Thursday, May 29, 2008

Who

It's strange to look back at that park from afar, from the seat of a movie theater, or the lacquered library steps, where I thought only a year ago that I loved, how I loved with every inch and end of me. It was that time, with the pink skirt on Carrie's night out, it was that time when I curled in purple fish sheets, so fallen. I can't say that it hurts anymore, can't say it hollows even small parts of me. But there are nicks of nostalgia when the steps of my school stare out at me; when I want so badly to go home. To go back, really, to the metal park bench by that library, the bench and the belated words that decided this. To go back, to the fancied ice-skaters, the eighties music a melody I had not known to suck in and slip inside, I had not known to squeeze tight around my heart strings.

I had not known.

I had not known that the Brooklyn Bridge was no beginning, but rather begged me back to a person, a child, an adolescent so full of flippant emotion, so merry and mighty inside.

I can only compromise with being young these days; I can only try to hide the small grins that grasp me, that somehow tickle those torn pasts tonight, when looking back slightly aches, morose muscles of living I had forgotten were ever there.

These could be jupiter drops, the changed light of eyes at the mere opening of goldfish, splits seconds of august, at this disquiet I so dislike and yet cannot drown in momentary mists. I cannot unmake my own memories.

And so it was slippery tonight, maybe with the sounds of the city I so love, maybe with the knowledge that this is not what I expected. Maybe with the unpatched pattern of promise torn in front of me, so tempting to imagine again.

Or maybe, seriously, it was the smile of him. It was the noisy grin, that fat dimple eyeing me back. How strange it is that familiar greens can fawn familiar faces, those drenched possibilities still tears, but tamed; the roar of clawless lions still enough to make me lick my lips.

I don't regret; and yet, I still yearn for some sort of understanding, for an eventual last isolation of the emotion that colors my mind, that still makes its way back inside, the most untender of exile, my proud pathways to peace.

Inside of the movie theater, thousands of miles and thousands of hours away from it all, there is so much to say, so much steeped, so much stolen by our imperfections, still cold, those frozen fingers of our time.