There are millions of conversations you can have. With yourself. I have the same conversation, mapped out in questions, exclamations and forgotten bits. It’s an argument. While I’m the defense and the prosecution, I’m also the jury, the judge and the bailiff. Everything, and nothing. It’s a pointless discussion. Taming the lions that erupt in the catacombs of salt inside my brain. Collisions. Dreams. Emotional wreckage shifted into victorious laps with arms raised.
I saw a guy acting out a scene, or what I thought was a scene from a movie I liked, yelling at traffic from a bridge. It’s a storm, he screamed, unmoved by my approach, gesticulating as if his arms were attached to unseen wires, as if at any moment I’d spy the crane camera recording his dismay. The traffic flooded all senses. I felt the warm drizzle as it began to wet the concrete and asphalt and metal and plastic. This is our storm, he told the weather and the traffic and me. It’s ours. But it wasn’t his because that guy was lost in a vacuous cavern, collapsing like a deformed lung.
by Hank Cherry
