I was bored at home and very cold. Apparently, days before I left for KY, the heating unit stopped working. Whether this disabling was due to the lack of fuel or some yet undiagnosed electrical failure is neither here nor there, beyond prefacing the note that it is still very cold in the apartment, and further, that cold was the catalyst to an early departure. The sufficient origin of a hasty exit was an earlier phone call to Quinn, and, to complete the trio of reasons, the cold and boredom of home.
So I step outside to start the car. I march steadily down the steps then the concrete leg of a sidewalk, pass over the short green median, arch left in a gait that dots the edges of the car; which, although not circuitous, is not compulsively close to the grill, the panels, or the door; I beep and open, tug inside pocket for metal, withdraw, and deliver that tiny etched bar to it’s tiny electrical gateway. I torque the engine to life, which is certainly more like tossing dice than introducing male and female fingers. Clearly one is a gamble, and the other a payoff.
All of this bit of routine to warm the car up for the journey.
Hell, the journey is a crap-shoot too, right; since the car has to keep working for a predictable amount of time? I don’t know how a car really works right? And this one has many times proved it’s determination to it’s own destiny despite my frequent, purposeful, and seemingly potent exertions of will. I’ve driven this beast thousands of miles. I’ve pushed her by foot-to-pedal up and down the length of I-75. I’ve hustled her down thousands of quarter-mile street hops, and begged her to carry me across thousands of miles of highway across the country via I-90. Now here, now past thousands of promises kept and a few broken, I still doubt her, as I’m sure she doubts me. Isn’t that always the case? Our failures; it is our failures which are remembered as demarcations of the successes and easy wash-overs we expect from each other.
So we do each other’s bidding. Well, today her and I made a quiet exchange. Of course I felt myself the greater benefactor. The poor Camaro hasn’t been driven in a week and already today she’s gotten three of possibly four outings behind her. I hope she appreciates a job well done, because I’m not putting gas in until tomorrow if I can make it.
The first of her gifts to me comes post-ignition. In her old age, and because of her unfortunate parentage, she has always required a bit of a foreplay. This wait is especially difficult for eager young males who seem to look forward less to driving than to telling the stories of our travels. But I’m trying not to kiss and tell here. So I’m letting her get comfortable, warm, ready; and she leaves me outside her bedroom door to wait. Thanks sweetie.
Too bad for her–good intentions despite. I turn away to see, over the distant hills, this absurdly bright swath of sunlight. All around me are dark houses, dark long streets, some spots of orange lamplight, house, and christmas lights. Above me, of course, are smooth mirages of cloudlining, like tiny eyelashes of reflected sunlight. I can look down and the orange cast leaves my brown shoes black, and makes the white plateau of the Camaro’s hood a pill-like, muted, orange as well. I can return my gaze to it’s natural post at five foot, seven inches and rotate around inside the dark band of houses interjected with these living room lights and christmas lights and lawn lights and the little red reflections of brake-light covers. Recording this to memory, of course, elicits existing memories of some hyperactive teenager’s belt grommets at a disco. Yes, it did.
The temptation, just north of those grommets, is that delicious band.
The boys and the girls know exactly what I mean here. Thank you Madonna for making an entire video homage to your own deliciously exposed midsection.
So striking is this catch, that I return up the path to the steps, then up the steps to the landing, and stand in awe of the most beautiful dusk I’ve seen in a while. So sharply bound by hills and neighborhoods below. So many hills falling upon each other, speckled with houses, and city lights, stepping in front of each other, or retreating behind (however you’d see yourself in a lineup), that I’m compelled to think of them as a crowd of people. I muse that they may be strangers, or lovers, or riotous partygoers positioned absentmindedly at the foot of my stage.
Above my stage, extending from behind me to the edge of the light, are an ocean of clouds, roiled and tumbling into one another in no general direction that I can make out. But I imagine, in my revery, that, even as I know they must be pushing east away from the ocean, instead they turn upon westerly shores with their nightly agenda. Just this once. That would make them ocean, and this bar of light that they compress against the cross-town hills just their foam.
No matter what image(s) from your memory you make analogous, it is an impressively stunning skyline. At one point I thought of it as a cupcake, like those generic Hostess chocolate cupcakes, what with the sugary middle layer. And I’m so embarrassingly prone to allegory that it soon became an exaggerated symbol of this last holiday, the doubt between a question and it’s answer, jet-lag, culture shock, or any number of other liminal states that i’ve analyzed over the course of my heady little life.
How my eye loves a transition; how I love a contrast. My talkative mouth grants my ear as much silence as it can handle when alone, and yet abuses every other ear with so much work that I drive my neighbors to frenzy. People, if they could judge me by my word-count, would surely suspect that I must be a pack-rat at home. But like the busy hills below the white-to-banana-to-citric band of dusk, and the cloudy tussle above, I come in layers. My outer layer is that dense business that I sell you on, and the inner layer a quiet sanctuary; cloudy with a tumult of whispers, hums, and little thoughts that trail off like the narratives of the ever-distracted.
Yes my writing is thick, and muddy. You should take your time, read, and reread. Eat up each word, and chew for chrissake. Stay a minute and you’ll find this skyline scrawled across the inside of your eyes.
Here’s another nice image analogous to this uncanny skyline.
Eleven o’clock; directionally. A young woman arches over her work; her eyes are cast to the page, chasing the space just beyond her pen. Her thin, brown, straight, hair leads from the crest of her forehead to curl limply behind that softly rounded upper edge of her ear. It reappears to frame the line of her jaw for just a moment before diving down an all-too-brief stretch of her neck to the bracing white of a flared shirt collar, and then retires early against her dark sweater. Occasionally that hair is pushed back and away. What is important here is that harsh and cool white cotton between the very dark sweater and the gently shadowed neck. This is your skyline.
are you and your car getting married or something? i tried to finish your entry to find out but my eyes kept crossing.
it’s about a skyline. “Yes my writing is thick, and muddy. You should take your time, read, and reread. Eat up each word, and chew for chrissake. Stay a minute and you?ll find this skyline scrawled across the inside of your eyes.”