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simple sentences

I sat down at Phoebe’s desk. Why did I feel so strange? I took a red pencil out of a pencil box and tore a letter size sheet of stationary from a block. It was printed with drawings of meadow flowers and ladybugs, a typical little girl letter set.

I started writing, filling the candy colored paper with simple sentences. Later  on I folded the sheet and filed it in my journal. The flowers and ladybugs give a cheerful, crazy character to my non-sensical statements:

Where is Phoebe? At Ally’s house?

The colors in the house are too bright, especially the blues and reds.

The edges of all objects are too precise.

The pancakes are too even.

Time is warped.

The woman in the kitchen is not my mother.

I saw a girl living in a blind man’s glasses.

I am going insane.

At this point I stopped. I thought of Penelope Hoffmann in her curved office. I had wanted to visit her today but something – or someone – had hindered me. That also was something that could not be proven.

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there was a gate and there was none …

there was a gate and there was none. to step forward required no courage just a lion’s heart. beyond it was the mirror land. hares parading on their hind legs, walking canes in their pretentious front paws as was to be expected. what else? i could not see enough from where i stood. i stepped through.

once through, the scene changed just as i had suspected it might do (but had hoped against my better judgment it would not). no green bucolic scenes, no childhood dreams. there was another gate and not a gate, a foot of grey no-mans land between realities, not more. i stepped through the second gate, as if one step mandated two, oh, what a fool i was!

beyond the gate there was bright blindness, no object, no surface, no orientation, no gravity – not dream, not reality, a blindness that did not originate in the eye’s inability to see what was there, there was nothing. there was no gate, there was no path, but in the brightness, invisible, the pretentious hare, checked his silver time piece smugly, and i did not know how i knew he did.

then i heard it fall, the silver time piece, fall with a dampened thud that sent shivers down my spine. i felt the rabbit searching for it like a blind man, paws frightfully extended, and suddenly i understood why i could see the hare with unseeing eyes. when i had stepped through the second gate i had turned inside out, and the rabbit was trapped within.

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Circus, fading

A parking lot and two blocks worth of retail place ankered around a Barnes and Nobles book store had replaced the industrial clutter of deserted flat brick buildings and weeds she had known like an internal landscape of suburban dread for all of high school. The place now had the mark of a new era of tidy franchised architecture, the clocks had been reset to zero and were running fast. Fifteen years count-down to decay, or to the day the last book would be printed, whichever came first. There was no emotional reaction to the replacement of her childhood environment with these exchangeable elements of retail culture. The fact that it was nearly impossible to tell whether she was in New Jersey or California actually felt kind of welcome, delaying the realization that she had indeed come back. She pulled into the parking lot next to a brand new looking silver Ford SUV with enough space to accommodate a mini baseball league team but most likely outfitted with only two child safety seats and DVD headrest monitors. It was still raining.

The muted green and white neon lights of the book franchise and a coffee store melted in the dark reflection of shallow puddles over new tar with the circus red lights of a franchise family restaurant branch. For a moment she could hear the animals restlessly pacing in their cages, but the impression faded quickly and made space for the mundane evening traffic of the mall. Families kept arriving to spend a Friday evening searching for a way to wile away some hours for the prize of coffee and a magazine. She held a door to a young mother pushing a stroller with a sleeping toddler. More families passed through the parallel doors, and for a moment the circus was back, forever lurking in her mind, waiting for just about any reason to manifest itself. People in anticipation of a spectacle streaming into the big top tent. She let go of the handle and followed a family with two young kids passing through the small foyer and the second set of doors that echoed the first. The father of the family dropped the door on her, she caught it with her shoulder without a moment of surprise.  The whole family then stopped right in front of her to perform the incoming routine, willfully ignorant of whoever should be behind them. Kids immediately shedding their coats into their parents’ expecting hands and taking off towards the kids’ book section. Battery powered books, stuffed character animals and a wooden train table all well within kids’ reach had nationwide proven to be wildly popular with the preschool through elementary school set. The mother feebly called out some warnings and then both parents, strangers to each other now that the kids were gone, walked towards the café to satisfy their craving for caffeine and sugar to get them through the evening and were immediately lost in the crowd of customers stopping at sales tables long enough to scan the back of a book cover or to flip through a brightly illustrated volume of some sort.

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Venti Latte

Traveling through space while entertaining a nervous relationship with a cup of burned coffee in a paper cup. It is ten in the morning and the daily cast of characters spending their morning at the local Starbucks has arrived and settled at their tables. No kids yet, mothers in Yoga outfits chatting idly over iced green tea, a couple of  unemployed writers pretending to write a novel. The coffee is not quite hot and the milk in it emits a slightly nauseating, fatty smell. Panorama windows frame the store fronts on the other side of the street with their display of black and white pictures of hip people in hip clothing like a piece of corporate art in the lobby of some high rise office building. The tall guy at the adjacent table who never takes off his faded blue utilitarian coat has ceremoniously unpacked his briefcase and carefully arranged a set of gel pens and a journal next to his venti latte. His face twitches nervously as if he was about to loose his patience with mankind any moment now but he is forever just quietly drawing sad faces into his journal, badly executed despite the fact that this is basically what he does every day: scribble multi-colored (red, yellow, neon green, blue) sad faces into his journal and hope that someone watching him thinks he might be some kind of well known artist incognito. Nobody ever addresses him though and so he keeps casting aggressive glances over to the other tables where people are too absorbed in their own conversation to ever notice that they are so lucky as to share this space with him who might be almost famous if he was known for a body of work he has not been able to conceive yet. If, every once in a while, someone coming into the store accidentally smiles at him, he disintegrates right in front of everybody’s eyes and responds with a big, sweet, grateful if a bit out of practice smile.