October 23, 2015

[mnemosyne]

October 23, 2015

Serafíne is not yet used to being a ghost.  She will be, before this ends.  She will become familiar with silence, with the rhythm of her own breath, with the concourse of her own thoughts.  With absence, both as a fullness and as a presence, physical, tangible, total.  On a day not long from now she'll climb onto a Greyhound bus in downtown Denver and: leave.

No point in staying to haunt the edges of a life that used to be hers.  

Or, rather: haunting is such a slushy, stagnant thing to do with whatever remains of one's consciousness. 

She'd rather move.  

She'd rather do.

She'd rather be.  

No idea where the thing is going but hey, that's part of the point.  The glass is cool against her cheek, and the dog curls up on the floor, beneath her feet.  She has a bottle of Stranahan's and a lump on her back she will remember eventually is her backpack.  The moon in the glass, fat and shining, the highway this running artery of light.   The staccato pinpoints of headlights that flare and shine like animal eyes in the darkness.  

Her breath makes  a shadow no one can see.  

She curls up, for the duration.

[mnemosyne]

Midnight and near-full-moon looming over a town that doesn't seem to have a name, just a center square and dark faces of one-and-two story buildings like something out a movie lot all dark now except for the neon open sign still blazing in the picture window of a clearly-closed thrift shop. And the bus station of course, which shares space with a 24-hour laundromat, the ugly wash of bare fluorescents smeared over the vaguely stained bisque of near-antique industrial washers. No passengers waiting and no reason to idle except for the corporation tracking. Gotta hit the marks and the marks say he has to wait until seven minutes past this godforsaken hour and he isn't going to bother opening the doors except the pregnant girl in the third row from the back lurches up the aisle, asks how long they're here, and insists he open the door because she has to pee and wants an egg salad sandwich from the vending machine.

No reason to slip off here, except she feels like it.

So they do.

That's how it works.

Spend the rest of the night laid out in the center of the grassy square, dog with its muzzle settled over its crossed paws, girl laid out all open like she's trying to make snow angels without any snow, golden hair strewn all over the damp grass, shivering until she tells herself not to be cold anymore, and she isn't, is she? senses blown open, staring at the stars.

It snows before morning. She wakes to the gentle dusting over the grass, snowflakes caught in her eyelashes, melting against her skin.

[mnemosyne]

We don't have to worry
Life goes where it does
Faster than a bullet
From an empty gun

- Beck, Round the Bend


Somewhere north of Rosebud, South Dakota and the only reason she understands the place is because there are times when place is as tattooed to her fingertips as time is to the back of her eyes.  A sense of spatial relationships, of the earth growing wings around her, the flat raw jagged plains which are so open and endless they make her lungs hurt, but duck into any building built by human hands to human scale for human habitation and here you are, confined again.  Neon hums against the darkness and no one was expecting snow but here it is, not early but - 

- hey, doesn't summer always lull us into believing that this time, this fucking time, she's going to last forever?  

--  

The accumulated slush is already melting off the enormous LOVE'S TRAVEL STOP, up there shuddering in the last gasp of the stormfront chasing through and the few eighteen-wheelers that took refuge in the parking lot during the height of the storm.  Four-fifteen in the morning and Jaycee Millikin, night clerk/hostess/waitress and George Romero, the line cook/security/bus boy are hanging out by the counter shooting the shit.  He's waxing eloquent about the zombie / torture flick (he takes his name that seriously) he is shooting with the old super-8 camera his older brother put in the mail to him forty-five minutes before he jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge, has a part for her, is saving a role for her, but she hardly notices.  All she can do is daydream about making it to NYC, she keeps thinking about how one interstate connects to the next and all she has to do is say fuck everything hit the road.  Be there in no time.

Though the truth is, she'll never go.

Never even leave the zip code.  

--

And it is one of those nights where something is unsettled, something is not-quite-right.  They keep forgetting or misplacing shit.  The door to shower #3 was left open but maybe it is simply the latch that is sticking, there's something wrong?  Something unintentional, something that rises from the time-of-year, from the closing-of-doors or maybe their opening.  Some hungry-ghost hanging about the periphery-of-things.  

Which is: not wrong.  She's sitting cross-legged at the end of the counter, combing out her long damp hair, peeling apart the weird cheeseburger-hot-dog thing she lifted from the rolling grill and feeding it to Sid with greasy fingers, careful, careful, teaching the animal tricks without understanding that that is precisely what she's doing.  When the bit of meat is front-and-center, Sid is both so excited her body shivers with it, and that's a fact not a fucking metaphor, and so bright and still and focused she only moves her snout to track the minute flick of the girl's fingers.  Snaps it out of the air like a champion.  Jaycee and George Romero notice - well - nothing, nothing at all. 

For herself, she doesn't really eat.  Is so so hungry-not-hungry, in a way that both transcends and absolutely returns to the physical that she shakes with it, too.  

--

Jim would've been good at this.  Hell, maybe that's what he left their lives to do, right?  There are all sorts of bullshit stories about exiles and odysseys, strange gods and the open road.  He'd start the day with yoga in a part he'd never met before, steam rising off the captive lake,  the gathering of strangers who couldn't-quite-see and bask in there - fuck, whatever it is.  The reverence that comes rising up in us with the miracle of a goddamned sunrise.  The renewed wonder that you are still on this earth at all.  That there's such a goddamned thing - 

- and fuck, okay.  She feels all of that, right?  The certain slant of first-light, the crystalline stillness of pre-dawn, the strange and hungry wonder that comes from: something new, something new, something new.  But she wasn't made for any of this and even calmly, clearly choosing this sort of exile over any other: each day hurts.  God it hurts.

--

The back bench seat of a Trailways bus, the open bed of a pick-up truck, the rattling sardine-can interior of a boxcar - yep, that too - city buses, county buses, the funicular up to Fort Pitt.  Amtrak: that's the best.  The worn red velvet seats and the country moving alongside at sixty or seventy miles an hour.  Empty sleeper berth when she gets tired of wandering.  There is a guy with a typewriter in second class crafting poems along the way for any passenger who asks for one and she sits and watches him for hours as a cold autumn day wraps itself into a colder autumn night.