waking up.

I was standing and watching the creeping advance of cars outside when I heard that a friend's family member had died. There was a rushing sound of elevators in transit and then nothing. I stood at the very tip of a slate iceberg and when I looked down it was impossible to tell where the clouds ended and the water began. Everything eddies when we look at it from above, even people.

I remember watching my mother play with the telephone cord in a swank hotel room. The sunlight came in through a window blocked off by my father reading a newspaper that should have been important, and the television in the background played the kind of music that we have become accustomed to. The spring was dying outside and we ignored it.

When you do something like counting the curls in a telephone cord, eventually the act gains meaning. Buddhist monks use the same technique - they count the 108 beads on their cords as they chant their sutras and at some point the number 108 becomes the same thing as the number 1, and then numbers mean beads, and suddenly the world has become more precise. Even though everything is the same, it is that sameness which remains different - the thing that everything becomes is really the thing that everything is. It exists, always, like the world in a movie screen exists. It is there and reality attaches itself with hooks and ladders to it, and perhaps that means we can see it somehow. Perhaps when we count over and over, we are opening a door. This door is chased silver with acid etched patterns like the spots of a jaguar riddling its surface. It creaks on a single brass hinge tainted green with the patina of arrogance. It bleeds air where the frame meets frame. When people exist, when their frames meet the frames which enclose other people, the door opens and we discover that life is neither a lock nor a key.

I sat outside and a red car beetled past me. The road appeared as a withered branch and I reached out a hand to snap it off, to pull it towards me. I thought about the Casalinos and I wondered if in the perpendicular of the sky, whether their life was my life, whether my life was theirs, and whether this was the true face of violence - cold and laughing, voice choked sorrow by the wind.

-Rich
two out of three ain't bad