At the end of the tunnel, I was looking for a light. I traveled to the end as a sojourn of truth and found God spinning in his grave.
California is weird. Everywhere I look, I see muscles twitching in memory of something that lies buried and breathing beneath the lust. Here, there simply isn’t a season available that is conducive to unraveling your own mysteries in the dark. Who has time for introspection when the perpetual snapshot, even to the mind’s eye, shows a still image of a couple, in a bar, sitting on kitschy bar stools, watching a forty-six inch flatscreen showing a weather report of seventy-five and sunny?
It never is gone for too long, you know. As soon as the clouds descend, they part again to cast the ultraviolet bounty on a population that never even noticed. They are beyond expecting it.
In the northeast, there is more night to contend with. We get paler, we huddle closer.
I noticed the mornings less often back home, but when I did, it was a revelatory experience. If you’ve never been driving through the backroads of Woodbury in the late morning, after an April shower, away from the grey-snow grit of the Hartfords and the Elm Cities, then you’ll never understand why every single moment is a labyrinthine spiral.
And if you’ve been exposed to similar gardens, then you’d do well here. All you’d have to do is understand that you never really left your favorite slum, you just adjusted to the change in color palette from different shades of gray to different shades of tan. And the proof will strike you, hard and right at the moment when all hope seems lost.
