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two weeks away from home

At 5:20 am I sit on a velvet sofa of the Windsor Hotel. A fan blows within the ice machine, then a grinding sound proceeds the collapse of a machined serac into a metal bin. There are no windows in this common room, the many doors lead to the chambers of dreaming strangers. I wake this early, hours before my coworkers, I think because morning stuns me. There comes a point when my eyes jerk open and I am overwhelmed by the fact that the day will bring what is new. I stare upward, then blink hard shut my eyes, until the soft envelope of bed feels unbearable.

All creation did not aim me for this place. Yet it was preceded necessarily by all of creation. I don’t believe in a DNA of the atom, spiraled through the uncommitted, turning towards an ultimate product. I believe only that life wants to live but that’s not something to be known. We all labor under contract to the same miracle; tribute is paid in the feeling of home, the feeling of distance, in the unexamined moment.

As a self-conscious person I endanger my relationships by doubting my own meanings. Alarm dissolves the audience, a soul-felt repulsion, a violation of the agreement. I am here, now, to work fourteen 12s, to drag out of the burn at the end of every day black with soot because I don’t want to wonder so much. Of course question everything. But be tired by this world, teach yourself it is bigger than you.

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