sidewalk
I can feel the sandwich sitting cold in my stomach and the radiant sidewalk seeping through the soles of my Oxfords. It’s too hot to go outside today, I said, but we walked to the restaurant for lunch anyway. I don’t feel hungry much these days. I blame it on the heat. I push my sunglasses up the bridge of my nose and all around us the pulse of sound and smell is distorted like the air rising from the hood of a car. I know there is no oasis here, only exhaled breath heavy with exhaust particulates. They say that riding your bike to work is like smoking half a pack of cigarettes. I smoke my cigarette mechanically. The city holds on to everything.
I wonder what it would be like to touch tree bark and not think of stucco. Once there was meaning here, profane rituals when the sun was only a god. You are speaking but the city has taken all the words falling out of your mouth and replaced them with the sounds of wind whistling through radio antennas. Entombed beneath us are the bones of pixies, gnomes and trickster spirits; you can hear the whispers of their husks in phone static and dropped packets. A homeless man looks through me and asks for change or a cigarette. I oblige him both without words because I have nothing else to give anymore. You’ve walked on unaware. I know the tremble of time but I have no equation anymore to describe the space around me.
I catch up before you notice I was ever left behind. The sidewalk is cracked here, a shoot of grass or some species of weed pushing up through the concrete. I stoop for a moment and pick up a piece of the debris to feel the weightlessness roll in my hand. You give a summer smile when I try to lob it into a rainbow-slicked puddle hiding under the curb but it falls out of my hand and only settles back into stasis. “Isn’t it a beautiful day?” you ask.
I smile without expecting the fury that wells up inside of me. Then I want to strike you, push you down, break those coffee teeth and ask what is beautiful about the entropy of this stillness and then everything is gone. I can’t hold on to anything anymore. A woman with a baby stroller walks past us on the sidewalk. I move out of the way or like a ghost pass through her and then we are in the condo, where the weight of heat lifts from the scoliosis of my cybernetic back. A fifteen year old girl on Oprah had built six wells in Africa and had recently been kidnapped and held for randsom. The thought of inflicting myself on reality like that makes my hands tremble. When I die I won’t be buried, I’ll just crumble away.
