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By chris Date: 2006 Mar 04 Comment on this Work [[2006.03.04.15.27.742]] |
| I think she loves me. I do. I want to believe in all that sappy shit. Really. I just need to sit outside before sleep, out under the bright Texas stars, and listen to the swamp sounds and watch the small planes circle over the nearby airstrip. I need to breathe deep in the humid air, feel the cool concrete beneath my bare feet, and just watch... For a while. Tiny dots of light far above the lobolly pines grow larger. Some of these planes are coming in to land, into the wind that blows balmy and steady off the Gulf, and I hear as they buzz alarmingly low over the house. Some have just taken off, and I wonder where they're headed. Dallas? San Antonio? Midland? I need to be up there with that solitary pilot - too tired to talk and too bothered by something to stop thinking - as they contemplate the black space of this state from several thousand feet. I need to be up there with them as they traverse the distance from these bayous and sticky, godforsaken sloughs to places that are high and dry and infected with a different kind of loneliness. Do they notice how the pines and live oaks and prairies turn into limestone hills studded with cedar, then near-barren flats of mesquite and cactus and agave, then seemingly nothing? Where there is nothing, there is nothing to cause you pain. No danger of the real being indistinguishable from the unreal. But there's always danger here. Danger follows the living. And we are still living, still here, somewhere near the middle of this life. Life is pain, say the Buddhists. They're right (about some things). And then there's art. All art is autobiography. All art is fiction. |