Yes your hair smells like sunshine today / Gasoline horses will take us away
“Gasoline Horseys” by Sparklehorse
I accidentally skipped October. I’d been counting the months since, even re-counted twice, and I feel guilty about that. It wasn’t seven, it was eight gone. And all day I’d thought: Wow, seven months.
It was an anniversary day and I was home alone.
I drove up and down the little mountain road to the antique store. I wanted something to do and I knew the grocery store up the street would be too busy because everyone was coming back to town.
I’d wanted something to do and I didn’t want it to take too long and it was a nice drive over. Horses and dogs and donkeys and sheep. A bamboo thicket in the thinned out woods. It looked like I passed the same car twice. A couple good songs on the radio. Cathedrals and spires of opaque white-ice drip on the rock faces along the roadside making rivulets in the ditch.
I looked around the store for one thing and didn’t find it so I left. There was nothing, I knew, that made me think that they would’ve had it. It wasn’t that I’d seen it there before, decided not to get it, then regretted it. I just thought there was a chance that they’d have a Rio Bravo movie poster, maybe even one with Dude—Dean—classically with his hat over his face napping before the song. One of the consignment stalls always had old posters and memorabilia.
Leaving the antique store without buying anything makes me feel like they think I stole something. I worry about that when I walk out.
Back at home, after undoing the drive, I felt like I shouldn’t have done that and that I just wasted my afternoon. Empty handed. Recently, wasting time makes me depressed and everything feels like wasting time.
I wanted something to make it feel worth it and I didn’t find anything that did.
I stood at the broken window in what would’ve been—and is, because we still call it this, unless I slip and say “your office”—the nursery and I watched three flickers take flight from the brittle, winter-bleached grass. Then a guy across the street was trying to stick a wire-stand sign into the frozen ground. I thought, And you’re going to trust him to repair your foundation?
I went into the bathroom to run hot water. I saw the mirror needed to be cleaned. It steamed up around the caliche spatter of toothpaste.
I should have gone to the grocery store instead. It’s because I like orange juice a lot right now and needed to buy milk too. Instant coffee years at this point and I can’t go back. I save so much time.
I watched a little baby gray-colored spider crawling down the baby blue bathroom wall.
I turned off the sink. I thought, I want people to ask me if I have kids so I can say yes and start to tell them. I want them to feel bad for me and give me attention and pity and I know when I say, “Yes, but…,” and they interrupt and ask how old, I don’t know how to answer.
…
Read the rest @ Soft Union
Thank you, Lamb.