10/20

Weighed down.  Was it the rain?  The grey skies?  The low barometric air pressure?  Or was it that mood disorder that has gone undiagnosed for years?

Hard to tell.

The morning starts well enough though.  I'm in high spirits. I don't mind it so much when I'm standing behind the cash register at work and someone approaches to ask about the taco menu displayed above my head.  It doesn't tighten me up the way it has lately.  It doesn't cause me to go rigid, crippled with apprehension.  That doesn't happen. And the interaction appears to end without catastrophe.  

It's not until afternoon.  Sometime afternoon that the weight settles in.  When it starts bearing down on the corners of my smile.  When it weaves its way through my spine and curls it into a slouched, distorted mess.  When it drops the anchor and takes takes me with it.  

I go under.

And it's not so bad, down here on the seabed.  A little darker.  A little more quiet.  Doesn't seem like too bad of an idea to burrow into some sand and stay for a while.  Loosen up this spine.  Address this frown.  Return to the surface in due time.

Yes, that sounds good.

9/10

The stool squeaks like it always does as he pulls it from beneath the bar.  He drops down on it.  Heavy.  Worn.

The bartender wanders over and asks the man if he’ll have the same as always.  “The usual?” He asks.

And the man nods, barely lifting his chin from his sunken chest.  He nods and places his elbows on the bar.  Slouches forward.

The bartender sets the scotch and soda down on a coaster and slides the glass under the man’s nose.  “You need a straw tonight?”

This snaps the man back to present.  This brings his gaze up to see the bartender’s playful smirk.  “No, I do not need a straw,” the man says as he picks the drink up from the bar and delivers a generous gulp to his stomach in defiance.  

But the bartender has already turned when the man clunks his glass back down.  He scans the other patrons’ faces to see if he had an audience, but no one is looking at him.  No one cares.

He resettles his chin on his chest and sighs heavily.  “Suppose there’s not much left to do,” he mutters.  Then takes out an avocado.  And makes some guacamole.

3/8

She lays on an inflatable pool bed, drifting through the canals that cut through the cement of this surreal city.  With her arms and face submerged, she floats, snorkeling.  Searching for deposits or remnants of this or that.  Searching because that's the reason the team sent her out today.  Cull and analyze information.  

So there she floats.  Down one of the intersecting waterways.  And I'm just watching her.  As she slowly pokes around beneath the surface.  As she casually raises her head to drain water that leaked into her mask.  As she lays there so unassumingly.  

Then I'm in the water too.  I'm coasting over to her raft and when I make contact, there's a brief moment of fear that I've disturbed her research.  Compromised her project.  Maybe I shouldn't have intruded.

But she greets me with a smile and a laugh.  Pulls her dirty blonde hair from her face.  Sinks me with those royal blues.

She slides her legs off, providing room for me on the raft, and I grab onto the opposite side.  Our feet drift underneath, coming together in short, almost rhythmic patterns.  Joining, then parting.

I ask how her day is going and she begins to explain the greater aspects of the search, identification and successful gathering of certain organisms or entities, but I must shift my weight at some point because as she's speaking the raft folds in the middle and our heads meet.  A swift bonk.  

I'm embarrassed but she's laughing again, and as I'm trying to asses the damage, apologizing and scanning her forehead for bruising, I realize our lips are closer than they've ever been.  

My body tingles.  Heart races.  Time slows to focus on me.  

And she notices.  She feels the pause as she glances at me.  The split that occurred from the moment we were having to the one I've created with my desire for her.  And though she holds me suspended there for an eternity, poised on my elbows with the grey haze of the day settling down around us, she leans forward to join me.  To lend her lips to me.

And the rush consumes me.  The release of tension and inundation of ecstasy is almost too much.  But I bear it.  I bear it to float with her for a little longer.  

2/28

I’m at a bar with a co-worker.  We decided to meet up for a few beers and plan out the week ahead of us.  Manage the perpetual onslaught of coffee orders coming our way.  But we don’t spend too long discussing vocational duties.  

Once we’re on our second pints we’re speaking more of family relations and odd social interactions.  Of his mother in-law’s manipulative boyfriend.  Or of the guy that I tailed up the highway after he cut me off yesterday morning.  Things like that.

We step outside for a cigarette and I shiver in the night’s brisk air.  Fixate on the clouds of grey seeping out of my face.

Back inside he heads for the restrooms at the back of the restaurant, and I return to the bar.

As I sit, sipping away at my pint, the bartender stands before me rinsing dishes in the sink wells beneath the bar.  With her short brown bob swaying as she bends and rises, eyeing the patrons seated at the hightop tables for empty drinks or needful expressions, I shout her name.

Through the music and cacophony of conversations her gaze settles on mine and she smiles, courteously.  “How are we doing?”

“I’m alright,” I say and raise my beer.  She glances at the glass in my hand, then her eyes are off scanning the room again.  Looking to utilize her services.  But I still want her attention, so I ask, “How are you?  How are your classes?  You said you were taking astronomy courses last time I was here.”

And for a moment, I feel as though I’ve succeeded.  As her arms stop plunging and scrubbing, and her wandering blue eyes come back to me.  Settle once again on mine.  But slowly a certain vitality melts from her face and she lets out such a rattled sigh that I feel a jab in my stomach.  A painful twang through my inebriated carelessness.

Her shoulders slump as she begins to speak.  As she tells me how the value of the credits she’s obtaining aren’t transferring to the university she’s decided to attend.  How it looks as though she’ll have to choose another major, and how the future is revealing itself to be something particularly more cumbersome than planned.  How that’s becoming more of a normalcy lately.

