ladies and gentleman

every business lunch ends with me wanting to go eat lunch. words are vital but now i'm seeing the white space. even on this page, white imprinted by hard fought dark. then if published on here, the opposite, with lettering illuminated. i feel like i've been drowning in space. last week i was rendered nearly immobile by the alarming quantity of sky, distance between people, my own cells. i will not break this into paragraphs, chunks, instead let the sentences hug themselves close. i remember an old friend of mine would get consumed by these things, like a vonnegut character or something, she moved downtown to bombard herself with energy, but found it to be only a confused version of active space. sometimes i imagine she makes my shape on her floor, with all the things of mine she never gave back. the sweatshirt i've mythologized and lamented in so many conversations as torso and centerpiece, the beanie which fit my large head on hood, short story book with a human heart on the cover resting in slender fingers of left hand, perhaps inserted on top of the sweatshirt logo above chest cavity. also my harmonica below the beanie, where my mouth would be to play the music. finally that seventh grade photo i.d. of mine somewhere between all those things with innocence of soul, spirit, in simple image, possibly hanging down from loft ceilings strung by fishing line hovering. the pants, maybe my shape would wear no pants because maybe my nature was always to be naked and hers, wanting space, from a bad past or maybe just a different truth. perhaps she'd use the watercolors i gave her to paint the legs and beautiful whatever else. i was on an airplane alone when i realized that she did what she had to do to save her own life. I wrote all the words you just read, yesterday morning. then the day happened. a friend of mine spoke of our travels and my own pseudo hollywood nonsense. weeks before, she had cried on the sun temple as the sun rose, continuous tears, streaming, pouring down in release to mountains and a heart-opening beauty, all prior to tourists and after a bunch of plateaus on a journey to profound arrival. i left and randomly found my brother, sister, mom, parked outside of an el torito of all places, joined them in this far flung serendipitous world, eating nachos. later, moving from the sun i drove strangers west to east in the early night, spoke, identified, learned something about people and context. then came fairfax and the sea witch, we are warm blooded, vital, ridiculous, alive, alive, alive, somehow you will be my friend, lady, woman, girl, steamed windows and everything. like a natural stick in the changing tide of that little bar where you once said kind words to me years before and again and again, here we are, i'm always listening. now, here at my table, i don't feel the space anymore. there is a physicality, fatigue, never-ending battle with ideas and creativity and purpose and functioning and mortality and i will breathe and make jokes about my own cremation and honor this experience of here and now and it's a wonderful wonderful time to be doing what we're doing and yesterday this lady from detroit was going on and on to me about today's youth and artificial skeletons and mourning the loss of cameras when suddenly she shifted toward how lucky she is to be where she is, seeing what she's seeing, getting to be here.