Sunday, March 18, 2012

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Sometimes, there are unexpected triggers, and people can come and go through the brain...like when I saw a painting, A Bigger Splash, when I was younger. I thought of a young man. Did he see a print of that painting or something? That young man does not walk the earth now but it seemed as though I could see all kinds of things through his eyes. Pruning a tree. Girls that he liked or that liked him. Running away from home. Crawling into a train car and reading a book and falling asleep on a train. Woke up, and the train was moving. That's just a small portion of those things. "So, I heard that you talk to the dead," a stranger said. Sometimes, I thought this was a good poem for him. To An Athlete Dying Young. And when I was younger and visiting another country, taking a short cut walking down a back alley at night (ah! foolish 19 year old), and there was a soldier coming down the alley with an enormous weapon slung over his soldier, and the light fizzled out at the precise worst moment, that young man was who I made myself be. I was him. The soldier turned his head and gave me a very intense, long look and we passed by one another and I left the alley and went back to my hotel. "Senorita!" the concierge exclaimed in concern, and said other things in Spanish I didn't understand. "It's okay. I'm okay," I said to him.

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