It's the Mud

I’ve likely woken up to the superbloom in the desert. Standing in the doorway, I let the light flit under my eyelids for a while. I am consolidated and can piece myself by opening and closing a gratuitous amount of pockets full of rocks and baubles. Run my hands over hand wrinkles. Reflect on the tarot I drew yesterday. Outcome? Unsettling new changes. Fingernail growth will be accelerated. Internal body temperature will drop 0.4 degrees. The old-man’s wheeze is permanent. Eyes still closed, do I really have anything to say? 

Exit the doorway and assume position in the white monobloc chair on the porch. Purple flowers have appeared in empty rivulets, but the surprise garners no visceral reaction. Without another soul to confirm my corporeality I don’t ascribe the quality of realness to anything. The desert at once covered in flowers could be a delusion, it could be that this whole thing isn’t real at all. Tongue grazes dry mouth, teeth, lips. The sun exacerbates the feeling of my age and the bewilderment of how I got so old and how I got here rather than there—how I became the kind of man who has whiskers and rubs his belly. The world was sticky, and now it’s hot. There is no cool to be found, and even when the breeze breaks off the rocks the air is warm. There is nothing to sip on, there hasn’t been for a while. My fingers are all I can bear to rest my eyes on. Rest now. Nap in the white monobloc chair which heaves under your weight, whose white legs wobble but never snap. 

Asleep, I pass my waking self a note—“let’s pass notes”. I laugh but don't write back. 

Lazily, I drift in and out of sleep until the heat of the day makes itself known, I stir with a sense of restlessness that can only be tamped down by planting myself in my seat. After a few moments with this sense of kinetic energy and sweating, I let myself get up to kick a can off the porch. The absurdity of the moment passing at its certain cadence strikes me as sublime, and I begin to laugh, I begin to heave. I begin to sob and altogether forget what began the sobbing. I wipe my eyes and return to the monobloc chair. 

 I can only impart what I know here, which lives penned into the cement porch adjoining the cement block house. What I know: I live within and without the white monobloc chair. I like to stand on the precipice of the porch and collect the stones within reach of the edge. I like to sit outside until the parts of my face feel hotness in such a manner that they’re moving in synchrony. I remember nothing before the house and the chair and the stones.

I’ve spent the early afternoon examining the stones, perched on the edge of this and everything else. A glass eyed mouse has crept over, hopped onto the porch, and fallen asleep. The superbloom trailed behind it, transmitting the feeling of the small purple flowers peppering the desert—the oil and water and air of it all. There’s these drones that play on and off all day, bleating and wailing like an unreal ghost. The mouse on the porch breathes in time with the drones. The skittering of paws on washed concrete seizes me. Today is strange in a material way. It’s giving me long-gone things back. The motion of back isn’t something I’m used to. I find myself more familiar with the side-to-side of moving through the house, the in-and-out of stepping onto the porch and going inside.. 

Hazy details are returned to me with convulsions: Jenny mixing brownies in the lime green room and the trundle bed behind the stairs and the bog and the river in spaces inside me. My galoshes and walking the street in sleet and self-awareness. Something infecting me now, and the way she’d feed me cookies at lunch time? The way he passed me a dollar on the white lines of the highway? The lead. The paint. The coats. The forgetfulness. The kicking and the screaming. The not knowing it but hearing it anyway and being sure. 

I stumble at the paralysis of the returning of things. The mouse stirs, I almost fall off the porch, I kick over a couple of the precious cairns fashioned from my stones. Re-entering the mix is a skill. I’ll die in this monotonous fashion, the sleeping mouse an unfortunate victim of my severance from time. 

I stomp into the kitchen with its marbled dull grey-green color with grecian style grape wallpaper trim. I need to steady myself. I need something to sip on. I fiddle with a clasp on the cupboard with shaking hands until I give up. Convulsions again. Flat telephone memories separate into layers. They rest on water. A gift from the drones or the superbloom or the mouse or the purple flower litter in the desert. 

The presence of ghosts kicks and sputters on the porch. Specters of familiarity remind me of nothing but their forgotten aspects, the tip-of-the-tongue task. I’ve never noticed all the fucking garbage around me before. The thankyouthankyouthankyou bags and the hair and the corrugated items of all kinds. I can’t call this lucid. I can’t call it anything at all. The wind is picking up, grabbing whorls of trash and purple flowers. The mouse has been reanimated and inserted back into time. It jumps off the porch to tend the garden of pollution and flora, biting into a purple flower floating in the halestorm of debris. Lapping up stem and petals, it drags the flower to the surface of the porch and lays down in the shade. I convulse. I begin to sob. I remember why.