My Life is a Beautiful Painting : The Last Two Weeks

I am alone, speeding along some Middle California freeway in an older woman's car. Nobody who knows me knows where I am and this realization give me the giggles. Soon my head is thrown back and laughing. Alone in the hot and the flat and the brown.

I am on my back and staring at a hotel ceiling. Subsisting on cold chinese food and brew packet coffee, the shades drawn. Did I walk away from all of my promise years ago? The moment I picked up a hammer? The moment I stopped writing letters to girls? Or hitchhiking? Will I become my father, with twelve stories about my youth, a short two-year window of glimmering light and then nothingness? The tooth brushing routine and tea and pint night and shoes stuffed with newspaper?

I am eighteen miles from where I started and still running East, maybe six ounces of water jostling in the bottles around my waist, one pack of Fruit Snacks left in the pouch. With the flowing of the road I crank out six-minute miles back to back to back, it feels almost effortless, like the running falls out of my legs. Soon I am standing at the edge of a roadside gas station, wishing I had a dollar for the vending machine, then moving on..

Something simmering on every kitchen burner, the smoke alarm blaring, sweat pouring from my wrists onto the Fitness Room exercise bike. I bump my shoulders against another man's in a tight-packed corner bench in a bar, shout loudly at a girl walking by, pour another beer. I pick through bunches of grapes at a Farmer's Market, dump freshly chopped cilantro into an open and waiting blender. Things are in front of me as promise and expectation and then almost instantly they become this collage of the past. She is holding her arms behind her back, the sheen of the black shirt showing me everything about body and stomach. I lean closely into her, then decide it's maybe better not to; later, I clutch my own hair and make a scene on a curb as she grinds her cigarette butt out with a thin shoe, her eyes dead as a plank of wood and sick of me.

I am fingers drumming wildly beneath the table, at once a ball of energy looking to make the entire world mine, then quickly a crying and bewildered animal. Obsessed with the lottery, with cards, with mental illness or injury settlements. With the letters of writers, with their turmoil and explosion. With foreclosure listings and brick workout scheduling, the ratio of carbs to protein in my after-workout drink.  I am dipping a spoonful of honey into a glass of soymilk and slurping it again and again. Anything to take away the pressure of having to do it, of having to take what I've said and actually put it into action.

My hand cuts smooth, clean shadows into the sand. The forest in the morning, the beach in the afternoon, rolling together on the carpeted floor, tummies full of food, as the sun goes down. If you work out hard enough during the day, the night seems perfect. I am quiet and content and warm and laughing with her.

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