03.20.01 - 01:15 a.m.

i always walk back over the same ground. the same footsteps in the same places. the same shortcuts, the same pauses for light and shadow.

and i want more from the sidewalk that its mute practicality, somehow. i want echoes of myself back, or someone else. the vertigo of dis/recognition or memory shaped from stone. i want more from the passage of time than just its passing. i want some immediate signpost. here is where it changes. here is where you fell. this is the moment of triumph or disaster. this is the passing of another day.

i suppose i wait too much. for something more, not necessarily dramatic, but at the least framing in its scope, to relate to life as a narrative rather than a collection of fascinations and urges, to find a constant thread that begins and ends, then starts back up again with the next chapter.

i would like to turn the page and know i've turned the page, mark my place and take a break - slide into and out of myself at will.

open the book. open the book. i used to want a soundtrack more palpable than the random snippets of musical phrases that assert themselves in my mind. when i am walking down the street and my coat billows out - o fortuna from the carmina burana. when i wake up to sunrise, the ode to joy.

but now it's the certainty of words on paper that i covet. or rather, not the certainty of the words themselves, but the arc of narrative - the swell of it, the turning point, the denouement. the division and organization, the significant pause.

where do you see yourself in ten years? how do you see yourself in ten years? how do you see? and how do you create those worlds in your mind, and then give them - whatever they are - up to reality, inevitable as erosion, day by day by day.

sometimes what i didn't know amazes me. i went to seventh grade here, which could well have been the worst year of my life, though i think those came later. i remember that somehow - over the summer i spent backpacking or riding horses at the catholic camp, everyone else grew up.

suddenly i could walk past the safety patrol at the middle school and stalk onwards to the junior high three blocks further down the street, but that was as close to the grown-up club as i ever managed to get that year. one of my grade school friends had sex that year. others spent lunch getting drunk or stoned. i was scared of my lockermate, and didn't know that hairspray existed.

literally. in the heart of the (late? i guess it was) mid-to-late 80s, i didn't know about hair spray. like. literally, i did not know why my hair would not stay the way i wanted it to stay. like everyone else's did. and those were bighair days, and the heart of mtv, but somehow i was scandalized whenever i saw david lee roth leaping around on my screen. mind you, his hair stayed the way he wanted it to stay.

i swear to god.

my favorite pair of pants were black, with multicolored tiny little hearts printed all over them. or corduroy, red, with these flares of fabric that opened on the sides, but were sort of held together by red buttons. i got dressed up to go on the plane. and i spent more time playing with fourth graders, hide and seek, than i spent with people my own age. or with adults. or reading.

or going to lectures by abbie hoffman. i am probably the only child in the history of the world who would sneak to stay up late and watch the state of the union address. i go vote now in my old junior high.

the ninth graders seemed so damn adult.

but i didn't stay there. i don't know what would've happened. i know when it changed, and why, but not how. the means are easy to pick out, but the passage of time, the urge to movement, the certainty of change.

i want the sidewalks to tell me where i fell and tore a hole in the knee of my favorite heart-printed pants, and how my mother sewed a big pink heart in as a patch, and why they were never the same again. i'd like to know if i was happy, or if i just wanted to escape. or if i knew that escape is always impossible, because you take yourself with you wherever you go.

and i want to know where i'll be in ten years. or at least that those years will be worth it all, after all.