A man in blue
pulled up
beside me
He showed me his badge
It gleamed in the sunlight
I congratulted him
I used to be afraid to die, but then I realized that once you’re dead you don’t care anymore.
The argument was grotesque. My mom and I fed off of each others angst. Regurgitating it as we screamed and then slurping it back up of the ground as we listened. Eventually we grew weary of fighting. Our heads throbbed and our thoughts were clouded by the black smut of recrimination. Not much had changed. Only now the floor between us was covered by a thin layer of vomit green hate. A layer that would soon be built upon. Constructing a wall of lies, disappointments and lost ideals, that no reasonable advice or guidance could pass through. Later on I went to check on my mom, to see how she had made out without me. But without any help the wall was much too high to scale. All that I could do was bathe in the salty tears that seeped underneath the wall, and comfort my mom with tears of my own.
And there I was, smoking hash in the cosmic night, under the bright, starlit sky. A celestial sphere that stretched across thousands of miles. Over the heads of B movie stars in Los Angeles, the helmets of high school quarterbacks in Kansas, and the comb-overs of nine to five “better start putting away for retirement” guys in New Jersey. We were all living under the same heavens, joined together by a common mediocrity.
