engaged
My life is busy. I am becoming engaged with things. I have a set of schedules to follow. I am interested in my work. I am in love. I am trying to get the most out of the time I spend. I love the books I am reading. I love the weather; I love the chill air now and the hot humid air a week before. I love the dead leaves on the ground. I enjoy beyond my wildest expectations riding my bike. It is freeing in many senses and it allows me to flow the parts of my day together without disjoint. I crave speed, the frenzy of traffic, the battle for space. I am pushed on by the rush of green past me, the experience of a car from the outside traveling at its speed. Perspective warps around me like a road into the distance, my mind is a flashlight, a set of expanding beams, providing, causing movement, ahead of itself, catching itself in a fall, running and moving legs so that it catches itself in a fall. I am happy. I am listening to beautiful music. To the cello. The cello is so striking, so poignant and emotional. The sound brings me news, brings me tears and sadness, and faith.
I wish I could write. I would write about everything. The way the grass feels on my legs as I run through the arboretum. The way a dog moves and how its owner walks and talks and how the kid is riding his skateboard, the sound it makes on the pavement, the way the fence looks, the dark black fence, and its elegant lines. The way the hill looks, running up it, and the way it looks from the top looking down, down over the trees and over Boston, up to the clouds that move through the city and skyscrapers, past windows and planes and fiery suns. I wish I could write the way a painter paints the scene as the sun hits a low fog bank and explodes in fiery white. The way a pine cone smells, the way a fungus looks, or a different fungus… the way a squirrel moves along a swaying branch, searching for nuts, wrapping its tail in on itself. The way an oak tree looks. The impressiveness of it all. The sounds of distance cars which I ignore and listen instead to the insects, the ones that sound like bicycle wheels slowly spinning backward. The way a person’s face has lowered to look at the ripped hole in my jeans. The way a nervous fat man reads a book and shifts his seat on the T. The way a young woman kneels by her bikes, as I enter the liquor store, and is still there when I return. The way a desperate crazed man in a wheelchair in the center of the road has turned his head to rest his wide desperate crazed eyes on me. The way a dead cat looks in the road. The way it feels. The way everyone’s faces looks, those people who look so busy, who don’t look up or nod or smile or say Hi, the countless busy people and their faces drawn into some concentrated field of work and life and clutching, throttling narrative. The way the coffee grounds smell as I pour them out of the french press. The way we can laugh about the silly food that we make, the creations that combust from the hunger and rapid-fire of our minds. The way a car honks at another car. The way a man waters his plants and pays no attention to me. The way I can play guitar, the things that I think about then. The way my hands can move over a keyboard or with a knife or a pen or a camera or how they move through hair and skin and how they pick up chicken bones. The way the sun looks at 11:19am falling on a tree that is half-fallen over. The way the woman giving a history tour is looking at her notes. The way a white cat prowls behind a black cat prowling at night. The way my CDs from the library tend to stack up. The way a CFL lightbulb feels. The way a book in my hands feel, the way the pages flip and the way my eyes move.
I would like to write all of this because it interests me, it moves me, it is the world I feel and live in and care about and the world as it presents itself to me. I would like to be open to these experiences, and all others, and part of this openness is a kind of articulation of them, a putting-to-words of the things that happen, the flashes of light and noise and color and movement. Sometimes I feel good about these things. Sometimes I am curling into a ball and cannot look, cannot feel the world any more. Sometimes everything hurts. The bike stands on the porch ready to embark, ready to charge the road and embrace distance, to bring me along, a certain perspective from which to see a world fly by. That is what I want: a certain perspective. I want a certain world, too; but almost anything can be recast as another. There is light and shadows, no things to see or touch or feel. It is all dead; nothing is here; nothing will comfort me now.
