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Sat | July 08, 2006

The Last Day

I'm on the train ride home, away from the West Village where the sidewalks are smeared with dog shit and flies spring up off the ground at your feet. The train is moving in the direction of the setting sun. It's too bright and so I close my eyes... and see a luminous reddish orange. It changes to watermelon and then to an orange yellow. I start to think it's peach. Real peach, not Crayola peach, not that dull beigey color. Peach to yellow-orange to red watermelon and back, one color morphs into another. Dark objects pass but I don't open my eyes to see what they may be. I hold them closed so that I can follow this image that has neither depth, nor flatness.

Is it even an image? It's smears of light seen through my eyelids. Vision isn't dependent on open eyes. In fact it can be induced mechanically by closing one's eyes and pushing on the side. This creates a spot or a ring of light.

I'm at home and sitting at my computer on a Saturday night. Being at home on Saturday is no fun but being awake at night is good. Everything else is dark and there is just the black desk lamp and the screen. Joshua is online. Neither of us has anything to do and yet we're not going to do anything together. Such is the unfortunate nature of so many relationships with IM buddies and ex-boyfriends.

He IM's me.

NomadNick (7:32:58 PM): hey u

It's a step up from

NomadNick (9:34:37 PM): hi

which was a step up from no IM's at all.

We chat. I consider taking him out of the "selfish unfair jerk" category, of which he is the only member. I decide to keep him there. A little while longer, just to be safe, I think.

I'm glad about the "hey u." But not glad about most everything else. When I go to bed I realize that for a few nights I haven't imagined him next to me. The feeling of our touching skin, that I had held in my mind, that had stayed like an after image, was gone. That lingering pulse of light had drifted across the blackness and faded into perished memory.

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