High on New Years (Listening to: 1940, The Submarines)

The pieces of my life are losing their shapes. The places I’ve known have switched their limbs behind my back, mismatched signs on the wrong buildings. Used furniture stores with sale signs in the windows have become ice cream parlors and I can’t quite catch my breath. Street signs are stuck into the wrong corners so that Madison Street and Rainier Avenue have traded places. A weird déjà vu and I feel so full and brimming and dislocated. Gaping windshield like a hungry mouth in this car is a window to a rusty sky and cars that fly like knitting needles towards me and away. Patterns, patterns I cannot catch a hold of. Music is a soup, a delicious sloshing liquid that runs in and out of my mouth like the tides. Tasting it, seeing its hazy clouds drift in and out. The melodies melt into each other until I am bathing in this aquarium of sound. Snatches of conversation I do not understand and a thick foggy warmth. Every now and then, my name. Words that are not my name but are myself. I think in code, and the currents in the air strip into deciphered letters falling around me like leaves. I am so breathless. The people I’ve known all fading into one another, until all I see is one strange and rippling face. And all at once the music becomes one song, the places become one place, and the people one face. It is beautiful and very, very sad. Terrible, beautiful echoes. The three fade into each other, melt and swell and I see one big, so very infinitely big, one picture of today, now, this instant, forever and everything that came before. All melted together in this car, before me and the orange sky and hard blinking lights. My big sad eyes they say look like they are just about to cry. I don’t understand it. They touch me, ask if it is beautiful. Face, face, people I’ve known, that doesn’t begin to describe it.