19 march

Transfer trucks have always terrified me. One time her friend Sandy, says my mother, was driving beside a transfer truck, and the wheel blew out; and the hard metal center went whizzing out of the tire just with a crack and flew right through the side of Sandy's car and into her torso. I can't imagine what it would be like, to be one moment alone in one's personal parallax, and the next thing, crack! and a five inch blue tube of metal comes screaming in through the window and blows your brains to bits. Light's out! Game's over. All those years of little victories knocked down. I think it must be the most horrible thing in the world.

Driving today, the outside scrub of uniform blue and grey rattling by like an infinite series of uninteresting hallucinations; and my hair so rambunctiously curly & brown and my eyes so wide-set that today i resemble some sort of terrier; and Unsleep reaching numb, malicious fingers through the base of the skull; and love hovering black and silent above my head like a noxious balloon-- only now do i see the future lined up before me in neat little rows, wherever i turn neat little rows of pins for me to check off and knock down.

Just now, as soon as i've accustomed myself to the small square of Earth on which i've been planted, i must rip and unravel myself and jump from pole to pole, ticking off pins as i flick them to the ground. What is so inferior about the place i am now, the people whom i now love? Is it not impenatrably everywhere, any place i might climb toward, the struggle of loving and wanting and falling and fighting and giving and never having enough? Wherever you go, it is the same few feet of sky, and it rolling off you to dilute into others.

And i thought of them, all these beautifully fallible people whom i love, with all those pins lined up in front of them, and i wondered which ones they would keep and which they would knock down. It must be very silly of me, i thought, to feel so wadded-up and so alone when i have all these pins in front of me, all these careful rows of opportunities spread out and plastered across the skyline. Only i do not want them-- i want to be be loved and lie down. I want to surrender; to again to feel swallowed by the bigness of life, rather than sleepy and nauseous and numb; purple and rotting as a piece of banged-about fruit.

A blue-and-white transfer truck pulled up beside us and i stared at the grease-coated wheelcap whizzing feverishly around its circular track. Woodenness replaced me with a whoosh, and very suddenly it did not matter all that much whether i died or stayed alive; whether those pretentious pins ever got checked off and knocked down. Rot, i told them. Sit stagnate and mold over. I sat very still and i stared at the window as hard as i could, but i still had all those pins lined up in front of me, and it still seemed like the same three feet of sky.