whitelimousinesdraggingtime

[whitelimousinesdraggingtime]

A sort of book review

She saw the last dregs of sunlight glinting fiery orange off the fence, which was painted silver to mimic the kind of well-kept metal no university could really afford, or at least she thought that the LED light from the streetlamp across from her was those last dregs of sunlight, or perhaps she hoped it was, as the moon rose, a sliver of opal brightness in the rapidly darkening sky that matched more perfectly that LED streetlamp than it did the yellow-green-lilac glow of the sun’s belated, western-edge of a time zone good night to her.

It wasn’t really saying good night to her, but to everybody along that particular horizon, which included the many people inside asleep or working, who wouldn’t quite notice the sun disappearing again as it did every night.

This is not to say she was better for having noticed it; the noticing didn’t happen for her every night, only if she happened to be outside or at the window, and it probably didn’t happen more often than for anybody else, although she made a point of the people around her knowing that she searched often for it, enough that they occasionally, noticing it themselves, pointed it out to be sure she wouldn’t complain yet again that perhaps the sun didn’t even really set here, but rather faded slowly away as if in some apocalyptic novel in which the solar system would end not with the expansion of that essential central star, but with its sudden—or gradual—disappearance.

No, she wasn’t superior for having noticed the sunset this time. Indeed, she was rather late, having only just finished a book about half an hour later than, according to her mendacious weather app, the sun was supposed to really have set, and, upon finally extracting herself from the emotion-logged pages, had been taken aback by the continued brightness of the sky and how it gleamed flatly off that faux-chrome fence and especially by how it failed to shine quite so effectively off of the square-backed orange plastic Adirondack chair she was sitting in, which she marveled at for its complete failure to make her homesick for the touristy beachfront Adirondacks she had grown up around.

That chair was chained to the chairs around it and to the offending fence itself, perhaps in the hope that a chain would dissuade overeager (overserved, even) college students from taking it back to their dorms as a not-quite-shiny, underwhelming trophy of their intoxicated bravery and recklessness, not unlike the traffic cones and street signs that no doubt proliferated in the residence halls she was surrounded by.

The chain that saved this particular chair from that fate was not the black iron of a dungeon, but a rather cheery, industrial thing wrapped mostly in yellow plastic, a sign that whoever had installed it was concerned about pinching themself in its links or perhaps, more charitably, concerned that the aforementioned college students, in their inebriated clumsiness, would hurt themselves on it while trying to claim their hard-fought criminal evidence.

Regardless, her musings on the topic were cut with strongly held convictions from birds and fireflies, the former of whom seemed to massively disagree with her even having thoughts on the matter of whether the light on this fence, which was ostensibly responsible for dividing their domain of grass and trees from hers of metal and cement and paint attempting to convince her and the other denizens of this quadrangle that they were really having the kind of luxe experience formerly reserved for American aristocrats taking a cruise off of Cape Cod, was from their adored warmth-giver or from her cold, artificial, miraculous LED lamp, and the latter of whom mostly just each wanted to find a lover, which they planned to accomplish through ever more cryptic Morse codes produced by their even-more-miraculous bioluminescent abdomens.

Or was it their thoraces?

Was that even the plural of thorax?

She was an aspiring chemist, perhaps an aspiring materials scientist, but most certainly not an aspiring biologist.

As an especially astute reader can probably surmise, her concentration on the particular quality and direction of the light was also marred by her innate tendency to wander off on some deer path of a train of thought, especially if not penned in by the creative constraint of an English assignment, which this was not, or by the focus-bringing qualities of putting pen to paper or finger to keys.

A MENSA inductee would certainly notice that this train of thought has since been re-examined and put to paper, or at least to the closest thing to paper a digital space has to offer, although the nature of the internet as a “global forum” may indeed require its entries to be viewed more as speeches by philosophical Romans, which is, in most scenarios, how an internet-dweller might prefer to think of themself, including both the apparent contradiction between a society so notedly strict in their philosophical habits and the looseness and the diversity of thought supposed to exist on the internet, as well as the reality apparent to most that strictness of philosophical habit is a rather enduring requirement of most web-based communities, so perhaps there is something more focused and yet more in the realm of unreality and abstraction about this twice-removed experience of a person’s thoughts past 9 post-meridiem on a Sunday evening, when that Sunday didn’t even really begin until two and a half hours post-meridiem, or even later, after her second double shot of espresso, which contained a significantly smaller amount of milk than the first.

