Friday, December 2, 2011

Somewhere, Between the City and Here.

There's a shell of a building off Tennison Street that used to be a skating rink, my first kiss buried in the rubble. When the season changes and November gives birth to that first dirty snow, it's just a rat's nest buried in ashes and cold. Couple times a year, they clear out the homeless, the crazies, those with nowhere left to go, but leave my memories scratching in vain against the permafrost below.

Town like this, of course, there isn't much but memories. Every house has its heavy sigh, foundation sagging against an overgrown lot. Every wrinkle under every hollow eye speaks to something smothered, visions imprisoned in the id, the reason everyone bites their nails.

Maybe it changes in the city. I've been there, you know. Everyone still asks me about it. A sixth-floor hotel room with a rattling air duct and an abandoned wristwatch in the wardrobe. I'm bad at being alone, always was, so I take in a piano bar where every jazz musician goes to die. Thirty years ago, it might have hung heavy in a carcinogenic fog and inspired someone, but now it's all failed actors on the third-shift trying to make rent. Funny how the city works: everyone's too busy trying to afford it to ever really see it.

There's a married woman—pretty sure that's what the ring says, anyway—making eyes for idle chat, and who knows where that leads? Bartender's queer as a circus dog, quite the character, and talking for a tip. The hostess is from a town like mine. She says I gotta move here. I say I can't afford it. She says honey, you never can.

The city is trolly cars and tourists and self-made men and corporate shills and beggars and addicts and art majors and pickpockets and it smells like sewer gas and sea salt and it's gull shit and billboards and bright lights and traffic signs. Passing couples reek of weed and record stores and excitedly talk up the latest Lars von Trier flick like existential epiphany is framed one bloody cumshot at a time. Everyone dresses different from me, threadbare or Bourgeoisie, and sometimes that makes me feel more alone, covered in the apparel of anonymity.

Unlike the town, the city has no time for memories. There are just honking horns and gypsy cabs and a construction crew that never seems to leave. Tomorrow, the M1 will be shut down and the Green line will divert to State Street instead. In the city, nothing lasts. The girl you meet, the one with Pacific eyes that drown your intelligent response, you'll never see her unless you ask her back to the room—and even then, you may wake to a foam impression the morning next. The friend you made, the one who also had an interest in the avante garde, he'll take the promotion, pack his bags and trade in Godard for four kids and a Shrek sequel. The guitarist you heard at The Bloodhound will relapse and sell her Gibson Hummingbird for a plastic bag of crystallized escape. Everyone, everything, moves too fast to be anything but a moment.

The snow falls sullied here. If I sit on the roof of the Tennison Market, I can look past the rubble and into the shrouded lights in the distance. There's no time for first kisses in the city. There's no time for new romance in the town. I have no answers for the past or future, so I sit and eye the expanse, wondering what waits in the sprawling sea between.

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