charred west

Part One.

I remember the point where the foothill
Melted, boiled down to paperflat
Precursor to the fists of giants and their mouths
Giving addresses, never forgotten.

CLOSING DOORS

After two weeks back in the humidorium, sifting off my last layer of dead Navajo skin that Utah was kind enough to slap on my arms, I’m feeling the void out there. The spaces in between towns, between uninhabited jumbles of oildrums and angry barbed wire, plywood monuments yelling ‘Repent!’

That’s what sat with me, the void, between the two worlds.

Story begins to and from a huge rock. Two young people who thought it would be in their best interest to spend a lot of time together. Currents started connecting, compatibility imminent, things escalated over the span of two years into the irrational, the absurd. Let’s share our lives until we’re dead. The gong of that statement crashed as it always does when people do these type of things, across heaven and earth, and being painfully close to the epicenter, my cellphone-brick chimed and happy voices from faraway lands requested my presence half way across our fair yet somewhat deformed continent to witness this commitment publicly sealed. Two children whose void was dissolving before my eyes, compacting itself into a fatal, crying whisper and then annihilated. It’s fun to watch.

St. Louis was the first middle-American powercity that we encountered, the arch doing it’s thing. We found empty streets with stuck greenlights, a pizza restaurant with the short-sleeve clad mayor and his troup of off-duty police officers, talking frantically about the Cardinals and their suspension. My former manager worked behind the register, replying to my jockish, “Where’s all the people, man” with “dude there are thousands of *-in people in this *-in town”. Assured of my former manager’s steadfastness of character, I rejoined my comrades in the least red-pepper mottled booth for some orange-grease pizza. Which was good for everyone save a curly haired chap who had taken to being violently ill after driving 12-hours straight. And thank you St. Louis, making bread so fascinating.

Kansas was frighteningly open.

It’s a rougher land out there. The people are scattertossed over it, realizing that they’re sitting in a broken land. Daily business commences around violent shards of rock, testaments of an earth inverted. Our clocks rang 3:00 in the afternoon when we stumbled into a sandwich shop around 10:30 AM. Denver yields an odd mix of people. A lot of nerds, shoegazers. People that seem to ponder, but are willing to talk, they’re happy with a faraway stare. I saw a rescue mission empty out, and all the tenants were given Maruchan noodles. Dozens of noodle-eaters. I spectated through the window; Jamie from Empire of the Sun. Forgot my turban

The Rocky Mountains showed me how tall things could be, and how small trees could be. Also, there’s a greener green. Colorado smells like perfume. Memory usually ties itself to smell, I don’t understand it completely, it’s bored a way into my brain. The first four of us wandered into the Roosevelt forest at dusk and pitched our plastic home, avoiding cactus sprigs like mines. Justin and I scouted for sunrise lookouts for a while and ended up on opposite rocks in the blue light, chatting about tomorrow. Here it comes, here it is.

The aforementioned couple are now husband and wife. We feasted on their behalf. Football burritos were enjoyed by all.