I turn on music never when I live, only when I don't. My life has no background music. Next to my computer is a dead desk clock. It sits on top of a bookshelf, at 1:38. Always on time.
Coming back, I looked out a window and saw an old woman looking at a sunflower. She was old enough to be my grandmother. Her face was so wrinkled and small that the sunflower and its petals leaned forward on its jealousy-green stalk, and seemed to envelop the woman in an embrace that was very quirkily frightening. It was the first time I had seen the sunflower. It was the first time I had ever seen that woman.
While we are on the highway, a child presses his face against the edge of the window and closes his eyes, clearly enjoying the rush of air against his face. His chemically westernized orange hair flits in the air like a wave of desperate hands at a rap concert. Like grass underneath a helicopter, like the trembling eyelids of someone about to cry. The edge of the car curves inwards as my eyes give way to wide-angle lenses, and with steady hands, I take a mental shot of this child in B&W memory.
I step outside, and suddenly I deflate, wheezing like a punctured accordion. People pass through me, and I suddenly discover I am transculent and partially intangible. When I pass through people I eat their hair. When I walk all I hear is the flawless language and the careless but perfect intonation, lifting up and falling down at the exact phrases and at the right instant. Kids, --kids this time, nothing like the child peeking at the rushing wind-- kids flow around me like a pebble in water. Like the shape of a candle flame or a teardrop, but only sideways, and only flat. I discover that the perfect score I received only saddens me.
Suddenly, the faceless director behind a camera says "Cut!" and we shoot from a different set. This time I am in a court, and I pretend that my fury takes over. Fury, the book that I should have bought instead of a cheap trash novel that half of my friends would call, in their respective lingo, "absolutely amazing" and the other half "a plebian prostitute." No matter. I skid and my finger undergoes some sort of chemical reaction from a sudden friction burn and turns into a piece of shiny plastic. I clutch my killing tool and I fume in anger, and the ball becomes my embodiedment while my swing becomes the downward swing of the butcher's cleaver. Apparently I've done a good job, because everyone behind the glass is clapping, even the operator holding the boom.
All in a good day's work, I think. My coordinator mops up my sweat, and I gulp down a mouthful of
And there he was, sitting on the gray squatting-chairs while casually looking at
A phone rings, and I don't answer it, because I'm afraid lately that I won't be able to talk. I don't end my sentences lately. Then again, I don't talk lately. Its calming, the way it despairs, calling from all over the house. Like a young horse, a young being more than anything, it bleats. Begging. Who am I to talk, though? I don't, and so it gives up.
Its been a week since my cellphone decided to turn belly-up. I haven't gotten a new one since, out of sheer laziness, much like the reason I haven't gotten an mp3 player. Why listen to music when there already is so much in the world? The freedom of being not connected is too much to bear, sometimes, but its worth it. Tomorrow though, or the day after tomorrow, or next week, I won't be. I hope I won't be free. The inherent irony. You understand my irony as well as you understand the nested circles that I like to talk about.
I don't need any more colloquialisms, nor more people. Every day, I get more and more wrinkles in my hands, and the inside of my right thumb is starting to ache constantly. The inside of my skull is starting to give up. A single thought spiderwebs out into numerous connections. Why do I dream at night of being late to class, or doing laundry? Why are there Beatles and Van Gogh posters on my walls?
I wish I could die, the exact same way that I wish I could kill. With dreamy longing, but with resolved impossibility.