Evidence is Important
When I look at power lines, I think of platitudes—not because of the crackle and snap of electricity, but because of how they sag. It’s awfully sad but it’s not as if we could get rid of them, could we?
Imagine abolishing trite statements and switching our computers off at the same time. Would we mind, at all? Sometimes I believe that only people who would die without trite things to say need computers to let their brains talk.
I’m looking up at the ceiling and somehow I don’t seem to get all the way there and my eyes are stuck to the inside edge between the walls. When I drag them down to come back to life my soul stays there. It’s stuck to a wall — two walls — with Magic tape, like acetate on a mock-up advertisement.
When I lie in bed, I feel like a cat except that my toes are numb.
When I look down, the floor is very close to me and the world is like a suffocating aunt who tries to hug you but elbows you in the face instead. I want to say “the problem is not really you, but the idea that tactile-defensive behavior combines badly with body dysmorphia.”
I say “Please love me.”
I dream of being loved but, usually, there is a vampire in the closet behind me or a bogey under the blankets.
When I was a child, I went six months without covering myself with a sheet or a blanket.
Evidence is important.
They call this ‘personal writing,’ but I write for dead birds in the road, and the ashes of cremated boxer dogs. I don’t know what they think of, but they must have felt something like this at some point.
By ‘this’ I mean the feeling when you realize, too late, that someone has been mocking you instead of making friends. You look down on the human race for eons, and then they build huge metal horses and kill your descendants.
Birds sit on the sagging power lines in townships and trucks knock them off.
When I drive past their corpses they have no blood or meat and look like broken umbrellas.
Further away, people who look rather majestic and wear broken shoes starve boxer dogs and let them fight until they eat.
The only part I understand about the dogs is that they’ll still fawn at your knees when you touch their foreheads. Their hips come up over their ribs when they wag their tails.
It’s all a little exhilarating. Can you be happy when you know that the power lines are sagging?
Can you be happy when you know why your toes are numb?
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Image by Rayani Melo
