Unstuck

(Clip adapted slightly from an email to Coyo, Summer 2002. Tonight, like Vonnegut’s unlikely hero in Slaughterhouse Five, I am feeling “unstuck in time.”)

I walk here to the Fish and Chip place...cold air...wispy clouds smearing across the twilight sky...
a blanket hung on a porch rail flaps roses, pale blue and pink, cream...
a bearded man, my age, pulls out of the gas station on a motorcycle and stares at me.
The red pigtails, I think.
L. would laugh at me, think me naïve to believe it’s the pigtails he’s looking at.

The sky is almost uniform violet now. The cars travel with headlights on.
My friend C. said, "I can't keep up," and she means with me, with my life. I laugh and fire back a funny reply but there's a twinge of feeling not-enough because I am too much.

Funny how it goes - no words at all, spells of muteness when words seem as aimless as leaves in the wind and other times the words are wind itself - blowing until it stops. Wind bearing loneliness, love, the fading roses on a drying blanket, the news of my Aunt Betty's impending death. Wind gusting through, messing up the pictures drawn in sand, blowing away stories, the chatter of events, old and current history, the touchingly exposed neck of a young boy sitting at the table in front of mine.

Human human human, like a beating heart, a hollow drum.

The streetlights glow orange, blurry suns...my glasses on the table, a sizzle of food hitting grease, my pigtails trailing across cold French fries on a white plastic plate, a ringing phone...orders for pizza, Lebanese accents, men with hairy arms toiling over pits of hot grease.
Amen. Amen.