october waxing

the shadows frosted overnight; dusty whiskered grass peers at me from the banks as i fly by. it is a sight that simultaneously exhilarates and fills me with dread. the afternoons are warm, but not hot. the soil sucks all available moisture in, ready to huddle for the winter.

not yet, i whisper to the trees. i'm scraping fallen pine needles every morning and my shoes take on a sticky sweet smell; i'm pushing all the old, dead wood into a pile behind the shed.

i find myself counting time in weeks, rather than days. i remember when i counted time in hours, and minutes, and ticked seconds off with my fingers. soon, i will observe whole months and years, and become a cold, hard carbon form.

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24 September 2015 07:57

today

i am keenly aware of the surface of the earth. i am the presence that spills to fill all available space, moving smaller things to where they should belong and breaking along larger things. slowly, over time, i can move those as well.

i am only as great as the infrastructure around me. i touch everything i can see.

the skies and clouds bend above me; i occupy a space below them. summer taunts and threatens to wane.

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01 September 2015 17:47

early frost

frost crystals blinked in the sunlight at me as i stepped onto the porch. by the time i got close enough to look at them, they were gone. the rubber sheeting glistened with dew.

there's a work truck of old rastas who wave and shout enthusiastically at me whenever we pass each other in the mornings. i smile and wave back, but i wonder if it's cool that i'm not actually a rastafarian and they just think i am.

we're bad at remembering how we felt the day before yesterday. we're bad at evaluating our progress towards long-term goals.

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07 October 2014 08:29

breathless

the morning fog deadens sound and smells like the back of a storm front. we shift between seasons, a rapid cycling through the unbearableness of mid-july and the desperate press of late-october.

when i'm trapped in a bubble of traffic, anxious revolutions buzzing at my feet and restless for a window, i remember: the sunsets are always good. nothing can be so bad if the sunsets are good.

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04 September 2014 08:26

Pelted

The sun was out when I finished tying my shoes, but by the time I had lost sight of the building, the first few drops of rain had already touched my skin. I thought I was imagining it at first, as the touch was so soft to be indistinguishable from hair brushing against my neck, a blink that came too fast. Slowly, the sky closed overhead once my feet started crunching on dirt and twigs, and I had resigned myself to getting drenched hours ago.

It wasn't until my turnaround point was in sight that the pouring rain paused, then shifted into pea-sized hail that pierced through the trees and pounded onto the path. I just folded my arms to put my exposed hands close to my body and pulled my bandanna over my ears; the dreads gathered to shield my head and neck. I ran through, me and the three other stubborn assholes on the trail, and pressed in and out of the wall of hail. So long as my heading was east, the tailwind kept the hail hitting my back, and not my face; when the path curved around and pointed west again, I ran with my hands over my eyes.

The sun was out again by the time I got back to my office. "It raining out there?" people asked me as I walked by, water and mud pooling out of my running shoes.

"Not anymore."

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22 April 2014 19:27