.
I wanted to tell you, though, that I’m waiting for my moment. There is a moment in Winter that I’ve grown to love, I dare say, most. (I’ve tired of attaching value to the invaluable. There was a girl in college who glared at me after I ranted haphazardly about the treatment of sweatshop laborers. She spat, “It’s an economic necessity.” My response didn’t come to me until after class when she wasn’t there. It goes, “Well, Princess, I come from the hopeless & obsolete opinion where Economics is not a necessity.” And I still do. But I digress.) There is a moment in Winter when there’s no wind. There are clouds & there’s the moon; both are essential, complimentary. There’s an unmolested layer of snow, but it’s done falling. It’s after Midnight. Bundled, cigarette orange, and breath alive, you’ll hear the low-pitched squelch of snow crushed beneath heavy tires in the distance, a telling juxtaposition of the ensuing hush. A dead quiet–the good dead, the resting dead, the detached dead–encapsulates me. The moon in all her sly, delicate madness will waltz through a gap in the clouds. Silver, blue, black, white, like a reflection in chrome. It’s so quiet that I deny the possibility that other living souls dwell on that plane in that moment.
