Aware (The Shift Puller).
Exiting the 44 line bus on the mere average morning in an autumn several calendars ago, I felt a deep awareness that arrived erratic, unannounced. The framework for how the melancholic intention comes to invade a person, lives in the immanent, and has no place in this account of how I arrived here, in this place, settled. Things move: by design moved by a mover, prime or otherwise. I was moving, dragged heels and without earnest swash, half mind/third body wondering over words quit similar to these with less reflective attention, more a phenomenal discourse on small objects in terms of the larger, such as my melancholy to me, or leave to sky, eye to head, building to cosmos, and the such. I had to ask myself: why does the internal seem expansive and deterministic to the grand view; the cell dictating the disease, the cure, actions, and death? While pondering these earn shaped disasters, I became so aware of it all, the world and its confrontation with me; less powerful to it than the disease to my existence, I began to sweat.
I stood in front of a bank leaning on a classical column of city white rock, and realized my palms were so wet I was having trouble holding myself up. In fact my entire body was drenched, my flannel shirt pulled down on me, that burden heard in gospel songs, real as the mule beside them, the well to fetch the water. I couldn’t keep my balance. At first I danced in a circle, creating some grotesque ballet, trying to scream yet nothing but more drench came out. Pools of me dripped to the ground making any sharp move/decision impossible. I had slid into the street dodging cars by shifting my weight best as I could. No one honked, no one looked.
As I spun about the crowding streets I could notice them. The pressed color still in grey moving day, the jacket tail whipped, the accordion gates slammed with purpled cold hands. I started to gather pieces of the city into the now muck-like drool of a sweat surrounding me. Little pieces of trash, like receipts, cigarette butts, bottle caps, newspapers, and bus transfers stuck to my skin and clothing as I slowed down. At some point I must have gathered enough to stop. I stood on the sidewalk holding onto a lamppost heaving puffs of heat against the cool dampness of the transconfiguring moment. So aware of my strange appearance as an urban trash monster, I watched people walk by giving me looks of disgust, small children mocked me, hissed, and a police officer told me to get a move on it. I couldn’t move. The weight of the accumulated human discard bogged me into the cement, and the best I could do to move was a large appliance like waddle. I shifted my weight with such force that each thrust I thought must rip me at the middle, tear my torso, decapitate, and shatter. I pulled myself along with a shift/pull maneuver, grabbing telephone polls, street signs, and street lamps. Every shift, every pull, took such effort that I cried and hoped my tears would alleviate the heft of the trash, possibly wash it away but nothing, they were an unctuous primer.
I managed to shift/pull my way up a street I knew led to a park. I needed finite repose, a space where I could concentrate on freeing myself, unaffected by any human interaction. I’m not sure how long it took me to get to the park entrance but the sun was setting and the joggers were thinning. I sat at the entrance quite a while, breathing deep and doing my best not to replay the horror of the earlier affair. I couldn’t help myself. I felt calm now and new the act was over, the curtain fell, the spotlight had been removed, but the stained image remained; that’s its nature, to remain. I cried ignored, and alone leaning against the park gate wanting to slip in before it was closed so I could hide through the night. Once I became dedicated in shifting and pulling my way through the park I started to cover some ground. I felt lighter as I rustled my way through the pines and stones beneath me. The jagged edges of the rocks and wood started to free some of the trash once clung irremovable to my person. Up the side of a steep incline I made my way, rubbing against tall oaks, and kicking up earth dust washing away the manufactured waste provided by the cities finest progresses. But as the trash fell away, a new skin was being acquired. In place of Camel ends, bus ride limitations, Mickey’s seals, and headlines were shards of stone, chunks of wood, thistles of pine, leaves of gold! I was transforming from the urban monster of decaying materiel, to a Pan of the forest, a real natural freak. I arrived at the top of the hill just before complete darkness. As I made my final shift/pull to the cliff edge, I felt the earth hold me. I looked into the emptiness, the blue blackening and imagined myself aware of the fall, but I remained, still. I sat on the precipice through the darkness and into the morning where I smelled the robust earth stuck to me, around me. I could hear footsteps of joggers. The frigid breath of daylight slid across me and hardened with moist dirt taking away any original shape I once had.
I’m not sure how many days have past; I won’t count the suns. I know that lizards in the right season bathe in the heat on my arms, birds gather tweed and stone from my forehead, and occasionally someone will sit in my lap resting from a hike, run, or from life in general. A pretty woman will sit against an arm and read a book, a young man has written words in concentration leaning into my chest. Teenagers spray paint on my back words I hear people chuckle over, sometimes in distaste.
