august 10, 2011

Folder:

in my twenties

A boy sitting at the table next to me at a coffee shop is playing WOW on his laptop, and I am writing a review for The City Madam while drinking a giant iced coffee and fending off spiders. It's dark out, and a huge fan is blowing bits of honeysuckle flower across the table.

I think I'm happier right now than I've been all summer sitting here on this dark, dirt-covered patio in the Houston Heights listening to the din of post-dinner and wine-influenced conversation quietly typing away about the themes of greed and the use of bunraku puppetry in this theater's brilliant interpretation of Philip Massinger's seventeenth century allegorical dirge on humanity.

It makes me wish that the fan was really some great wind, and I had a bike to help me glide down the big giant hill that is my current depression, so maybe I could go back in time and change my plans and erase all this hurt and regret and undisciplined television watching. To exist like some swift night warrior, like some person who understand why existing is still relevant, and why I want to plant prairie grasses in my mom's front yard.

Tonight I'll go to a show and stand around waiting for a cover I know, waiting for friends to show up and shout over the PA and tell me about their lives and the dinner they made alone in their apartments last night. About their relationships and how collecting old jazz records and bike bells has flipped a switch in their minds. How their twenties aren't that bad, really.

And I'll wish to be that satisfied with meals I'll eat alone and things I'll collect to fill a hole, and the obnoxious, sporadic flight of honeysuckle.