rabbit

[butterflydreaming]

I woke up and thought, This is not happening. I had been out of bed, showered and dressed, for several hours. But I had just woken up. Now, in the middle of eating breakfast over the sink, washing back a bite of day-old Alki Bakery cinnamon roll with a swig of locally-roasted, Fair Trade coffee. This is not my life.

I had done it once. It was more than easy to do it again. A phone call and a credit card. Clothes that I could live in for a few days, my wallet in my pocket, anything that mattered enough to take in a small carry-on sized bag. House keys, car keys... I didn't need them anymore.

It was a walk of two blocks to catch the express bus that would take me to SeaTac airport with enough time to pick up my electronic ticket and get on the plane. My e ticket, nevermind that I wasn't going to Disneyland, even if I'd be in the neighborhood. E tickets are things of the past, and that's where I was going.

The color of the sky changed during the flight, shifting from that deep, intense azure to the paler blue of worn demin, grayed out by the haze over the San Fernando Valley. By the time that we began to decend, it was the only color of sky that I could remember. The way you forget the details of a dream, I had forgotten the blue of a rain-washed sky. In my head was the sound of engines, but snippets of songs sifted upward.

...I haven't seen the sun in seven years...

The noise of LAX was a fog, as thick as a membrane. I moved through the crowds with unbelievable ease. The airport sprawls, and I hadn't been on it's scuffed floors in as many years as a cat has lives, but I knew my way. I walked down the long corridors, down escalators, toward the baggage claim, but I didn't have to stop at the serpentine, coiling carousels. The tinted glass of the sliding doors cast back my reflection like an enormous mirror; I walked through to the outside.

Mirage waves of heat floated upward from the pavement and mixed into the air that I couldn't feel myself walking through. I passed the taxis, leaving the shadow of the concrete building, walking out into the sunshine. The sun was a gentler light than I had seen it in years; the air had less weight, the sky was higher and paler. None of the pigeons picking through the garbage cans had frostbitten, missing toes, and they competed with little brown sparrows, not vocal black crows. I found the bus stop where I knew it would be. It was the kind of thing only a local would know, and only a local who had been strangely without a car for years. I waited for the blue painted bus, older than its MTA counterparts, stepped on and paid my fair in coin. The quarters clattered as they spun downward.

...but run is what I did, when put to the test.

And then as the bus dropped from freeway speed to street speed, my mental radio changed from the Cowboy Junkies to Weezer. down on Santa Monica where trick are for Kids...

But that wasn't right. That song... was too recent. Silly Rabbit. Weezer was "Sweater Song".

watch me unravel...

The driver cast me a strange expression when, stepping off, I wished him a good day and said "thank you". Something for me to remember. No, to forget. We don't do that in L.A. .

And then I was on the sand, and all thoughts disappeared. My feet were burned from the brief run across the beach but I didn't notice until the waves touched them, taking away the heat. The roar of the vastness that was before me rolled over then, and I could only think that there were nine years left somewhere, and that I wanted them back.

Rabbit
where'd you put them
put them things?