Sometimes, a phrase will hang in the air and pop out, and stay in your mind and linger and toss and churn. Sometimes it will roll from left to right, feeling along the wrinkles for guidance, kicking playfully until your whole head becomes full, a single phrase bursting and filling and inflating until you can't stand it anymore. I burst out and yelled it everywhere but people saw me and smiled, but I wanted them to frown and to cry and to think. I wanted people to stop straight and open their minds in wonder, but it didn't work. She smiled and performed. It entered my head through the veins in my ear; Sometimes, things match together exactly because they won't.
Everywhere I looked around, I saw that same phrase staring out me of vowels and words, and I wondered if these were mere hallucinations. Some nights I lie alone and I hear voices at night and they turn out to be a Fred, a Will and a Colin who open my door and jump away giggling and laughing boyishly; Other nights they disappear as soon as I think fiercely about the stars on my ceiling. They jump out at me, those single phrases, and I write them down and I scrunch my eyes together in hope that they will hold them in, but when I open and look at this world in naive wonder they spill out of my mouth; When I try to run after them and pick them back up they sink into the ground and leave my eyebrows down and my mouth gaping in a hurt 'O'. I need to keep myself inside, but I feel myself failing miserably and flowing out.
We had climbed up and down, sweating and shedding clothes. Three hours and were were at the summit, feeling the wind sift through our sweaty hair, watching the multicolored trees below curve outwards, bulges of hills dipping up and down and fading outwards in a blue haze of gentle disappearance. They were silent because they didn't have anything to say. I was musing, wondering where to start, when we started back down. I wanted to stay. Home was there.
Two hours and we were back in, sitting on plush seats with the AC swirling through us and driving back in a gray shower of rain, watching the lights outside blur into small globules of green and red, slipping downwards and joining together, teardrops from wide eyes. We stopped, and a song came on, and we started singing all together.
Afterwards, she sat down close next to him, and I could see her eyes. I could see what she meant. Enough, I said, and I walked away out through the door without looking back. My eyes swiveled and I cried out within, and I could feel myself churning around and around with the grumble of a washing machine, tumbling and spinning over and over again, thumping madly with the small metallic clinks ringing from the dimes and nickels inside like thin staccatos reminding me. A tolling bell.
It's so hard to cry these days, there is drought in the desert and in the gaping mouths of young birds waiting to be fed. The only thing I can do is to wait for the clouds to float by, so I tilt my head back and wait. Tomorrow, perhaps, it will rain.