Stardate: 5.27.09

The ride up from King George (Where my parents live) felt surreal. I spoke aloud to myself as I drove in an effort to pinch myself. The wind rushing in through the windows kept an erratic pattern as it combed my hair from side to side. There were moments when I wasn't sure if I was awake. Moments that still don't make sense. A feeling that I am trying to chase around this page with a pen, waiting for that one moment when sounds make words and I can string them together coherently. Until that moment I'll set aside reason and bring into focus the blurred pictures my senses captured. 

I sped up to pass the trucks beside me, they had been battering the side of my car with their weight for some time. Downshifted into Fourth I felt the engine push me past their abuse, it's groan playing over the sounds that emanated from the speakers behind me. I cut across the empty lanes and made my way over to the exit ramp, slowly pushing down the clutch and letting centripetal force pull me into the long turn. The music faded out to sing a new tune and there was a stillness as I came round the bend. The open windows sucked in the smell of honeysuckle from the forrest beside me and the sun had just fallen behind the row of ramps that ran across the horizon. Not one person on the road but me as the wheel righted itself and the tires hugged the pavement below. A flicker scattered across the road in a slow and steadying pulse from the street lamps above. I looked up to see every lamp above the road for miles blinking and sparking on and off like accidental Christmas lights in May. Sound began to swell from behind my head, honey dripped from the window, sunlight flared to a dull orange and December shone through the scatted lights as they made their way down toward me. Singing out like sparklers in slow motion, realizing they had come two months early. I wanted it to stay just like this. But it was only a moment, until the elements remembered what it was they were doing and got back to being practical. 

I have never seen anything like that before. My mind started to think about what had gone wrong with the power for all the lights to act like that until I realized that I didn't really care why it had happened. I was just glad that it did. 

A feeling of depression set in once everything had gone back to normal. I had felt something during that moment that in I hadn't experienced in a long time. I felt calm and undetermined, content, like the space between the lines. I felt safe in unsafe times. And now the presence was gone, it was like an injection of serotonin straight to the vein, the come down was the absence, it was the understanding that there was no one there to share it with. 

Some time ago a team of scientists were conducting an experiment with electrons. They found that if they shot electrons out of an electron gun through two slits that the electrons would split around the obstacle and come back together again to make one precise whole in the backboard. The finding alone was interesting enough but what happened next stumped them profoundly. They found that when they placed a camera in the area to capture this activity the electrons stopped performing. Take the camera away and they separated, content with being back together. Try to observe and the conclusion was not the same. They called this the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. The theory being that these seemingly mindless electrons had some kind of will of their own. That they wished not to be seen performing. 

I felt, on that road alone at the verge of nightfall, that nature had slipped up. That I had gone unnoticed for even the briefest of moments. That I had stumbled into the way that things truly were. I thought about how many time I see even the simplest of events and think nothing of it. I thought of all the sights that were shown only to me. And the complex series of happenings that it took strung together for them to be a reality. That I was only person that would ever see that exact moment again. I thought about memory and how it was a fading portrait of an instance I could never go back to, like a Polaroid developing backwards. I thought about my vision of the future and how many times it had changed. And I wished that I could see it happen again. That I could creep up undetected and look into the mechanisms and clockwork having nature be none the wiser. But it was only something to me, it was only a moment and its clarity will fall apart each day until its a ghost wandering somewhere in the back of my mind. Content to brush up against my dreams and leave me in the morning with nothing but a slight taste on my tongue. 

These are the things of breathless. When the only sounds I hear are wind rushing, white noise from patient speakers and the slow pound of my heart inside my chest. These are the things my mind captures when I'm alone, which is why I seek it so often, but what good is alone if there is no one after. I have only this space and God to confide in. Pages hold only words and He speaks like a whisper, a sound intangible, a sound like one unobserved. I am thankful to be alive, to be perplexed, to be shown such nuance, such quite wonder. I am thankful for it all.        

Stardate: 5.20.09

I thought this was supposed to be summer already. The only thing colder than the temperature is the wind that carries it. I hugged my jacket closer as I adjusted in my seat. Their voices were a muffled murmur coming through the cracks in the sliding glass door. The back porch was a safe house from their forced laughter and conversation. I had been in a state of melancholy all day and was trying to get my bearings on just why I had been thrown into such a funk. I retraced the day’s events the way you would stop to think while looking for lost keys.