Indeed, just in the half-hour since the entry began to be written down, she has already realized her propensity for the word “perhaps” might just be grating and repetitive to the eyes—or metaphorical ears, if one considers the forum model of the internet—if her readers do not love it near as much as she does.

She briefly wonders how she has already gotten so far removed from the technology-free musings she experienced earlier, when the battery on her phone proclaimed itself dead and in doing so demonstrated that it did indeed still have some energy, at least enough to power the desperate, pleading illustration that showed rather inaccurately exactly where and to what depth one must insert a charging cable to return it to a nigh-alive being and not an extraordinarily expensive brick.

But she must have considered (mustn’t she?) that those musings were precipitated precisely from the sudden lack of a phone, that a chasm had gaped open in her brain that was normally knotted together by memes and the anger of young teenagers and especially immature adults over things that she rather liked to think she had a uniquely nuanced opinion of, and in doing so she would have succumbed to the same falsified sense of importance affected by the not-quite-matte silver paint on the fence she was considering in the first place.

It was at this point she decided to take a walk, and upon getting out of the strange little plastic excuse for an Adirondack chair, realized that the end of the book had been quite emotional, and that now she had stopped considering the light of the sunset and begun to experience its ever-weaker effect on her surroundings, and that now the wind and not the chatter of birds and high schoolers was in her ears and her hair, and that extricating herself from the chair and its chains had not re-aggravated the bruises inflicted by the bar installed on her twelve inch high bed rather ironically installed to prevent her from the injuries that would be caused by falling out of it, and that there were, perhaps, tears in the corners of her eyes.

And that she sort of wished, so soon after her least favorite grandfather’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis, that the book hadn’t ended with a disagreeable, bookish man losing his grasp on those words—and people—whom he loved, and who loved him.

[whitelimousinesdraggingtime]

I am being dragged by the heel by a white limousine, music blaring, chatter roaring inside, a beautiful dissonant harmony with the rumble of the engine.

really these musings are just all star reflavored, but isn’t that the point? everything I do has been done before. the years do indeed start coming and never stop coming.

why can’t i just hold on, ride on the back of the car like some drunk party girl, excited to ride fast fast as i can into the future, around the clock of the year until midnight strikes again and i am one year older, one year closer to death, one year further from childhood?

i am slow

i take two minutes to put on my shoes

three to pack my bag

i genuinely cannot comprehend how people get out the door as fast as they do, for it seems to me that i am packing as quickly as i can, tying my shoelaces faster each time, and yet

here we are

wait for ——, she’s slow

——, hurry up

i am trying

I am clawing at the rope that attaches my ankle to this speeding white limousine until my abs give out and I collapse and give in, skin scraping against the asphalt like fridge-cold butter stains toast that’s been waiting, cooling, for far too long. but the limousine does not slow.

and no one sees

people joke that I’m ambitious, that I have this need to get to the next place, this drive, and all the while I am about as far as one can get from the driver’s seat while still moving. but I have it, because they say it.

they mustn’t see, I mustn’t let them, so I put on a brave face and smile through the zillions of tiny scratches on my eyelids and through the gravel embedded in my cheeks and say “isn’t this limousine ride so fun? I wish it would go faster too.”

I write going-away cards for my friends and in return they write texts saying how much they hope I will enjoy myself in the future that I am being dragged into, and nothing about the blood and pus dripping from my brow. is that what adulthood is? carefully ignoring the blood dripping from somebody’s forehead as you tell them how happy you both are?

I know it’s a tired metaphor, the one about being dragged forcibly by apollo’s chariot as he moves the sun around and around and around, the one about time being an always-spinning wheel and about how one wishes time would stop, pause like a track on an album, step on the brakes for just a moment so for once in my life one might have space to catch one’s breath and realize how much one might love a moment before it’s already gone.

I realize it’s been done.

but I don’t think anyone’s done the limousine that lives in my head and drags me around a white circular calendar as i pass an overly-cheery Monopoly man (what’s his name again?), waving and smiling through the tears that sting my skin that won’t have any scars in the morning.

maybe it has been done. I haven’t googled it.

i wish i could write poetry. i think it would help me get on track.