thispresentsojourn

It’s certainly a stretch to say that on Sunday, I felt Reality’s braided, leather whip slashing relentlessly at my back and sides. Even so, it’s quite odd the things required at times to be reawakened to the progression [ahem, fluidity] of Time, which is not coincidentally a theme of thispresentsojourn [the name itself even assumes a time and place!]. This reawakening began when I’d stepped outside for a small while to borrow from the newly-70º-temperature. Pacing the front lawn, my thoughts swept towards the approach of May, which is [the name for the time period] when I will resume life outside of Ellsworth’s charming, mint-green walls.

At the very onset of these thoughts, one could hear hissing and the gnashing of teeth, and Ellsworth, whose demeanor is characteristically calm and gentle, pulsed with a fiery, jealous wrath. You see, I had for the first time on Sunday morning toured areas of Dallas apart from faithful Wilshire Heights looking for a place to live at my lease’s end, and it wasn’t until I had begun this task that I [existentially] knew the weight of my investment in the house as place. Searching for a new building which might take on the cautious title home was no longer of the Abstract. And for the first time [in regards to Ellsworth, at least] I felt the overwhelming threat that results from staring Loss plain in its face.

For the majority of Winter, my roommate Austin and I had been making retreats to the backyard together mostly because it gave us an excuse to wear large coats, to smoke tobacco products, and to make-believe we were wise beyond our years. On some nights, even four jackets wasn’t warm enough, but Austin rightly and continually remind me how much “we’re going to wish for this in June.” Generally a nod or two might follow a statement like this, and, trenchoat over trenchcoat, we’d stand together with a Ravenswood Cab in one hand and a Djarum in the other, quite satisfied that of all our Worry, the hairs standing straight on our arms occupied the greatest portion.

On Saturday, a golden warmth was poured about this prairie we call our backyard. Austin thought that the rise in temperature occasioned a proper celebration, and I agreed. With as few words as it took, we donned tanktops, made selections from the bookshelves, and spread a quilt among the dormant grass blades.

He allotted some space near the ferned fence bordering our alleyway with his quilt, and, for concentration’s sake, I assumed some distance from him in the lawnchairs near our back steps. And I began: “A few miles south of Soledad, the Salinas River drops in close to the hillside bank and runs deep and green…“

I had made it through a no more than a chapter by the time Austin began his complaints about the gelid current which had begun moving briskly among the shade. I tried to convince him that if he’d just move near me among the circle of lawnchairs, the Sun would paint a pleasant warmth upon his shoulders. “Hey, you’ll probably even get a tan,” I said, manipulatively. For some reason likely unassociated with my rhetoric, he eventually moved to the blue lawnchair across from me, and immediately after he’d sat down I heard the familiar sound, “NEW MESSAGE” from his cellphone, which holds his attention for the majority of each day and looses it quite infrequently. Knowing well to expect no further conversation once he’d flipped open his Sidekick, I looked in Stanley‘s direction and sank to a slouch.

I sat for many nights this past summer on the phone with a girl on the East Coast I’d never met, imagining myself in scenes i’d never seen. During these conversations, I’d my back propped upon the place Stanley’s trunk becomes root – a curved area far too amenable to my scoliosis-like posture to neglect. I’d sit for hours and talk about what is but mean “what if,” all the while staring up through the sky-reaching branches of Stanley and his counterparts. And although I’d never climbed to the high reaches of the tree, I won’t deny that I have, on many occasions, peered out from the kitchen window while washing dishes to wonder what it might be like to sit high among its woody complexity, careening from branch to branch, drenched in the same adrenaline to which I was so addicted as a child.

I’d especially given it thought after Winter’d begun, as I became quite self-inquisitive about this past Summer or, the experiences therein. I wondered why I’d never climbed Stanley, when even our neighbor’s twelve-foot fence provided such easy access. Winter was not the time, for he’d become weak from his reduced exposure and proximity to the Summer Sun. “I’ll wait until Spring,” I said, always planning a silly little something.

Then, as suddenly as it happened, an apocalyptic sensitivity hijacked my rationale, and I found myself scaling the neighbor’s brand new cedar fence, moving quickly and directly to the center of Stanley’s barren womb. Once I’d made it to a branch that was duly sturdy and steep, I looked out across the vast entirety of the neighborhood, and from here, I breathed in deep the near-year’s worth of stability and consistency Ellsworth Avenue has imputed me.

As my eyes twitched among the houses at Ellsworth’s perimeter, I thought about the family across the way whose father spends his early evenings skateboarding, about the widow whose five dogs fulfill her every need for loyalty, and at the hardworking old brute who leaves his house at 8:29 and returns at 5:31, every single day, without a hitch. And in these thoughts, which are themselves a compression of reality, and these very words a compression of those very thoughts [Raines, et. al.], I was led quickly through the events which span [read: compose] the past year of life. And I breathed deep in the comfort that, though my time with Ellsworth was coming to a close, this time of my life was not. It was coming with me.