👾🐾 | 
stale air, always staler, the only thing keeping these fibers from aging to crumbling, well that and a worn, salt-encrusted cork plugging the mouth of this cloudy glass world that bobs among ceaseless blue, split in two as one that moves against the other. the ink inside these rolls seems damned to irrelevancy if ever dry land is even reached.
is this what a hermit crab feels like, between shells? Having finally clawed out of a shell that, while once home, had become a tightening and crushing trap, the crab is both free and exposed. Stiff and creaky and fumbling and not at all adjusted to the wind bare against its whole body, it stumbles, and skitters, and then scrambles over stretches off sand and sea-worn rocks. There is another shell out there, and the last shell was certainly it's own end, but the beach is suddenly a sprawling, sun-glared place.
Thunder hasnt stopped rolling since the storm passed, unbroken by lightning in bolts or even distant flashes, it echoes against half a bright blue sky as the grey keeps moving south. Been dry nearly half an hour and the storm keeps moving away, yet the rumble seems here to stay, persistently and even peaking louder than you thought the loudest could be even ten minutes ago, still it rolls.
along these walls i'll build shelves, and on those shelves i'll stack jars; dirty and musty jars, scuffed but not cracked, with screwtop lids that are rusty but still thread tight and i can drain the sloshing sewage into those jars until i am both hollow and empty again, surrounded instead.
But i can leave a room with walls, and shelves, and jars.
a postcard pretty,
almost annoyingly so,
beach in southern California
roughhousing in waves
until i lose my shades
no one else is really bothered
and i shouldn't be either, but i am
and i pretend to still be having fun
but the laughs kind of feel
-they aren't but i can't tell me that-
like they are at my expense
but as i turn into the next wave
to hide the distress on my face
small plastic brushes my shoulder
and i reach, splash, grasp and clutch
a pair of sunglasses
that couldn't be, not possibly,
but absolutely are the ones i had lost
my laugh is genuine and raucous
the tide, envious of my noise, knocks me down
as i rush back into the group
all what the fuck and happy
the back slaps and laughs are for
not at
me and i know for the briefest second
that i will be flashing back here for years
dé·jà vu
/ˌdāZHä ˈvo͞o/
noun
a feeling of having already experienced the present situation.
except it isn't that; it isn't that simple, or straightforward, and if it was only that it wouldn't be the experience we know it to be. Routine and repetition creep through life in countless ways, noticed and missed, and we are not living in the waxing and waning of déjà vu; it is a unique experience, an oddity even among the familiarly familiar, and it is the familiarity itself that puts the feeling out of place.
Because it isn't just "i've experienced this before," but rather "i've experienced this before but i shouldn't be here again, or shouldn't be familiar yet". it is recognition stripped of context because the context you can define is at odds with that recognition; you have been here before, or maybe it is a memory out of time colliding with it's arrival from the wrong end.
follow it the wrong way and you will yourself fall out of time, slipped from grip on the past in a continuous path and unable to move or see a future yet to be when every other moment creeps with warning and eerie repeat.
do you ever get hit with a memory you had forgotten for years, but with it's unexpected return comes also the recall of the many times you remembered that memory long ago before losing it in the fog. it isn't just a flash of the past out of nowhere, but a blur of context that bleeds from it's moment forward just lost along the way.
sitting, alone, in the shade of a very large tree, with my back against a smaller tree, i watched a playground full of my classmates play in a near perfect binary breakage of activities and feeling perfectly out of place and longing to fit in a way that i didn't understand and stopped wondering if it existed within a few years.
Just weird, i guess.
i keep hearing music, not particularly good music nor very discernible under whatever foreground noise it plays behind; only playing then, when it can get lost or hide in the crowded sounds of water droplets hitting my face and the nearby plastic curtain. it's not as if, bare naked, i can go pursue the sound and, as expected, the music drifts off into an outro i can't hear before the water is shut off.
i heard it the other morning, just after waking, with my own pulse like the ocean in my ears and the static of time-ignorant 'mares pounding in my head. Someone had started some lawn care equipment outside the open window before my opened eyes and as the clanging rumble made itself clear, there behind it was the music just shy of my grasp.
if i had to guess, it feels like it would be a sad and tired song but it also feels like there is more - what i can't know or understand of either and what might change neither, yet would change something - lurking in all the notes i can't pick out.
now, all i hear is the intermittent but unrelenting whoosh of cars passing on nearby roads, echoing to my ears between mostly dark houses.
the trick, if it were, to predicting the future is you don't get to pick what or when slips into view and you'll never want it to be true. The fates mocked the ancient greeks on the latter, revealing that which was most feared or loathed and letting them build each their own path, if not the destination itself, to that dreaded doom. it is always so to those weighted evermore by the past and feeling only the breeze of the present; glimpses of what will come make a struggle that feels chaotic and shifting into a staged and scripted farce that hurts no less.
what is seen passes to be before you'll know what for, what else but brace or roll as you may.
what is it when you can hear, more feel but only not hear in all the ways needed to describe the sound, a pulse almost a thrum but with definite beating that courses as easily, apparently, through walls as air, as loud in any direction with no echo left to check against just the hums rise and fall and the hair-on-end effect from toe hair to stereocilia
and then it's gone, still without echo just the ghost of itself in my head and the normal unsilent ambience of the suburbs drifting through a mostly open window.