Underdogs and Tidal Waves

Southside of Mellow
2011-04-10 14:30:15 (UTC)

Smoke and Soot in the Palisades

And I remember that time.
It was summer.
The music was blaring from the street below.
And as I stood there staring up,
we locked eyes
and he reached out his hands,
motioning for me to come with him on the roof.

Kids were jumping from the rooftops,
chaos was exploding around us.
My friends were too engulfed in the maelstrom of noise and frenzy
that they couldn't see this stranger asking me to climb the firescape and come away with him.


And as we spoke of our lives in retrospect,
there was nothing else for me to say.
Enshrouded in artificial light,
I can remember when I wanted this.
But as I'm standing there and he's spouting off technicalities and I'm hoping that he can't tell that I'm sick,
this isn't like those moments lit up with fire from kerosene.

It's the strange kind of impotence of my life.
These moments impelled by a wave of alcohol.
It strange how this dizzying poison like nectar sets motion to the fury of my life.
But standing there, completely dry, praying for chemicals,
there is nothing between us.

And standing there only blocks away from where that stranger asked me to come away with him that summer,
I wonder if it could ever be like that.
I wonder if it will ever be like that ever again.

Those strange dizzying moments.
Those frantic feelings of wanting to flee, even though I'm bound up.
I know now,
with years passed,
that if someone asked me to come away with them even for a few hours
of disappearing at a festival,
I'd probably just leave his side and flee.

I find myself wanting to understand things more as I get older.
I find myself wanting to be able to decipher these patterns.
I know that I'm privy to them.
How one week I can feel like I'm lit on fire and the next week, I can feel myself dragging, like feeling nothing at all.

I wish I could understand why.
It's like spotting fireflies in the dead of summer, close to dusk.
You know that you see them flickering gently against the night sky,
but their glow is so faint that it makes you wonder if you ever saw them at all.

It's a strange kind of reeling.
I know that I feel no wayward desire,
but in between wakefulness and sleep,
something is ignited and I'm not sure why.

Even as we stood there in the rubble,
it was hard to remember why.




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