I thought about the dreaded afternoon, sitting at the DMV for hours, watching them skip over B159 time and time again. If anyone tells you that the DMV has become less painful and more proficient, then they never had ticket B159, the scarlet letter of motor vehicle wait tickets. They may as well have handed me a piece of paper saying 666 on it, although I might have just misconstrued that as their address. Despite the two and a half hour wait time and the hundred and twenty dollars I spent in fees it really wasn’t anything too out of the ordinary for me. Seeing as I spend most of my days sitting around for hours waiting for a ten minute meeting. I guess being a lobbyist is sort of like being at the DMV all day. Sitting on the hill all day you do two things, make numerous phone calls (in which you sit on hold most of the call) and wait in offices, trying to look professional as you sift through their reading materials.

This is exactly what I did at the DMV. Made phone calls and let my mind wander as I pretended to read the paper. So what was it that threw me for such a loop today? The other day I had been running around the house looking for my phone when I heard it ring, I looked down in my hand to find it had been there the entire time. Here it is again on the back porch, in my hand, glowing the time and low battery sign. I scanned through my list of missed and received calls and there she was. The nickname I had given years ago spelled out in rigid font placed next to date, time and green upwards arrow.

I’ll never be certain what’s more frustrating, losing something or finding it in the most obvious place. This time it wasn’t a set of keys or a phone, this time it was a spark, one that had been the cause for my days descent into unrest. She had called to say “hello”, but hellos always seem to last so much longer than five simple characters strung together, as do their more complicated and drawn out bedmate, goodbye.

I am well acquainted with them both. And while her hello took root and began to grow I made no protest to the seed that had been planted. We moved passed pleasantries and started off right where the last goodbye had left us. I forgot how easy our connection was, so incredibly effortless. Isn’t that the kind of thing people look for all their lives? These calls are like a drug to me, such a small taste for such a painful withdrawal. I lay awake most nights with thought, and I stumble around through the day with the aftermath.

It’s odd to me that it took so long to come to this conclusion. I suppose a decrease in mental acuity is a byproduct of insomnia. It’s no matter, I knew now the root cause for today’s symptoms. I missed her. Not more than twenty feet from me, separated by an inch of glass, were my friends all huddled close to their others. My need for seclusion was now understood.

I went to a restaurant yesterday and sat down alone, I was hungry, I knew that. I went over the menu again and again, seeing nothing that I wanted. So when the waiter went into the kitchen I grabbed my coat and ran for the door. I fell asleep last night hungry. Tonight will be no different.

Stardate: 5.19.09

She spoke about him as if they had been apart for years when in reality you could see both the break and her current revelation on the same page of a calendar. I took it in stride with the rest of the conversation. Showing any bit of amazement in regards to her forced callousness would make her feel even more empowered. I feign the unfazed (a strategy I often employ) to show some kind of ‘mature’ composure, proof that nothing fazes me. But I’m torn between intrigue and nausea as she spills. She catalogues his short comings and misdeeds, it’s a crack in her bluff and I keep a straight face, taking slow drags of a cigarette and listening. I think of how I deal with these types of things when they happen to me and I wonder how others read my confessions. I wonder who this guy really is, I wonder if all girls speak this way after separation and I think about those I’ve left behind.

Five months ago I was in love with a girl. I walked about with a gaze that didn’t wander and a step that failed to falter. How is it now that I am so far removed from such elation. When I realized that I had been running down a path with no finish I knew that the walk back would be lonely, I knew that I would think of her the entire way. You never want to hear someone say the obvious, time heals, fish in the sea. You know it’s true, it’s just the farthest thing from comfort. So I kept tired pearls to myself and let their truth bounce off every fork tongued word that worked its way past her glass.

This wine is a conduit, for her thoughts mass exodus from brain to mouth and for my ever increasing resentment to such a show of bitterness. Would it be so hard to let your guard down for a moment and say simply that separation affects us all? That after everything you’re not so different, your A priori is stronger than your desire to appear unscathed. Say all of this or nothing at all. Surely a close friend is an outlet, and such a vent is aimed wildly at catharsis. But I am no such relation, no such friend. I’m just a person who’s sang the same song. Who has moved back and forth from love to loathe enough times to know how this all began, I just don’t know yet how it ends. 

