constellations, stars, and rainbows

I watched the downtown lights wink and flicker from across the street, like Morse code from strangers 6 blocks away, small figures and profiles gliding across far away windows and lives and places, making dinner, watching TV, feeding their dogs. And these speckled buildings appeared as grounded constellations, forming twisted figures that no one had named. Maybe I'll do that one day. Write a book full of constellations based on how many lights are on in a tall building. I'll name it something fancy and smart, and people will buy it as a novelty. And I'll be a successful author who finds his identity in quirky prose and odd things, and when I die, someone else will have to write something clever on my grave, and maybe that will make them money, and the cycle will repeat itself, just with different players.

As those people across the way carry on, I sit here watching them, squinting to see if I can make out any details, and trying not to feel too awkward from watching a stranger's life. I have my dad's old Boy Scout X-large sweater. It envelopes me like a drab green sea. My house slippers are canvas with worn down soles and blown out heels. I've had them for three months. Coffee is steaming in the window, leaving a small patch of condensation like when you lean into your window at wintertime. Warm down my throat, Caffeine hits blood, pores and capillaries and eyes shoot open, slightly tweaked now. Not sure how many cups it has been. This old school desk and rolling desk chair bring me comfort from some old world with old people that don't exist anymore, just memories and stories told by other people, and on and on and on and on. Another cycle.

Close my eyes. See small points of light shooting off into infinity inside me. Shooting stars that never land, never go anywhere, like I'm staring into the absence of space, floating there, too. I focus on one shooting star, its a bright yellow, like the yellow I saw in the rainbow earlier today, too bright to even be considered natural, some sort of magic that I don't get. Can't remember the last time I saw a rainbow, really looked at it, arching across 8 lanes of traffic, seemed so real, that somewhere really was a pot of gold and everything you want to believe in, just inside the woods somewhere. Maybe someday. Rainbow memory falls by the wayside, see the streaking yellow star behind closed eyelids, I ride its wake, following it, brain racing, no visions forming, eyes flickering slightly. Heart is beating from the coffee, or the thought of someone watching me, or from the idea of curling up next to someone, skin touching skin, their chest warm from blood circulating, the arms and hands slightly colder. The beauty of another person, their eyes dancing in the dull and quiet light of a bedside lamp. Small smiles peaking out, biting lip slightly, asking me, "what are you looking at?" when it is clearly them that I am looking at. And that's what I would say, and in this dream that follows a flying yellow star she still smiles, and she runs her hand down to my fingers, to those callouses that haven't been touched in years, to those callouses that lead to other callouses that you can't see, and her fingernails trace the veins on the top of my hand, the small bump where I broke it long ago, the scars from the flood, from knives, from countless other injuries. And she holds my hand and she breaks my heart in the best way possible. That is a dream that is a dream that is a dream. Cycles.

What if all of our scars, our nicks and scrapes and cuts and bruises and burns, all reversed themselves at once? All of those sutured holes and self repaired places decided to undo those years of being so healthy? What a mess that would be. Yet, we do that so often, and validate it, and make it sound like it is okay and it is healthy. Some things should be left sutured up, and some things should be let out. But what do I know? I am just some poor kid wearing his dad's oversized sweater staring out my window at night.

Or am I?