Saturday, May 14, 2011

Downriver

The wine is so sharp it makes me shudder. But it goes down like a lover down under neon lights. Just me and the fan. Whap whapping against the minutes as they pass. Only silence in between and even she is wary of me, just like the rest of the continent. Porcelin to be smashed, I am already a pumpkin before midnight. Footfalls in the sand, I move under a hood of shame. My citrus eyes the color of honey or hot shrapnel, you decide. I have backed out of the driveway of my country in a cloud of dust and trespassed across the continent of Africa in a search for my halo and I found my ashes instead. Ring around the rosy.

My hair is falling out in fistfulls, no doubt in protest of something. There aren’t too many mirrors here, but even when I see myself in one, I realize I havent really seen myself in a while. Have you? See, I’ve been off the map. Down a rathole and into the light like a newborn, puzzled by the smell of my own urine. Something is telling me that I’m still in there somewhere, while my license testifying to the only identity I have ever known has been suspended and there is this stringy white girl in my place. And whats worse, I think that’s actually the best thing that ever happened to me. But you’re damn right Im unhappy about it. The angry voice of the dog outside bites me in the ass through the window as I settle into a stare-down with the fan. Seems to me like every shift or growth we undergo in our lives is like a white water rapid on the Nile- one of eight or more. From a few meters away upstream, what with the spray lifting up toward the sky like the doorway curtain of some earthly diety, you feel ready, strong, yourself, thrilled and dry-mouthed with anticipation. Your friends cup your shoulder in encouragement and you may as well be goddamn Napoleon in a lifejacket that’s too big. F that rapid, you got this! But then, just as the nose of that raft hit’s the wall of water that’s sucking at your oar like a dog on a fishbone, then you don’t even have time to close your eyes before the wave has rolled your raft on its side like a roasting hot dog, one of your boat mates has landed on top of you shoving you down into the black of nature’s biggest pool drain and water has made its way past your open eyeballs into your stunned brain. Its really not you but your big-ass life jacket that finally pops your little head up into the crust of the white waves, hiccupping for your life and sucking in spray. At that moment, bobbing out of rhythm with the water, face into every oncoming wave and rocks playing your spine like a keyboard, that’s what changing is like. What progress wants, progress gets. So love it, fear it, want it, ride it however you wan to, but you still gonna be a wet string bean in the strainer on the other side. And there, the sun will dry you out eventually, good as new. Blinking and warmed by its rays with the roar of the water in your ears, the mysteries of life that you thought were so long dead inside of you start marching in all their colors and glory as the world’s greatest river runs past you. So there you are smiling. Feeling  newborn but tougher than ever. Believe it. Or don’t. But that’s what I tell myself anyhow.

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