I'm walking through the store. I am well caffeinated and perfect. My shirt is pressed and my hair looks good. Light fron the East bays falls across the railing into the main floor and I'm noticing people.
It's oneof those moments we all have when we are outside of what's happening. People are floating past me as if they are outlined--exagerrated to render their inner character as a cartoon version of themself, instantly recognizeable. Like reading a book. As if they have biographical subtitles:
I pass by a girl who looks vaguely like an old friend. She's mousey and soft; brown hair against her head, a midieval expression, like a renassaince painting of a chamber maid. Without meaning to, I get her entirely. As I walk past, everything slows down.
I see her room in her mother's house, brown covers on the bed, books on wicca piled in a corner with their edges roughened, a Maxfield parrish calendar, a lot of thin earth-toned shirts with plain buttons in styles that don't so much differ as graduate from one to the other. A guitar leans against the desk with a thin layer of dust on its hips.
There's a picture of her in college at a bar taken by a friend. She's surrounded by the dark, exposed in a blinding flash, playful smile almost there but still doomed, still so easy to extrapolate to this moment and you want to dive into that photograph and land on the table feet first and roar into her face "GO FUCKING DO SOMETHING" But even so, it would be a performance to her, a thing to be analysed. And then I'm back and time catches up and the light recoils from Q--R and she passes on, deliberate as a nun and I have no pity for her. Some people are born deformed and crippled and some people seek their damages willingly.
Detachment can be like a drug. Its not like watching a movie of the things of the everyday because it is the everyday. There is no skein of the metaphorical to skim off. You're there, in it.
I was hypnotized by an old man's face today. He asked me a question and I was absolutely stuck. I couldn't stop staring at the rivulets of skin that had washed up against his nose, It was like his face was at high tide and I expected the cheeks and the little fissures around his nose to recede back into the ocean of his face. He blinked and waves raced through the surface of his skin and I inmagined the flotillas of mites and burrowers and microscopic civilizations hanging on for hell or breakfast as their world rippled and writhed beneath them--whole generations bewildered as they had grown passed and died since the last time he'd smiled.