roamingaround

It slips into my head as a thin, dull note, or a line drawn across my forehead. The sound is gray, I look at the water, the land as it arrives, or as I do, also gray, the trick of moving land, sliding past in a textured strip, though in my mind I recognize the lie. I am moving, or being moved. Turning focus to the window, painted with rain and dirt, the texture of the grass is gone. My skull, a projection booth, falls victim to this pull, capable of only one choice, one depth of field, until the lens fails completely.

My eyes spare me. The truth would look like nothing at all. It would bore me, or I convince myself that it must be so. The projectionist has learned to ignore these films, to glance every few seconds as reflex, to make sure they have not caught fire or gotten trapped in the gears. The audience must be somewhere in my ribcage, perhaps seated on the tiers of bone, kicking their legs when the tension builds. It has always felt like thousands of legs, so it must also be so. They watch the land slip past, and are fascinated. They are trembling, racked with information and memory. The trees are yellow and dead. Houses.

I would stretch my hands out if I could, grip the leaves and the concrete. I would fall asleep in the parking lots, lying on my back and looking up into the gray. I long for the places to which I have not yet been carried, to the places I've been torn from, gazing through my little window: from my cinema, where I am able to feel everything, and touch nothing.