Seed Of Sight

They started linking chains to Mouse before she even able to walk out of her little house.   That little house that someone slammed between two trees in front of a cow pasture.  That house that was on a winding road that ended at the highway.  Close enough that you could hear the cars.  Close enough that at night you could even see the light.  Of people going right by you.  Like you didn’t exist. 

And most of our mothers will need us more than we need them.  Just as we will one day need our children more than they need us.  That was supposed to happen later than age 9.  But that link got added when most of us were still learning how to use our house keys.  That link wrapped straight around her spine. 

When we were children as soon as the teacher blew the whistle everyone would run.  Everyone would scream.  Mouse would stand.  And as everyone claimed their favorite social spot, monkey bars, swings, slides, soccer fields, Mouse would stand and wait.  Then she would determine by elimination which group she would stand near. 

After high school we screamed and ran.  College, jobs, countries and Mouse stood and waited.  And as she did chains got added.  Money, ex-boyfriends, friends on drugs, her Mother’s newest husband.  Mouse stood and tried to figure things out.  She could hear the highway from her house.  She could see the lights passing right by. 

Eventually she ran.  She planted her feet somewhere else.  Those chains looked for a second like they might break.  That was just slack.  And slack snaps. A thousand miles of slack snapping into place will rip your joints out of socket.  It will dislocate your hips.  It will bring you to your knees.  It makes your vision go double.  It will make crashing down into the pile of chains an act of relief.  So Mouse fell back down to that little house.  The lights from the highway bounced off of those trees.  And Mouse was in less pain there.

And one thousand miles away from her I wonder how free any of us get to be.  

I used to spend my waiting time thinking of her.  School was over.  Work didn’t take much thought.  Empty time was filled with what might be.  Imaginary conversations.  Imaginary interactions.  Flights.  Arguments.  Sex.  Meals.  Chores.  At what point did the time I spent playing it all out surpass the time I had actually spent with her?  It had to be after I moved.  Years spent apart.  We still talked occasionally.  Her in a studio apartment.  I would be on a payphone outside of a Walgreens crouched down on the sidewalk.  My bike propped up against the wall.  Men would walk by me, nod and keep walking.  I had nothing to fear.  Neither did they.  I don’t think anyone involved in that situation was sure of it.  Not at 2 am. 

It was a way to time travel.  Six hour shelving shifts where just a couple interactions replayed 100 different ways.  Bike rides where just a road trip where I had a car and she had her hair pulled back and we picked music we both liked.  It was like boot camp for when inevitably it would all come back to play.  And occasionally it would.  It would start out great.  And when alcohol would light fires we thought it was really working.    Really we were just so drunk that we could ignore the other one.  Hook them out off to the side of the stage and replace them with something better.  Our versions of each other. 

She was so close to what I had imagined.  She was almost everything that I would create for myself.  And I was that for her.  Her almost man.  Her tweakable guy.  This slight margin is what allowed us to think we could make those adjustments.  If we just put the time in we could pull the other person into outline we wanted.  In real life that stretch will snap ligaments.  It will shatter your spine and leave you with collapsed lungs.  It’s that hard to stretch a person.  We tried.  We paid for it every time. 

Then it stopped.  It stopped when she was right in front of me.  A real body.  A real voice.  And it wasn’t anything like I could do anything about it.  The ghost was superior.  And she knew it too.  She had her own ghost.  One night we acknowledged these ghosts.  We were sitting on a bench in Chicago.  And I told her that I still thought about her.  I told her the problem was that it wasn’t her.  It was me.  I was so selfish that I was still thinking of this creation.  This person that she was supposed to be.  I waited for the backlash.  I waited to be called out for being an asshole.  Instead she said that she did the same.  And we agreed that it must be ok.  If it helped us sleep at night we could keep thinking about what we wanted until we figured out what we needed.  

When you pass through Gary it’ll take the wind out of you.  A god flexed his fingers here.  And he is about to swallow you. 

When the speaker crackles you only make out every fourth consonant and yet you know what it is saying.  It’s Mother screaming out your name across the country side.  More feeling than sense. 

And you press your foot down.  The snow cracks and slides through between the wood planks.  It falls down onto a car passing below.  You exist at that moment.

