I love living in a city this big because of all the endless possibility for encounter, the untraceable mathematics of human lives colliding. I love how you can fall in love with someone just by walking by them on the street and the two of you can play out a story of your own, between your eyes, that doesn't last anything more than 10 steps till you pass each other. That said, I wrote this in class this morning:
You had red pants, flame hair, and an eastbound streamline to your gait. Black jacket, maybe suede, set back behind you in the flow with your torch tied down so I could peer right into you. This is a moment. This is time immemorial's same old song self-sung and everlasting. Let's call it sidewalk love, disconnect the traffic lights, and get immediately perpendicular. Let's not be collision-course-comets stuck inside the Almost Path. I'm so tired of the hello know you want you take me here and now who are you where are you going where did you come from I'll miss you goodbye and then our strings pull taut and we remain attached to our own paths. Do we not think quickly enough to be the animals we want to be, or is it that we're moving faster than either of us can afford? Now on every Monday, 9:12 a.m., I'm going to be habitually recreating my movements in a bid to intersect with time. See, for everyone I pass there is an infinity of narratives surrounding them until my mind narrows them down to one, and it is lonely telling other stories until something like You happens. Then, the characters are double, and one of them seems so plausibly me, I can imagine the minutiae of our day-to-day routines and I see deep beneath our covers bodies like two soft machines. I can see the red before my eyes that is your hair across your shoulder bearing down on me and lips, lips, lips . . . The image of our love together is a set of slowly curling painted toes that tease into a pure release. And did it mean this much to you? The inevitable question rears its head and I will leave it be, unanswered. Now, it is hours later, and little of your face remains. Not so much your eyes as some idea of them, some fleeting feeling built around a space and time, the wind, the heat and my singular perspective locked intrinsically with yours while our momentums tore us hard apart. There was a Beginning, a Middle, and an End. I crossed, I saw you saw me, put my hand to my forehead to shield myself from exploding wide-eyed in your presence and then put it down to find you looking into me and holding me until we passed and then I began to breathe again. Everybody's walking left right up down through the grid each day, each intersection offering a certain choice.? I leave at arbitrary times set on 3 different clocks, then spend X amount of time in [insert coffee shop] before I walk to the corner of third avenue and eighth st. and at the last moment decide to cross the street to the south side, then jaywalk just in time to give us a universe of otherwise unoccupied sidewalk on which to dance across with one another through the pupil universe.
-------------------- Acid doesn't give you truths; it builds machines that push the envelope of perception. Whatever revelations came to me then have dissolved like skywriting. All I really know is that those few years saddled me with a faith in the redemptive potential of the imagination which, however flat, stale and unprofitable the world seems to me now, I cannot for the life of me shake. -Erik Davis
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Nope...I see the Olsens, Spike Lee, and Julia Stiles around kinda frequently. Out of those three, only the middle one interests me. And I walk past most of the guys from Interpol. The band, not the law enforcement agency.
-------------------- Acid doesn't give you truths; it builds machines that push the envelope of perception. Whatever revelations came to me then have dissolved like skywriting. All I really know is that those few years saddled me with a faith in the redemptive potential of the imagination which, however flat, stale and unprofitable the world seems to me now, I cannot for the life of me shake. -Erik Davis
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