Down the way, there is a car trying to start as you stare up into a deep and hanging blue sky. I like to call this Blue Time. The time where the warming anxiety of the day grates against the velvet of the night as one last protest, making a Midwestern blue that bruises as it lays tenderly on your chest, making it just slightly hard to breathe
However, Do You Want Me / However, Do You Need Me: An essay on utopia through images in my camera roll by
in and
out
as the birds fly over for the last time in the day, toward a temporary home that is just as fragile as their bones.
The car’s engine never turns over (gets close) and you submit to the pressure of the blue. You still can’t breathe any easier though.
Seeking the pleasure of the pressure comes easy, like you were born into it or of it. I saw a T-shirt once that talked about how we were all made of the same material as stars, and I thought, Stars collapse like we do. Creating a black hole. A black hole was one of my fears growing up, a space of a violent nothing that you couldbe lost in for eternity, seeing a speck of a smoldering sun as you are yanked into another dimension.
this unknown can tear me from limb from limb as the sweet song of my grandfather’s off-key baritone creeps from the back pew of a dying church as he sits with his eyes closed. I can still feel the vibrations from his voice on the nape of my neck, a reminder that I am a sweet child of God and this is why the bees buzz around my syrupy heart.
“If it had not been for the Lord on my
side
Tell me
Where would I be?
somebody tell me
Where would I be?”
And there it was. (A nothing so dense, you could climb into it.) A scene of a beautiful nothing right before you as you flew through the sky. Hanging in the in-between, a bated breath anticipating something, anything that might cut through. What is in a horizon, and what lies just on the other side of graying enveloping clouds that cling to the body like a baptism gown. Dampness in the mouth as you pull the tongue to lick the gusts of wind from outside the plane window, imagining the aftertaste to be one of a dusty plum and metal.
