New Leaf - part 1

He sat with his mouth unsociably open, watching his office window snatch the sleet out of the air. Each shape shuddered before the melt like an anticipated blow, streaming down in nervous little worm trails. He knew there was something about the whole scene that pleased him, white business park wasteland, plaything cars and plaything people populating the distant diorama. Something about the fragile death of innocence and the disorder of heat. He wasn't exactly sure.

Not being sure about much of anything was the recent side effect of his new turn of thinking, and of course the hash cookies that were still singing in his head. But he knew, he thought, we all know that drugs are never so causal. Although they are indicted for it. They only introduce the conditions, we are always responsible for the rest.

He didn't so much as flinch when his coworkers happened by. On any normal day, he would snap back to his computer screen and his heart would thud with the dread of being found out. He was accustomed to feeling that every look and word from them was a judgment festooned with the shitty daisies of office manners. And this was likely not far from the truth, because there were things to judge. The stained and wrinkled slacks he wore every day, the odd couple of moth-eaten sweaters he cycled through each week, the occasional facial bruises, and untended goatee. There was no bigger elephant in the room than this awkward sore thumb status of his. But it was changing, or so at least was the amount of attention he paid to it.

He didn't seem too bothered to identify what exactly had transitioned, and to pry into it would have been the old hat way. The new leaf he was turning was one of prioritization. Wading through the clogged perceptual sewer of the day-to-day, and snatching deftly at the jewels. There wasn't much time for picking scabs of self-esteem, or appeasing the inner panel of second guessers that held the joy derived from basic life chronically on trial. He was too busy being surprised by the depth of the world. Like the riveting life cycles of falling sleet, his own vast smell libraries and the memories they safeguard, even the strange object permanence lessons of elevator doors.

As he looked out over the highway, the cars and construction, the blurry lunch-breaking human figurines, he wondered to himself how people really feel life. And how many feel it like him?