Opportunity.

In the morning, I did not get up until after my alarm had died. I lay in bed and kept my eyes shut. I was waiting for that frisson of cognition where one realizes with a certainty that this cannot be the dream, and that the dream cannot be reality. It is like catching the clutch on a stick shift. The gears mesh, the wheels turn, the sunlight goes from blue to grey and I open my eyes.

Outside I can hear cars going up and down the small street that leads to my parents's house. The neighborhood is a fortress now, and I live in a garret. Once people lived with each other as a community. Now the community lives without the people, a lumbering golem whose life begins with the sound of money being transferred. Everything is changing these days. I don't even carry coins anymore, I just throw them as tips to the girls at starbucks, those flashing bright eyes that seem so full of purpose and potential but instead lead to nothing more than a frayed black smock, turning grey with fingerless age.

In the mirror there is a person looking back at me who desperately needs a shave and will not get one. I examine my face for signs of emotion, some quality that might bleed through my pores and run colorful. There is nothing there - there never really is anything, except around the eyes. That's how I am different every morning. It isn't the hair, it's the eyes. Today they are sliced brown, the color of tea at the bottom of white porcelain cups. There is a flicker behind that dark golden bruise and perhaps it is something left of my dream, a dream wherein I stood on a vast vield of terrifying grass and watched the sky write words with a piece of charcoal.

Today I am going to work but I don't really know where I am going - my briefcase holds a sandwich and a though and maybe that's enough. I think about Deepak and I think about the sea, and perhaps that is why I think about Deepak. We can take this boat. You're damn right we can. You're goddamn right.

-Rich

a whispered wild gyre plays