Hotel Lobby

We agreed to meet in a hotel lobby where only I had been before. I arrived head first, heart second, early. Everyone was wearing drab disapointment, dragging grey baggage around the disinfectant-smelling corridors.

I stood on the moment and waited, feeling dizzy like a Florida lilac in the storm, knowing when the wind and rain passes within the day some old coot will have died from the shock of it all and I'll be picked and scattered in dour bereavement.

Pellucid. That was the word I was thinking of. That and a litany of "we met on a cloudy day in April" over and over again.

Trying my best to look like I'm Not There in that circumference of gelid sounds. She's late and the crystal chandeliers splay their light casts everywhichway, saying "nevermind". If my decisions were colors they would be green. A green that is in love with blue. Turquoise? What color is that?

If only dreams were our rights. If only desire bred power. I am powerless. Pellucid. April. Pellucid. Cloudy. Pellucid. April.

She's hardly ever here. I wake up sore from fights we have in my sleep. The pangs of longing, cluttered in sleepy girl dust from her last visit. We both love her. Only I love her now and then, present and past. She's in love with a version of herself who hasn't arrived yet. She's late.

The names of hurricanes, like mega-pop stars, are never mundane enough. They are what they are, lets not romanticize. Why not name them like streets? Mulholland. Oak. 45.

There's a lot you can see when there's nothing to do. That was when I ate a candy bar that was terrible and drank a coke that wasn't bad. I said a little prayer to Jesus Christ and imagined him as a bird with scorched wings, Dionysus on a feathery crucifx, falling to earth like a comet into the long grass. Kill me now, he thinks. I think.

Pieces of seconds. Strangers clad in let down. White noise. Waiting. Invisible. Pellucid-- Apri-- and there she is!

She gives me a look like I'm a sheep about to go to slaughter, and I brace, and kiss her tight-lipped pale face and spring up & go. Terrified.

We walked out of the lobby where only I had been before. She told me where we were going. August clouds perked up and shivvered. Her hands were electric and deadly in mine.

Strangers burn and embody smoke, prayers jettisoned and vanishing everywhichway. Every skinny body in the world rustled out of my perception like leaves on a fall day. My focus is a color that is fading. The blood all sank out of my head.

I thought I was ready for anything, but that just proves how very little I ever know.