ONE OF THESE DAYS


tuesday's with reverie.

You wake up late but not late enough. Empty bed, empty head, empty stomach. Rumbling, stumbling, on your back, on your side, but still not on your feet. That emptiness again, still vibrating, leftovers from the overnight hours. Hollow and hungry for something you can't feed it.

You were up at 2:30, churning, burning, tossing, turning. Sat, stood, sat again. No better, no worse. Padded down the steps on little bare feet, sneaking, trying to get away with something you didn't have to hide, the soft reflex of loud hardwood. Water. Computer. Checking email that never comes. Clips and quips, the happy diversion of Lewis Black: QuickTime and quick wit, leaves you laughing, always wanting more. Back to bed, sneaking still: paused, stepped, bent, slipped. Covers up, head down. Waited for sleep, slow to come but full to follow.

A hug and kiss, a smile, the touch of a tender hand. Four hours later, the day already feels better. Brighter, somehow, for the son. Then for the other. Perhaps. Three men and a maybe. Cartoons and breakfast: dull browns settle on the plate and in the bowl, bright colors explode everywhere else, like Jackson Pollock on the satellite. Male dragons and female super agents, kids and teens saving the world with a little help from Eastern mysticism and Western technology. Would that they could.

A walk, uphill, but not both ways. Triangulated. Youngest in front, walking, skipping, sometimes dancing. Maybe a little air guitar. Looking both ways, then back again, holding your hand across a street and not yet self-conscious about it. Willing, welcoming. It won't last. It's good while it does. Older on the left, an X on his hat and an X on his shirt, marking the spots that used to be but maybe aren't so much anymore: the head and the heart, growing, becoming their own little treasures, places to dig and uncover and rejoice in what you find buried there. He sings. He beat-boxes. He laughs. He does not hold your hand.

Oldest on the right and getting older. Flecks of gray in the hair, the beard, the brain. The body rebels, gently at first, feeling the weight and creak of its age. This is not a state of mind but a state of being, of becoming, something you perhaps did not anticipate but knew you could not avoid. Funny how that happens, how it sneaks up on you in the hazy, filtered sunshine of Shady Avenue, walking to the library, to the bank, to the video game store, three destinations that, as much as any, remind you of who you are and what you were, of when you weren't and how you will always be.

Cars rush by: one, then another, then another, an endless stream of people coming too fast from where you've been and going too far for where you'll be, all at the end of this walk, the end of this day, and then, someday, the end of everything. You're on a long walk on a slow hill on an old street in a big city, thinking that this is the kind of day you could get used to but won't ever have the time to. Because the minutes and hours, like those cars and those boys, are hurrying, surging, lunging, climbing the long climb up their own slow hill, and even though you're not wearing a watch, and even though you're trying not to listen, you can still hear the heavy ticking and tocking of those feet on the sidewalk, the hard rolling and hissing of those tires on the street, the hollow knocking and thumping of that heart still burning inside your empty chest.

It's just another Tuesday morning. But these days, you always feel it coming.

Posted: Tue - August 22, 2006 at 05:20 PM          

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