How many years can remain here before they take you back?  These myopic views are threatening to take you under.  A blanket of awareness.  You speak this at the corner by the 3rd busiest retail street in America and the roommate gives you a look.

On the couch in back of the room you can hear them speaking about Bush.  About how the rural people are going to vote for him.  They just aren’t the same people out there.  Not as bright.  You swallow your whisky and think about a man that can fix a pie, a car, a blanket.

At night you stumble to the edge of the platform.  No one pays much attention.  The beast is in the distance.  Your ears are ringing from the pressure of a Minneapolis band in a Chicago bowling alley.  And it’s not a night that you are bookmarking for a “I was there that night” moment.  It’s just a cold night after a show and Father’s army jacket isn’t warm enough.  Your boots are old and you can’t afford another pair yet.  You want to go home to your closet of a room and sleep this night out of your system. 

The day before you are overcome with sickness you know it’s coming.  You know because at the bottom of your lungs, when you breath out the last few inches of exhaust from your lungs it tastes heavy, sour.  That is what comes off the pavement and surrounds my face as I press it into the pocket my arm forms around my face.  Something within me is faltering.  Something trembles and burns.  Acidic.  If I breathed heavily enough now I would leave me.

Sitting in a doctor’s office and having him tell you what he went through, that they found him naked in the show, should be consolation.  Having your roommate sit across the room and say “Hey dude, I know.  They thought I was going to die.” should put things in perspective.  Chemicals wash perspective away.  And that is all we are.

The smell strips off my body.  I am not clean.  The dirt is ground into the palm of my hand.  If I stay here I’ll disassemble.  Someone will be found here in black shirt, jeans and work boots.  They won’t be able to explain the simplest of things.  So I pull my hands up to the sides of my face.  And I can see them.  So even though I can feel that my vision is going.  Even though I know that I cannot focus.  I am wrong.  My hands are there.  I put my hand on my veins and I count.  And I am wrong about that too.  My heart is in rhythm.   I stand and look skyward.  I name the colors in of what I see.  I count the leaves.  I look down the sidewalk and see that someone is coming this way.  I have to stand up.    

She sets her coffee cup down on the table.  I know she is going to ask me to leave.  I can see it in the body language.  In the way she is sitting at an angle.  I have forced conversation.  I have dragged it off the muddy banks of rumor and gossip and spilled it forth.  I’m a jester and I’m doing cartwheels.  I go silent.  I wait for her to speak.  I am anxious for stories of why her freezer is stocked with paper wrapped steaks.  How did she find that Thundercats shower curtain?  Did she paint those milk crates?   It’s all gone now.  If I could have kept my mouth shut long enough to let her open up on her own time I could have learned.  Why there is a stick figure drawn in sharpie by the drain in her bathtub.  Why that mug in cabinet says “bleach please drink.”  Why she can’t handle my aversion to this silence.

So then I’m on the street.  The leather jacket I wore last night feels a bit absurd in the morning silence.  The leather was built for noise.  For crowds.  I check my pockets for my phone.  My keys.  My sunglasses.  I check again.  I feel like I’m off balance.  So I walk from one side of the bricks to the other.  One side makes me sweat.  The other makes me chilled.  I inhale through my nose and get something rancid in my brain.  It reminds me of the garbage cans on the curb.  When I was young I would stare at the flies.  The maggots.  And I would fight the urge to touch the filth. When my mouth opens a phrase is released.  “I’m so tired.”  I didn’t aim it at anyone.  I didn’t even know I was going to say it.  But there it is.  Truth in the alley way. 

I’d been visiting her room for 15 minutes at a time for months.  My friends wished we were sleeping together.  That’s how I knew they weren’t my friends.  And anyway.  I was learning.  You ever notice that cigarette burns can cover needle tracks?  Sure you look like you’re a mess but when you get to the point of burning yourself with lit cigarettes it’s a fair bet that no one will notice.  15 minutes doesn’t give you much time.  Fights about who was better: Shifter Puller or The Hold Steady usually just end with the phrase “Get out.”  Sometimes “I’m out.”  We never talked about how we got to this point.  Talking is probably what got us here in the first place.  She didn’t answer her door today. 

When I first moved here my roomate looked at the buildings and said “We should all move back to the wilderness.”  I said “We did.  This is what we do to it.”  That’s why I liked it here.  It was a world we already destroyed with such severity that it looked as if it had always been that way.  And the people.  So many fucking people.  One could disappear into the density.   She did.  Maybe I will too.    

