Sunday

Run to the past to escape the present, which is the past, just older looking. You might be able to convince yourself that you chose correctly to be where you are, and who you are. Or you might find holy dissolution in the grand myths of cause of effect. Either way, you'll find some reason to justify your unhappiness. A reason you purposely fling as far away from you as possible, like an ugly boomerang of truth you hope will disappear into other yards and other lives.

Run to the past, run long concentric circles into that space where decisions resurrect their possibility. Run miles and miles into your flesh and self. Become obscure, unloved, and alien to this universe. Run because something is wrong, because it will never find you where it started. In the droplets clung to drying trees, in the haze that makes it simple, where dreams amass like thunderheads, and wants make animals that are given names and places to feed. Run the breath out of your hating mouth, the spit that tastes too pure, like solitude or failure. Run your heart as big as the sun, feel it swell and eat wayward attention, a dying star, an explosion in the dark, a way out.

Feel feeling leave your arms and the farthest outposts of blood. Let it huddle in the chest, and prepare the sacrament of exit. Your body will remember sanctity without you. But you may kneel before the ritual. Kneel, because your knees are shaken to sand, because you've ground them to grave dust and sawed down your shoes.

And the reminder rings its numbing bell through every bone and every semi-solid place. You are a thing that dies. That needs and then dies.

Crawl to the nearest shade, turn your face from the gazes and misunderstandings. Turn your face from the unrelenting sun, to save this moment and the high of a great forgetting. A whole life the white lie of immortality. Crashing down in ecstasy. The life in dying blood. That is where it happens. Not in dreams, not in lies.

Flirt with the drug of death, as it teases your lips with near miss kisses. You won’t make it home, thoughts say, rays of light in the darkness of blinding sun death. Which light is correct? You spasm in wonder like a flopping fish as you sift through other people's trash looking for food to bring you back. To take you home. You decide on home, because you’ve been there. You decide overwhelmingly on home.

You cry, no you literally weep, because someone is helping you. Is it the sugars? It's simple. You realize that you have forgotten the abandoned loveliness of crying. You wish for more tears, because the cry was not proportionately represented. But you’re low already on that resource.

Her name is Helen. You hear that much in the fade. She is helping you because she believes she stopped at your death spot for a reason. You cannot help but succumb to the compassion and trust. You can feel it melt like a painful thaw. It hurts, because it is free. I am alien to this universe.

She trusts you, walks you, wavering you, to her car. Buys you water and food, restores you, shows you unconditional strangerly love. Takes you home, helps decide that decision for you. That right now, you should be going home.