It used to be that people complained you couldn’t see the stars in the sky in big cities, but I find that you can’t see them anywhere now. I think maybe the stars are dimming.
And when I have visitors – those rare times – a train always charges by, blowing his horn like no one can hear the sound of those rusty wheels on those grass-covered, untended, Chinese-built tracks, so that the visitor comments that they could never sleep with such obtrusive noises. But I never hear it. Sometimes I even wonder if they’ve stopped the line.
Or when I am avoiding loneliness in my home by keeping company with my plants on the porch and I am caressed by a cool wind and I wonder – is it time for autumn, already? I haven’t even began my summer.
It’s when I realize I’m twenty-eight-years-old and remember how far away that seemed when I was eighteen-years-old and recall my Ten Year Plan. And I think that this life isn’t that bad. I didn’t wander too far off the map. I’m happy, right? That’s all that matters.
Or have a just become that good of a liar?
I’m at my usual haunt and everyone knows my name and everyone is glad I came because all our troubles are the same and Holy Virgin Mary I’ve become Cliff the Postman. But where the hell did Norm go?
It’s that time when my son wants to help with the cooking, so I tell him to get his stool, but when he stands on the stool he’s too tall for my heart to handle, so I take the stool away so he’ll still seem like my little boy. Even if it’s just for this one meal.
When I start crafting a mental list of all the things I would have not done if I die tomorrow, but then wonder at the things I haven’t even wanted to do because of the lines I have drawn around me, the kind I would make as a girl when I began a sandcastle. Even then I was deciding how big my fragile home would be.
People remind me that this is all just a waiting time for the Big Memories, but what if this whole life is just a waiting time? What if the waiting time never ends and the doctor is never ready? I’ve read all of the magazine and I refuse to watch the soap operas.