The Elk is in the corner adjusting his headphones.  He’s trying to keep them out.  He doesn’t get the point.  He came in that door.  A little girl in a red shirt tugs at his headphones.  What is The Elk listening to?  It just sounds like it’s trying not to exists.  She’s ok with that.  Sometimes she tries that too.  Online.  With the door closed.  Her roommates thinks she’s being elite.  She was going for passé.  Less work and all that.

So the group that brought The Elk counts minutes.  How long do they have to stay?  Long enough to find the story.  No one is really enjoying the moment.  But soon.  Soon someone will make a mistake that will make their own embarrassing moments look like antes.  That’s what they come for.  The Elk hasn’t told them how sad it is.  He’s trying to listen.

The drink flows down.  They wait.  They notice others looking at them too.  Waiting to see if they are the moment.  Soon bottles crash and people begin screaming at each other.  The group starts moving them.  It’s time for them to make their own mistakes.  Cops are coming.  A girl tumbles down a flight of wooden stairs and grabs her knees.  For the people walking away unattached to this embarrassment it is clear that they now have a green light.  They can finally find out what their friends look like naked tonight.  They can finally tell their acquaintances that embarrassing story.  The girl in the red shirt leans over and tells The Elk that she plays World of Warcraft for at least eight hours a day.  He doesn’t even smirk.  Just grabs her hand.  And it doesn’t matter what happens tonight.  

Your ears register just how close the sole of the boot was to your cranium.  You’re brought to tears with the fact that the party kept moving long after you gave up and left town.  You slide gently down, next to the toilet and your sweaty forehead presses against grout.  Reach as far as can.

As The Elk switches on the light everyone in the room slams their eyelids down.  For a second they all share a memory.  Lying in grass.  The smell of dandelions and the sky going white as they wonder “Was Mother bluffing?”  Maybe we shouldn’t have stared so long. 

You’re torn, bent like a page, wondering if your insides have finally gone to shit.  You’re sitting in traffic realizing that it’s your car making the squealing noise.  You’re on the other side of the phone asking someone to repeat themselves because you can’t handle the subject line.  Take one step.

And The Elk slaps the side the juke box causing the needle to jump, scratch and then goes back to performing the tasks that it failed at.  Everyone ignores the urge to swivel their hips and instead just nod their head.  They grip the top of their beer bottles to keep the liquid from reaching our temperatures.  And no one admits a damn thing.  

Here bodies are everywhere.  Unseen is not invisible.  They are marching down stairs.  Brewing coffee.  Under sheets thinking of their bladders.  Moving with their lovers.  Sitting on toilets.  Reaching for their phones.  Using their electricity.  Toasters, fridges, computers, coffee makers.  It turns the sky pink and makes tinnitus the new silence.   All the way to the water.  I wrap my focus around the concept of the water.  It’s supposed to calm you.  I always sit down my book when we cross the Chicago river.  That’s supposed to help.  I can hold on until the river.  By the end of the day I might be in the hospital again.  My temperature dropping.  An EKG strapped to my chest as I explain my medical history.  As I tell them I know I’m ok, I know it’s just all in my head.  And they’ll say yes.  But then say I’m not OK.  Then they’ll say it’s not my fault.  And I’ll stare at the curtains.  Maybe.  It doesn’t have to go down that alley way.  To the same dead ends.

I think about it when it was at its worst.  In a basement in winter.  Two kegs across the room, half empty sitting in moldy water.  I was concerned that I might charge up the stairs.  I might grab a knife from the kitchen.  I might open my lungs up.  Just to breathe again.  I wasn’t concerned.  I was panicked.  Sub temperature blood.  Charcoal in my gut.  Vice gripped lungs.  I thought that if I looked away from me for just a second I would be gone. 

It’s better than that here.  Among these bodies.  Over there is a wonderful sight.  Bricks, steel, flesh, electricity.  There’s such a wonderful stench to it all.  There’s enough pain here that if you slow down and listen close enough you can hear other people in the type of pain that has no logic.  Enough to disappear in without going too far.  I can recover here.  I can find remedies that don’t come in orange plastic bottles.  With time I will learn to breathe again.  Here.  Without opening myself up.