playing catch up
The nutty smell of cigarettes left dancing on my fingertips for hours is oddly comforting. I step down the concrete steps of the post office, it’s dark and there’s a chill in the air. Fallen leaves scatter on the sidewalk, littering the curb and the roadway, sweet autumn smells rising upwards. Light spills from the old familiar signs, darkness pools along the way, and I am satisfied. The sound of my footsteps on the concrete, the leaves rustling, odd snippets of one-sided conversations, curious as to why the lack of a flag pin on someone’s lapel could possibly invoke so much irritation. To the parking lot, days ago it was abuzz with excitement, Election day.
Earlier, the beach was deserted. That’s how it is this time of year; gone are the bright umbrellas and beach towels, gone is that man that really shouldn’t be wearing a European style bathing suit, really now, gone are the mothers and children and teenagers. Today someone is solitarily sleeping to the east, curled up near the dunes, jacket over the head. For a brief moment I’m tempted to do the same, but I walk on. I’m the only other one there. At the shore the waves break, gently, it’s the south side after all, seaweed and shells wash up with each small swell. A piece of driftwood loaded with long green tendrils, a faded, torn aluminum can. I scan the coast for beach glass before I remember it doesn’t wash up here anymore. Years and years ago, along a similar beach just a few miles down the coast, she walked into those waves, and never came back.
To live a life based on sensory perception, on innate instinct, somehow i need to sate myself, but this isn’t the way. Life, or the life that’s been created, is far too complicated to bother with the needs that boil up from the soul. But in squelching those needs, we are crushing ourselves, crumpling our souls up like yesterday’s newspaper, and letting them sit in silence and darkness at the bottom of a trashcan.
