At a distance
At a distance the buildings around you are monstrous. The dry mold on their skin subdues a pinkness that the morning sun let clear through the air must have made into another living thing on the sidewalk with you. They are beige. Great windowless prisms that absorb light line the street, far back from it, miles, down other roads, or right before your eyes. You could pick them up. Reach out your hand and wave it through the air missing anything solid and slapping greasy raindrops. You dont get near anything. At the end of the road, where it collapses in a point, everything on it, near it, or beyond it, comes to a single function, where the air is a body and body to body everything collects to propose an insurmountable conclusion. You always see it. You will never be a part of it. You are endless. It is a burden. You are the shephard of all other ends.
You dont ask for the burdens or projections. You put yourself on display, but only as a blankness that cant take a shape, or a trust. You are a show, a cipher. Against blank pastel walls you lose your edges. What comes, comes. What you become, you become. You notice absently, in the passing of time, a sourness in the way you line up with your surroundings. They change your edges. They make you something on the verge of annihilating them. Do they need you. They want to end. You will witness it, to make it certain. When something disappears it has no other corroboration than what it left behind. There isnt a story. The action is perpetual loss. There are always more things. More loss. Where do things go when you forget them, when they are gone and gone from you. Are they preserved, dessicated in the sun but still the same. Do they linger in shade. Do they become an inscrutable part of you, the skin on your back, your neck. Are you coursing with dross. You dont make things happen, but you are there when they do, they dont happen to you but you are forced to follow their repercussions through the days. When the sun sets you sit awake through the night. It is safer to see everything than to have it. When the rain falls you see each drop in place in the emptiness around you. The air between the drops is dry. You inhabit that scattered territory and watch the drops hit your skin and clothes. You turn up your collar beneath your hair to sheet water away from your neck so that you dont seize up. When it rains in the desert the water collects and looms. There is nowhere for it to go against all of the hard old things. It becomes deadly. A torrent of needling beadlets blown down Sepulveda, through the hills, as you clung to the bark of a dry beige tree, ramps down your chest and sternum and soaks your skirts. You are looking for somewhere the rain isnt, somewhere the sun wont be. Enormous stucco cubes are so far away and so smooth. They are covered with faint flowing blotches of gloss. They are so large that it rains only on portions of them. They have no inside, no door, no window, no shelter or outcropping. Everything is shadowless in the rain across windworn asphalt. Nothing stands. Nothing for you in these moments until the city cycles further into the day and the buoyant mysteries you have no use for slide beneath the soft sand. That doesnt mean anything. You inch partially beneath a cloth shelter that collects shopping carts. You watch the water still on the asphalt. Drops find different places to flow out of the open surface. Some slick streams swerve softly to sewers and cascade into darkness, together. Most of the rainwater languishes for a break in the clouds, or heavier rain. It spreads out. It is just rainwater.