Hail Morning After
Hail. It's hailing. Hailing and cloudy cold outside. I find it hard not to say to myself that Mother Nature's downtrodding feelings mirror my own. An emotionally syncronous weather system it seems to be here in Paris. My morning. What mourning.
The clock's at nearly noon when I finally pull myself up by the frigid bootstraps. A cold's coming through the windows, both open. It's a temperature that compliments an empty feeling inside almost perfectly. "Everything's going to be far away today," I say to myself in a whisper.
"What's that?" Lili's already fussying about.
I shoot back. "None of you're business, Lili."
"Whoa... Easy there Casa Nova. I think we all had a little too much rage face last night. What do you want for breakfast."
I look at the clock through squinted eyes, then back at her. "You mean lunch? It's too late for breakfast."
"It's never too late for breakfast, stupid. I'm making eggs," she says pulling butter from the fridge. She's got the good stuff. "Get up here and put the kettle on."
I comply, and I swallow down the hard lump in my throat with a deep breath and a long exhale as I rise. My eyes don't want to be here. They shift and shudder and take note of everything in between. Anything that could possibly bring some fulfillment, some ease in the pressure, like a diving to the depths in an upside down fish-tank. That's the feeling of it.
Montparnasse in the Window
There's something about going through a night of being taken with no way out that makes you pine and implode and reach with the heart's arm out to the one you've loved the most. Today is no different. There's a giant cavern in my chest where any type of feeling should harbor itself, but the cavern is empty. We've just scrounged up a rag-tag half-assed dinner, Lili and I, and she's excited like she gets when there's some great new intrigue in her life. The kind that locks all the dreaded thoughts in the trunk for the ride. But with one look she's recognized something she sees in me, I think, because when she goes for her cigarettes she stares at me for two seconds and says, "D'you want one?" And her voice tip-toes over broken glass.
"Sure, why not?" I look her right back, but not with my usual facade. It's a quick glance. I don't feel like faking anything right now so I guess I'd look a bit curious to a stranger. Blank expression. Faraway eyes with faraway focus. Lili knows me through, and her brow furrows and her lip quivers almost to quick to catch, but I catch it and hold onto the fact that she just might have some inkling of what it feels like.
I take my Lucky Strike to my mouth, light it quick, and lean hard out the window with my head as far into the cold evening air as it will go. Damned servant's quarters. The new Spoon album is on. The good song, Goodnight Laura. Invalides is right there where it's always been all bathed in gold spotlight. I don't usually see it, but with my head this far out and away, Montparnasse comes into view to the right, off in the distance. I only see it at this hour because it's not totally dark and abandoned. There's still lights on scattered sparsely through the fifty or so floors. Like a black-and-white game of tetris on pause, it is, little squares and rectangles of frozen cold light suspended in the dark night. There's no stars in the sky, and when I squint at it and close my eyes I imagine that sore thumb of a building is like any other in downtown Boston.
I wonder if she works late nights...
Like this one.
[stop]
