Last week i talked about flags flying at half-mast, and i meant to also talk about how half-mast flags always remind me of that ‘waiting for the other shoe to drop’ aphorism (aphorism, right? Isn’t that what it’s called?) but i got distracted by talking about lecherous principals and embarrassing angsty fiction written by teenagers. As one does.
But watching our flags trussed mid length up those poles always make me start thinking about the inevitable day when those same flags fall, and are never raised again. Waiting for the other flag to fall. Or something.
i took a walk with M yesterday along the river that marks the border between our town and the neighboring one, the one with the university and the university bars and the university apartments filled nine months out of the year with university students, all crammed together like they’re in some wealthy, endowment-funded womb.
And there are trails along the dirty river, and they pass through dense dark woods, and the trees’ canopy ensures that density and darkness remains near constant. And the woods stark difference makes both towns — ours and the university one — feel indistinguishable. And there are people who live in these woods.
They occupy their space like the deer and the rabbits, removing themselves to the margins whenever people like M and me walk hand-in-hand through their living room. You pass by their sleeping bags just off the trail, and you pass by their plastic bags filled with clothes and trash and bottles and food. And when you spot them living their lives in the margins of the margin, waiting for you to pass by so they can continue living. and it is sad because we know - we all know - that it’s doesn’t have to be this way ,
but it will remain this way until the flags fall and the shoes drop.
And Sometimes, when you make eye contact with the margins’ residents, that eye contact doesn’t count for shit. You might as well be looking at marbles instead of eyes, because you don’t let yourself feel a goddamn thing because that would be hard and you don’t want hard, you want a nice walk after your nice dinner.
But most of the time, when you do meet their eyes, you say the most pregnant “Hi” or “How you doing” possible —
“Hi, we both know the humiliation and the shame of this. Felt in different capacities by both sets of eyes. And yet what the fuck are we going to do about it now? Enjoy your walk.”
Or. “How you doing? Rhetorical question. Societal nicety, made ironic by the interaction because, again, we both know why we are in these woods at this moment. Society made this all possible.”
And then you continue along your unfair trajectories, carried by momentums beyond our understandings.
And one of us goes on to write this, and the other probably doesn’t think like i’m describing them at all. If anything, they’d think my little written detour
obscured by a canopy of words and littered with unnecessary descriptive trash
they’d think it’s obscene and masturbatory, and nothing more. Get over yourself. Get over me. Have a nice walk in the woods, and maybe one day when we all leave the forest bordering the filthy river we’ll find those flags fallen
, and the shoes littering the indistinguishable town sidewalks.
(((EC)))