Trees go wandering forth in all directions with every wind.
At some point we all had it right, before we began shaping it / holding it up to each other and explaining it. There is a reason we love campfires and flashlights, treehouses and bicycles, and why they are drawn over and again with different lines and with different spirits and why we continue to find comfort in them / sometimes joy / sometimes everything.
If this trip were a tree it would be a single birch in a grove of spruce; if it were a fish it would be from deep deep deep; if it were in a wardrobe it would be a ghost, and not a fur coat. This trip was custom cut from the excess spools of John Hughes films; filled with that perfect mix of youthful longing and premature ennui.
It happened hiking one day, I crested a cliff with tall green grass and suddenly faced a dragon and uh-oh his mouth was already open and he was breathing fire and I, yessir, was square in the thick of it. I found myself in a world gone liquid and gas, amid swirls and shocks of feeling, hanging there for the split second before the melt-and-collapse. If there was an observer, if there could be an observer, they might have seen just death. But I didn’t just see death: I saw eddies and currents, flickers and licks, flame and fire. I, the whoah/man who is being burnt to death by dragonbreath, I saw my childhood and adolescence and old age, I saw whimsy and longing and regret, I saw how dreams and achievements get muddled up when they’re put in a box and taught to fight. I realized how delusional it all was, little deaths really, but I understood life’s hot rumble better than I ever did before these adventures: it has something to do with earthquakes. Something to do with earthquakes. It’s like how you can see that Milky Way starlight two different ways: either it fills the sky, bright as oblivion, too bright to think; or else they’re pinpricks you can pick, constellations you can choose, friends that take shape in the thick gloom.
This trip threw us into a proton accelerator, bombarded by a PURE PROTON BEAM, an accelerated molecular PUNCH-to-the-FACE brighter than 1000 suns, combined us all into one beautiful mass, and everything went so HORRIBLY and VIOLENTLY right that ALL THE WORLD APPEARED IN CAPITAL LETTERS. Letters that we will be used for bananagrams.
I will meet you outside at dusk and we can go anywhere. We can go anywhere we like with cold fingertips and everything echoing and imagine that at home there are still dinners going cold in houses filled with yellow light.
stay gold;
-jbls
