Writer: Unblocked
<< 11:44 p.m. - Wednesday, Mar. 16, 2005 >>
You look in the mirror and ask me, �Who is this?�

It is your turn to decide that tonight.

Your face is milky white and round like the moon you adore. I can�t see it with the way you�re turned, back facing me, but I know how it is. I know how you�ve told me you can stare at your face until you stop seeing it as yours. You say that if you look long enough all of its unique features blend into everyone else�s, and there before you is a perfect stranger.

It�s hard when the rice-and-beans nature of your world collapses. When after years of being led down a winding tunnel, you reach an open meadow and the hand that led you all those years lets go and says, �Here, you�re free. Do what you will.� Time, harshly put, is a bitch. Once you make a decision, you can�t wander back to it and expect to things to be the same. So how do you know where to take things? How do you know where to go?

See, that�s where we are. Waiting here in this fucking meadow and hoping for some kind of apparition to tell us what is best. You turn around from the mirror, pull a brush through your hair, with a grimace at the crunch of tangles and say, �Let�s go for a walk.�

I�m amazed at the warmth of the night. Only a month before, you and I were blowing visible air out of our mouths and now we are out here with T-shirts on. You say that this feels good and I already know why. Sister, you are so easily read. This street has been marked with your footsteps more often than you can count. Here, once before, Brenna and you walked to the Dairy Queen for blizzards, and on the way you laughed so hard you peed your pants a little. And here, on the stairs of the tiny white church at the end of your block Max shared a mini bottle of whisky with you and talked about himself.

Sister, stop doing this to your self. Those things don�t happen anymore. Those memories are old. Not so old, but these days most everyone is far away and no longer in your realm. You change without them and live without them until you don�t know what that makes you. You search the mirror again and again for the face that you used to know. It eludes you at night. Always does.

We keep on walking.

There is something inherently incredible about nighttime. The thrill of your eyes open when so many others are closed and submerged in dreaming makes you want to talk to someone. I�m here. Talk to me.

�I want to complain that all of my friends hate me but I know they don�t. I don�t know how to make time for the people I love between working, going to school and sleeping. And I don�t know what to do when I am alone anymore. I want for my life like a road that has no curves; the way it used to be. I want for things to simultaneously be the way they were and the way they are now. And that can never happen. So now the fuck what?�

You pause and we decide to sit in the lawn of a seminary that sits at the base of an extinct volcano. Silence falls over you and I and I know you are defeated by your own words. Out here we can see all the way to the West Hills. Empty stretches of street with stoplights turning green to red and back to green; no one is out as late we are. Everything is either etched in orange orbish light or totally black. I can�t decide whether the scene before me makes me feel full or empty. You are calm now, stretched out and staring at the city, digesting all that you said. Sister, begin again.

�Somehow saying that to you, and putting lexical borders on the chaos in my head makes it seem so benign and straightforward. I don�t like that. Or that fact that anything I say to someone has to be processed by their own subjective lens, and suddenly my point gets skewed or just plain misunderstood��

When you were at home and I was out driving a few nights ago, I realized that there are never enough words to describe what you see and feel between the blinking of your eye. I realized that words are little futile sticks that we keep reworking to build a bridge over some hypothetical canyon. No matter how hard you try, you�re contained effortlessly inside your body. I wished for you then to have the ability to escape yourself and rocket out into the night sky to get some perspective. You should be breathing new air, although I am not sure you could survive it.

I realize you are standing up and walking away all in one moment, and I run to catch up. �We have a teacup moon,� you whisper to me like it�s a secret; your eyes are caught in its curved edges. I don�t always understand why you are so drawn to the moon, but several years ago, I remember you coming home sweating from a bicycle ride and telling me you found a name for it; Heisha. Sister, you can�t own the moon, it holds the tides with its own fishing pole, and it slices itself up into crescents and circles. The moon owns you.

We of the same mind tonight, and beside me I hear you chuckle bitterly at my thought. I don�t know what to tell you and its getting cold outside.

Perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps if you worked hard enough you could get back all that you had and still keep what you have now. You could fight against the ever-changing moon and win, maybe.

Our worn shoes, lacking in any kind of arch support are scuffling along the pavement. I can see, in the way that you wander along the sidewalk, that your lines are cut loose again and you don�t know where to go. It�s getting light outside. Maybe we should go back home. Sister, maybe we should try to be human.

You make eggs and toast for me on the electric stove with NPR playing in the background. There is a light blue hue rising from the east and all we need to do is forget the questions. Forget the buzz in our ears.

You close your eyes and turn your face toward sun�s arrival; peppermint steam rises from the teapot and you inhale it deeply. �You know I can�t win against the moon. I can�t maintain any kind of constant line in our evolving world. My moods and opinions change by the hour. That�s like hoping I�ll live forever and I won�t age. Luna, even the stars die. And still we move on.