first few desperate hours [d8]

[heather - d2 [mylee]]

S  H  E  L  B  Y

There’s something heavy and obstinate in the cloud cover when I break out from the shelter of my home this morning, and I don’t consider myself one to be affected something awful by dreary weather. I’ve seen worse, after all.

But maybe aging is less about affectation and more about stepping always toward being incisive, sharpening the nuance between the stratosphere and the low-hanging clouds. This, I think, explains my inclination toward holding my body close to itself, last night’s chill trapped in fog that swirls low over the district, and frantic, sleep-deprived. As I pull my coat closer around me, I think of the coming winter, the lingering and dull throb it brings to my body. It starts earlier these days, an ache in my jaw that wakes me, even in October.

I am beginning to lose faith even in the possibility of a season of kindness. Instead, I find myself looking to the ground, expecting to see something gentle being buried by the falling leaves.

Today, it is a girl who cannot stop crying and a boy who has managed the feat of surprising himself, an act that I admire, though likely for the wrong reasons. As I see them now at short range, I am taken aback at how young the girl appears, and I want only to be less tired, to feel less outside of myself on the brink of any given threshold.

As I step into the belly of the train, I nod politely toward both of them, and then remember the girl’s dripping nose. I shove my hand deep into my coat pocket and pull it out clasping cartons of half-smoked cigarettes and a handkerchief. I hold my still-clasped hand out to her and turn the palm down to make the square of off-white fabric more readily accessible, hoping that she’ll know what I am trying to offer her. You can have the cigarettes, too, if you’d like.

When I look toward the boy, I see the morning's shock that crossed his face when he expressed some private desire unexpectedly made public. I spent year after year interrogating those who stepped into the games of their own accord like it hadn’t been the conceit that drove my own experience, and I stop myself just short of asking him what had made him do it. I know he won’t have an answer.

I’ve been asking this of others for fourteen years, hoping that someone might eventually bridge the gap between intention and effect. But they come back in boxes, checked and filled like answers beside a question I am still unable to translate.

[ table: pogue ]