Lcooper
You come to visit me—almost without fail—on Boston’s gritty sidewalks. This is all I want and so I smile, pressing my face against the sun. Last Saturday my glow knocked heads with January sunlight and the steep snow glare. In this shower of winter light, I hardly noticed how often I turned to look over my shoulder. Instinctively peeking. Peeking for peekers—someone behind me walking impossibly close.
“It’s so strange,” I thought to myself last night as I glanced repeatedly over my left shoulder. I would expect this to be more of a haunting nighttime hunch. Menacing, terrifying even. How at peace I am with this enduring sense that someone is at my heels. It is not that I am ” being followed”. That phrase is misleading. It makes me think of shadows sneaking around street corners and this, to me, assumes distance—distance between object and subject. Trailing just inches from my neck, skipping in sync with my steps, my shepherd—my shoulder-post shepherd—is anything but distant.
“I should be sacred,” I think to myself. “Right?” But this “shoulda” business—is this dis-ease by way of guilt-driven obligation? Am I obliged to fear? Am I to affirm fear for sake of fear itself? This I refused to do. I am suspicious of unfounded self-doubt and panic and so I turn to the Flashbulb for a renewed fullness. That dancing melodic current, it nearly carries me rest of the way home. And I remember that this is where I found you last week, parading across the river hand-in-hand with those poetic melodies. Though I could feel you beside me, I was jealous of the music. I wanted to hold your hand, dancing down the sidewalk the way we used to.
But you make a good case.
And I am convinced.
Heart-to-shoulder: its the new hand-in-hand.
****
Tonight I cut stew vegetables and steep in a clarity revealed moment by moment. Those looking in at you and I—the outsiders’ eyes. Their stares. Their thoughts.
In a word: Irrelevant.
In two words: Absurdly Irrelevant
