it's funny how I just get struck with all kinds of achy sometimes. settling in to the new place, a day off of a raise, at a lovely dinner with a view and suddenly it's time to go. cue walking to the car, craggy mountain ranges like hastily torn construction paper layered against this cut-throat busted sunset that just won't quit. and then cue all the right songs, and all these stretched-out moments, and a shuffle button doing such a good job that it's starting to hurt.
black and whites and blues and glass and tabletops. worn-out floors and lamps on chairs on sheets on couches. the sounds of different walls, tiny ants crawl down the hall, and I'm anchored here like a radio station to amplify and pull all the words through, they're just right the first time. typing, not writing. but still.
{and I didn't understand / when you reached out to take my hand}
I really am closer than I've ever been before, on the edge of all this tangibility, not waiting for anything or anyone, riding the fringe of all the amazingness that's been practically thrown in my lap. and still, tonight, driving up broadway, stopping home to go out when I should be home sleeping and I'm tired and worn a little thin but for some reason I'm not sleeping - I'm practically sideswiping cars on my way up to the light because it's got me so bad that I have to take my book out and scrawl illegible blue ink all over the place. shifting. driving. praying for a light to get it down before another thought steals it all away, before it's gone forever. to grab that snapshot, the way the mountains looked and that particular shade of pink fading into dusty dime-store lips.
home, with a few weeks looming before my year anniversary here (which I will promptly celebrate by leaving the following day for chicago). it's a year and it's five lifetimes and five or ten minutes all at once, with a half-dozen versions of myself under my belt and folded into pages of some notebooks on a shelf. and me, afterward, glorious, sleepless, amazed, sunset-ingesting, lyric-laden, and free.