Something has taken residence in the middle of my chest. An iron heart, but there’s nothing there. Just bone. Can people feel bones like a pulse, like an organ, like a being of flesh just being there.
I told myself, walking across the street, to open my skin. To absorb everything in because I haven’t played much today other than this morning. It’s hard to play at work staring at the same thing everyday.
The pigeons weren’t out today. Once before I saw them etched in the sky like an Escher. Their wings touching wings, the pattern of them flying from rooftop ledges. Nothing in the sky today except cracks of clouds through the sky. This doesn’t mean anything. I say that to myself when I’m trying to make lines, when I’m walking and making lines in the hope that I’ll remember them. I walk through life’s cracks with lines. The grit below, the white women acting black on the square, the children in strollers looking off into the distance while their mom hangs out with skinny white boys with their shirts around their necks, baseball hats tipped up like gaping, bottomless beaks, black men shouting n***er. Are white people still not allowed to say that? Because I seem to hear it all the time. Why do people say that? – they use it so casually. The benches curve from all the butts, but now they are empty, bowing from the weight of all these people sitting on them all day, all the weight of people, people carry so much weight. The woman making my coffee with so much weight, midnight skin; the two women walking away from me with sweet iced coffee and too much weight; the two boys on the benches sitting next to each other not talking to each other but on the cell phones – one carries so much weight.
I resisted the doughnuts. One was heart-shaped with sprinkles. they made one especially for mom. But I’m not allowed to eat those, I’m not a mom. I’m just waiting until my coffee cools down so I can drink it. This is all just something to do while I’m waiting. I hear the click of the keys and it’s so strange that each little sound while I’m typing means something, the distinct clunk of the backspace, how quickly we use the backspace to erase the misspellings. My favorite is the space bar, I think. But they other keys sound like hooves or racing horses. I can type pretty fast. But the space bar sounds like when you drop a quarter or a penny into a deep pool. Kadunk and I like that.
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