My head is cradled in my arms as I lean over the bar.  As I’m sucked into the disenchantment growing around this lady’s life.  

When I open my mouth to ask about her kids, how they’re doing, what they’re getting into these days, my co-worker appears behind me with a heavy handed slap on the back and the moment passes.  She’s off running someone’s tab and I’m slouched in my seat listening to a story of how some dude is currently vomiting in the men’s bathroom.

  

2/27

The wind is whipping as I walk toward the campus today.  It’s early and the sun is just coming up over the buildings and tree tops.  

The warm glow of oranges and blues is hard to admire with the wind.  My cheek seems to be glued to my shoulder as a shield.  Which also makes crossing University Ave even harder.  As I turn left to peer down the road, the first four lanes are empty.  So I take my time traversing to the median.

Then I see the old man.  He’s dressed in thermal spandex.  Purple.  Or maybe dark blues and blacks.  With black goggles covering his eyes.  A bushy gray beard protruding from his tight hood.  He’s energetically marching along.  Swinging his arms.  Taking small determined steps with his chicken legs.  Into traffic.

I pause at the median and look right.  There are a line of headlights a couple blocks down.  Two in each lane.  Beaming toward us through the early morning light.

And into them he marches.  Right down the middle of the road.

“Excuse me, sir?” I shout.

But he just lifts his knees and swings his arms.

So I walk out into the road with him.  I pace myself beside him.  He’s moving slower than I thought.  “Sir, you’re walking into traffic.”

The wind is still slapping us about.  I wonder if my words are getting lost.

So I shout again, “Sir, do you know where you are?”

He stops then.  A dead halt.  As I do with him.  Then it’s just the wind moving.  Pushing and whizzing and whipping.

He turns to me.  I pull my cheek from my shoulder to give him a good look.  He’s shorter than I thought he was.  “Do you know where you are?”  I shout.

The cars are getting closer now.  A block away.

“Do you?”  He shouts back.

Then he turns and marches on his way.  Just as the light turns green.

2/24

I’m outside the bar with this girl.  The date is coming to an end.  Our first date.  We’d been set up by a mutual friend of ours.  Someone that thought we would jive well together.  I think that’s what she said.  Jive.

But it’s gone well enough.  We met at this hip establishment in Bethesda.  An enormous space with a coffee bar, alcohol bar, and tables placed about to resemble a dining room.  And there’re all these large black and white prints of farming high up on the wall.  Of bare feet in dirt.  Close ups of tomatoes and squash and other hearty vegetables.  There’s one of the girl too.  Apparently she was volunteering when the photographer was on site. We rise from our bar stools to stand under it.  In the photo, she holds a bunch of kale up to her face, blocking out her mouth.  But her eyes are wide and excited.

I say it’s lovely.  Or cute.  Or something.  

Soon we’re back on our stools and finishing our drinks.  Paying the tab.  Layering up.  Then we’re outside.  And it’s cold, but we dawdle in the parking lot by the curb for a while.  Talk about the coming weeks.  Of work and events and spare time.  

At one point, when she’s telling me of her housemate’s late study habits, when her chin is resting on her thick wool scarf, and her head is tipping just slightly to the right, as if she’s trying to slide a memory back into her grasp, I ask if I can kiss her.  I ask as though I’m quizzical of the time, or perhaps in need of a pen.  Something light.  Airy.

Can I kiss you?  I ask.

And her head levels out.  Chin parts from the scarf as her posture straightens.  As her eyes take on the expression in the photo.  Wide and excited. 

Then I kiss her.   

2/23

“You passed it.” I say from the passenger seat, turning my head to stay on the turn we missed.

“Huh?” CJ says.

“You just passed it.  We’ll have to turn around.”  And I’m closing the tattered atlas of the USA.  What has masqueraded as our guide for the past few months.

CJ glances in the rear view mirror, down the forested road we’ve been navigating for the past hour.  “Nonsense,” he says, then slams on the brakes.  

I curse as the atlas catapults from my lap into the dash.  As my hands shoot to the roof and arm bar for support.  “What the hell are you doing?”

And CJ is turned.  Twisted, with an arm behind my chair, peering out the back window as he high tails it in reverse.  “I’m making amends.”  He glances at me from under the corner of his glasses and bounces his eyebrows with a smile. 

“You’re being reckless.”  I’m now fixed on the side mirror, waiting to see the inevitable car come into view.  To ram us from behind.  Put an end to our journey.

But as I’m glued to the reflection, we screech to a halt, turn right and continue forward.

“I’m being efficient.” He says.  And it’s obvious he’s satisfied.  Content in his decisions.  I must’ve missed the cigarette he placed in his mouth, but smoke is filling the car.  

“You’re being an ass.  Open your window.”

He smiles again, which only creates this sensation that all of these displays of happiness are at my expense.  That he is truly taking pleasure in my discomfort.  In my vexation.  But he lowers his window anyway and the smoke dissipates.

“Next you’re gonna tell me to fasten my seatbelt.”  

I’m looking out the window at this point.  My eyes are on the trees and lush greens of the forest.  The density of it all.  The flourishing vegetation producing this mystery and wonder the more I squint into the distance.  But his comment crawls up my spine and clamps right down into all the attention I have.

So I turn my head to him.  His unrelenting smirk.  His smoking cigarette.  His empty buckle.  

“Put your seatbelt on.”