Tag: meta

excerpt from “The Balance”

She flicked the corner of the bright yellow metro card against her thigh.

Click.

Click.

The sound assured her that the card was still there in her palm, as real and tangible as the battered Retro 1’s on her feet and the overstuffed backpack slung across her uneven shoulders.

As long as the card was in her hand then she knew it was real. And if the card was real, then her plans were as well. It was her favorite type of proof — a syllogism; simple but impenetrable. She’d always found comfort in logic. It was her business, after all.

An LED screen spanned the entirety of one of the bus stop walls, cycling through an endless loop of advertisements that framed her face like a digital stage light. The red hues of a bourbon promo synthesized the illusion of blush in her pale complexion. Seize life by the glass with Buckshot Bourbon.

The boozy ad faded into a black screen that hung there for a brief, quiet moment; an electronic exhale that she wished she could stretch until her bus arrived to spirit her away.

The public safety warning that followed the whiskey ad cast a pale white halo over her silhouette. Be mindful of your surroundings, the sign warned her in bold white text against a black slab backdrop. If you see something, say something.

Like a tick, she subconsciously complied, glancing up from her MetroCard and lazily scanning her surroundings. She let her eyes come to rest on nothing in particular until the sensory barrage of Delancey street slipped out of focus, regressing into its most elemental forms: shapes, colors — blurs of movement smearing across her plane of vision. She felt safe and detached as the world recessed away from her and she submerged deeper into her own subconscious, playing the different scenarios of what she had to next in her head.

The pulse of a subwoofer thumped her chest as a black SUV passed by and her mind was dragged reluctantly back into the present.

— Jesus, I’m fucking tired, she said outloud to no one in particular but still wondered if anyone’d heard.

Andromeda

It doesn’t scare me to read that the world is ending
It will not be my children
Or my children’s children’s children
That will see the collapse

2.5 million light years away,
Andromeda, you are the closest galaxy to my own
I’m the Milky Way,
And though we can’t feel it,
But I swear I can,
There is a pull between us and
In 4 billion years
We will collide

We have collided before
In the beginning
When all of matter was thrust together in
Beautiful chaos
And our elements slow danced 
Before the great fission,
The concussive Bang,
And we scattered

Now we are not one body
But two

I’m not afraid of the imminent collision,
Though they say it will be the end of ends
Of our world
Because it comforts me
To know that across these soundless
Black distances
We reach out with unseen fingers
And though they don’t interlock,
My fingertips hover beside your own
And I smile to think that
Though we move
As independent bodies in space,
There are unseen contours
In the fabric of space itself
That tug on our bodies
And pull them together

I don’t fear the collision,
The merging of galaxies
Because I can feel the heat of your distant stars
And they give me warmth
In this cold darkness
And I wait eagerly
And patiently
For the day that our hovering fingers
Collide again