Star Date 5.15.09

What’s the purpose of coincidence? Does the name alone transfer all degrees of improbability to mere mathematical chance? Are we simply placed in front of astronomical odds purely by value that we ourselves are housings of billions upon billions of constant calculations and this is how we perceive the improbable? Could it be that there is a hidden faculty inside us that transmits these calculations and fires back answers in the form of an unconscious “coincident”? I asked myself these questions last night as I lay awake in my bed, my head spinning with calculation after calculation, musings, whimsy and daydreams. This wasn’t a normal sleepless night that usually plagues my ‘twelve year old on mountain dew’ brain. These thoughts hadn’t been simply conjured by myself, they were more likely brought to my attention. Let me back up.

I was laying down on my box spring absent mattress, hugged close by gravity to the concrete below. When I decided that the fight between me and the sandman was a loss. I kicked off my sheets like a white flag and swiveled to the side of the bed so my feet were on the ground, my knees coming up to my chin. I waited for that initial head spin to subside, you know, the kind you get when you sit up too fast or in my case work out for 10 minutes. What is it about the stillness of night that pairs so nicely with cigarette smoke? That’s a question I am content with never knowing, it’s already tangible, the feeling I mean, just no fitting words for it. This is similar to the question that arose as I stood outside in my boxers, a coat and a cigarette dangling from my lips.

Moments before my vision lit up with yellow flame I was standing inside putting on my coat when I heard a familiar song coming from the upstairs computer. My roommate had gone out and forgot to turn off his computer, which is odd because he’s one of those OCD freaks that can’t leave the house if things are left on. It didn’t bother me, on the contrary I grew up in an incredibly noisy household, the constant hum of music and shuffled feet to me is like the quiet sounds of a babbling brook to others. I never could understand how people slept with those “pleasant” noise makers on their night tables. You know what I’m talking about, those brookstone clock radios that play sounds like, a rainforest full of soft drizzle filled rain and happy monkeys. Or an empty field filled with sounds of tall colliding grass and the rare sound of a melancholy chirp from a cricket or swallow. That’s the kind of garbage that keeps me up at night, consistency, constant artificial pleasantness. And seeing as my life has been heading in a direction of consistent actions I suppose perhaps the predictability of the week had left me no surprises for the next morning, and so, my brain had gone to work to invent some. But the song that was coming from the room upstairs was one I knew quite well so I let it play as I walked outside, happy to let things just be.

The sound of the bass pulsed slightly and reached my ears outside the way a scream sounds through a pillow. I sparked up and leaned back against the doorframe almost in one fluid motion. The rhythm of the song was felt in my back though the framing and traveled up to my head. It started to grow, getting louder and more present. The bass began to grow into treble and seemed to be moving from my left ear to my right, as if I was wearing headphones. I looked to the street and there it was, the sound. It was some young kid at two in the morning coming around the bend with his windows down. And wouldn’t you know it he was playing the exact same song, but not just the same song, the same song at the exact same point in the song. It took me a minute to actually fully register what had happened. And then a few minutes to fully grasp the heaviness of it.

The computer upstairs has over 2000 songs on it. It was playing in alphabetical order by artist. I only was able to hear one small part of one song as I walked upstairs. The man outside in his car wasn’t even listening to the radio he was listening to a CD, I know this because the song was uncensored. I was outside because I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t sleep because my head wouldn’t shut up. I was smoking my last cigarette. It was 2:35 in the morning and there wasn’t a soul on this street except for me. What are the odds that the two of us would be listening to the same song at the same time? Those odds alone are pretty great. But even greater is the fact that I knew about it. I’m sure all of us at one point have been doing some routine task and have thought “I wonder how many people are also brushing their teeth right now?” But this is something more, if he and I had done anything slightly different this moment would have never happened and I would have been able to sleep. But it didn’t, I didn’t have to look around for my jacket, or find my left flip flop, or wait more than I waited to even get out of bed.

So I was left wondering why all those events had led up to something so anti climatic. Something with no surface value, no intrinsic gain, except to wonder why. But maybe that’s the point entirely.

On a night when your head is full of questions it’s better not to pursue them. Sleepless nights are a hunt for ghosts. You feel them when your alone, turn on the lights and their gone, tells your friends and receive blank stares. They will always be with us, always out of reach and full of a presence that cannot be ignored.