Perforated sheets with stamps of Felix the Cat or a magician's hat, little pressed dots rattling in pill cases, desiccated mushrooms in sandwich bags. Pupils ratcheted.
And so blessed with the delusion that life might not be chaotic or incomprehensible or boring, but must rather be the result of a principle or rule, though the precise nature of this principle proves elusive, cohering as it does out of the ether with the angle or strength of the sun and/or certain words said at a certain time which emerge from mouths with a certain trajectory, and are like a puff of smoke transitory and only have the illusion of shape or border. We walk through a cemetery at night laughing and return hours later to search meticulously and apologetically for the cigarette butts we had tossed uncaring on the graves.
Do you believe in ghosts?
No. Do you?
No, but pick up the fucking butts.
We walk by a frozen river glossy and burning pink with sunset. Melting ice from the concrete path by the river has refrozen and laminated the bank and this also catches the last sunlight and glows and we think it means something, because it is beautiful and that should have some meaning, as though the world were a series of metaphors or messages or clues, as though it could be read.
What is wrong with us is what is wrong with all people, we are blind and unaware of our blindness, navigating by symbols that refer only to us.
Never enough sleep.
Days fray, gusts of static and bad colors like broadcast television with the antenna not quite right, like nothing is ever quite right.
In mirrors: skins occupied by strangers' oddly pushing bones. On the edge of things is a yawning chasm or a widening shadow or a slack jawed mouth or a spread vagina.
