10.27.00 - 20:30:45

Good morning world.

There is such clear, cold, promisory brightness to the early morning. My step was lively, with purpose. I was alert to possibilities and awake to disasters as the door to my apartment closed - with a certain finality - behind me. There were the customary questions (did I forget my keys...? I did that four times last year, all within a two week span, locked out first thing in the morning. All within two weeks. I do not learn lessons.) and the customary jingles of response, and a certain lightness that bled into expectancy.

I wanted something to happen.

Nothing ever happens.

I do not like it when things happen.

But I want them, the way I want to hold a star in my hands, and feel my skin melt to bright-white flame, I want them the way I hold disasters within me, as if they were diamond seeds - hard compact brilliant fire alive with possibility of snaking growth.

I wanted something to happen.

For some reason, morning light is diffuse, very softly edged. Morning light - early morning light - when the sun is up somewhere but not quite here, whether it is hidden by a hill, or by some remnant of mist - so the world is brightening, but still pinkish, and there is no glare to dazzle these sleep-blurred eyes.

And I wanted something to happen.

I wanted to happen.

I wanted to happen to something.

Something had to happen.

And it is bagel morning, and bagel morning is a ritual in itself, and I stalk into the sleepy store headed straight for the bakery, and clean out half their stock before they have two breaths to blink and the bakers, the women busy bustling behind the counter creating confections for the masses (...do let them eat cake...), what do they think about me?

Every Friday - without prior word, but without fail - I am there, snaring their stock as soon as it is released to the world. I buy oodles of O-shaped baked goods, and reveal nothing more. I am momentarily mysterious, like the girl in front of me, in the ****** County EMT sweatshirt, who purchased:

• One cucumber;
• One bag roma tomatoes (on the vine);
• One bag celery;
• One gallon 2% milk;
• One box generic chocolate chip cookies;
• Ten boxes of jello.

Ten boxes of jello. From the my observation angle, I could not tell whether the jello was flavored or unflavored. I think it was unflavored. Does this make a difference? I'm still unsure, and while I pondered this incongruity long enough to remember it later [much later. I started this briefly in the morning, but I am busy, I am busy, and other things came first. This is merely a moment of release before other things come again], it was not this that stirred me to melancholy and breathless need for flight.

I would like for something specific to happen. I would like to disappear.

I was standing in the parking lot, and my gaze swept down an alley - across an endless series of crossroads glimpsed only briefly, known as a dawning thing, a distancing multiplier of possibilities, with the cross-barred electric poles marching in a stern receding line toward a pinkening sky. Behind me was the blue of forever, this deep, breathless color fragrant as the rain and thrice as intense as fall. It bordered on electric, but deep, as if all its vibrance were folded in on itself, banked in anticipation of lightlessness or against expectation of the bleaching, bleeding sun.

I wanted to leave. I wanted to leave. I watched the brief flash of a distant car seen once and never again and I wanted the old familiar conditions, the routines and comfortable knowingness to all fall away as I hurtled myself into an endless series of crossroads, possibilities, and then made more.

This need, this yearning, was as intense a need as a human's need for touch, it was as willful a thing as sexual desire, and it flayed all the comfortable, comforting lies we tell ourselves - I tell myself - each and every day.

I am tempted to say it took all my will to thrust it down, but rather things were the other way around. Had I any ounce of courage, any distillation of iron in my spine, I would have dropped two plastic bags on the street, and not looked back.

Or would I? Someone told me, too recently, that I am not a teenager anymore, and cannot therefore disappear. This, she said, is a teenager's privilege.

But I wanted something to happen. I want something to happen. If I see another familiar face, or hear the same complaints and compliances and complacencies, I'll scream. I'll tear my hair out. I'll drown myself in a mudpuddle. Or, I'll run away to the sunrise.

And no one will know where I've gone.