In the morning, I’m sitting quiet in the kitchen. I just got back from the long night, in which the frames of motion ran like an old film reel, taking on an antiquated and magic technicolor grain, fading, and then all at once becoming real again.
It was as if the light that came to my eyes was rain between gusts of wind, stopping for breath every few moments. All the while, the ocean emptied its cool salt waters upon the shale of my rooftop.
I turn on my side toward you, my old friend from back when we were children. Can you feel that midsummer wandering? Time is speeding and slowing, the sails open and take in the wind while we silently tag along, like little ones holding their parent’s hand.
I can feel the dirt and the wet grass under the tread of my sneakers, constant forever, before it turns to sandy pavement, then to worn kitchen floorboards.
In the long night we take up backpacks and wander like children again, returned to our old state, living in old states and bearing old souls in the ’60s. For a time, we’re feeling what it was like to live the nobility of modern fear. Its far off now, where the car bomb and the kalashnikov cut through an open eye, and in the middle of a gathering crowd in Paris, someone’s hand lies dismembered on the cobblestone.
There’s something garish to our glowing odyssey, like fireworks set off from a golf course. Back yards in July are islands in a foreign sea for a night, and though we will have to return home in a few short hours, the sun is not yet up, and no birds are yet singing with the brightening grey of things. We still have a little while longer in the hours when only pilgrims traverse the empty streets.
Together we’re watching our explosions in an empty sky, and accenting a staggering march with a grin and a laugh.
Ryan Shockey Davis 