again about thinking

In the mild heat of my room, fans whirring like the cicadas screaming outside, I wonder about things. I'm always thinking nowadays. Always pondering new metaphors. I see a cat on the street, and I think, if Van Gogh hadn't been medicated, we wouldn't have the sunflowers. A moth buzzes past me on a smoke break, and I think, green like newly grown wheat. Golden like being old enough to remember.

The other day, my brother had rendered the cake I'd made for his birthday useless. He'd yelled, angry and magma seeping into his cheeks, that he didn't want any f*****g cake and we might as well throw it away. I didn't cry, I'm not that young anymore, but a whisper of the sea kissed my eyelids. My eyelashes were crusted with salt. I did not cry, because I am not a child anymore. Golden like being old enough to remember. Am I old enough to look back? What is there to look back on, mourning doves roosting in the garage, possums burrowed beneath the shed? Broken ceramic birds? Concrete ones that won't?

You're in a car for more of your life than you realize, or some sort of transport. I used to take the train to work eleven hour days for two crumpled five dollar banknotes an hour. I've taken planes before-- I've existed so far above sea level I thought I'd suffocate from the dry air. And the sand has been between my toes after I spent six hours drinking Gatorade in the back of my mom's red Jeep. Bright red, maraschino cherry. Are morello cherries any good? I've heard about them, one way or another. Is the syrup syrup, or is it sticky and delicious and everything you wish you hadn't left behind when you moved out? When your parents told you that moving twenty-four hours away might've been akin to death by finances, but you did anyway? You room with two cats and a friend who binds his chest with two instead of one. I wonder if he hates himself. Could you ask him, Public Universal Friend? Or would that read as novel as the DSM?

That might be the crux, the rub. We all hate the itty bitty pieces of ourselves we try to hide in the underbellies of our aortas. We all pretend to be virtuous, or maybe we are, but vices are a hard barb to shake, and maybe your father cheated once or twice, what's it matter? Your father and mother have never been in love, not since you've been alive. Love tastes like a freshly fried and salted large size of McDonald's french fries. You wonder if fast food dates late at night (or too early?) might've made them like each other, even in a petri dish. Even under a microscope. Even with a camera that goes down your esophagus and into your stomach and looks around at all the half-swallowed eyeballs floating in your acid. When you played in the snow when you were a child, I thought I was the happiest I could be. My cheeks hurt from smiling. My lips were terribly chapped. I gathered flakes into a ball and threw it at my brother, and he pummeled me into the ground. Even as he hit me in the ribs, the groin, the belly, my eyes were caught on the euphoria of life, and all I could let myself have was laughter. His eyes blazing, he vowed to hit harder. When he grows up, he won't touch you at all. It will repulse him.

There are no good words to describe Hamlet right down to the wire, but you think dead dad and knife fights and political conflict isn't that different from life already. You wipe your nose and there is blood pouring like a faucet from it. It gets on your shirt, your pants, smears across your palms and cheeks. You cry for your mom. She has her earplugs in, and she is sleeping. She is sleeping and you are on your way to the ER, if you had a car. You shove a tampon up your nose and watch the end dangle red, cross-eyed.

There isn't enough bread in the world to feed everyone, but there are enough seeds to sow, wheat to reap, grain to be ground. The basic ingredients are suffering, vomit stains you still haven't scrubbed off the inside of your toilet bowl, and nirvana. Sometimes people sprinkle well wishes over top. They burn in the heat of the tandoor. They burn in the hot sand of the coffeeshop. 

Did Grandma think of me, before she died? Is not a question you can ask. There's one less person on earth but there's enough rabbits to compensate. They will still chew your mothers flowers when she sprinkles blood meal around them, a warning, a promise, an outstretched hand. Birds of prey do the dirty work, and they pay for only mice and their captures. Trained like crows. Trained like humans under capitalism. Trained like the political divide that doesn't really matter anymore, right? Yesterday, a man wore his pants backwards on national television. His penis might've been a bit constricted, so it's good there weren't any young women around. None for him to harass. None for him to make the belle of his haggish story.

The world has been returning to wildflowers, even if the ice caps melt, even if nuclear summer is what ends up happening. There are foxes and deer and rabbits. There are voles and mice and possums and raccoons and skunks. There is not you. This is not your place to stand, but you wonder anyway. You wonder, because that's what everyone tells you you're good at. You think and think and think, but philosophy has gone out of style, so you go to public school, and you read public school library books. You read about sophistic boys. All of them you want to draw fresh blood from. All of them you want to strip the marrow from their bones, and dine like an eagle. You imagine tearing their fingernails off and breaking their hands, one by one by one. Can this much destruction be contained in an eight year old girl? Has she learned to speak yet?