(Ruscha)
Fell asleep and then woke again to the sound of rain. The notes of it restful as a detached emotion, one that can be felt freely without the weight of experience; nostalgia for an unnamed thing, universal in scope. A mysterious summer anomaly for the region, unique to others' memories, so claimed. I close my eyes and I am in the jungle, an open windowed room along the coast, waiting for the rains to lift, the boat prepared and also halted. When I close my eyes in it I am anywhere at once.
Soft grey from scope to scope, the daily ambit robbed. The longest days of the year have lost much of their light. I lie in bed and do not mind at all. I could be perfectly happy there all day, waiting to escape.
I've drank straight from the milk jug twice in the last two days, tilting the gallon upwards, a thing I have not done in years. I am reminded of my mother's pleas not to, getting caught yet again, the admonishments. I remember young grade-school projects in which we were all asked to bring in a plastic gallon milk jug, one that had been thoroughly washed out. The stench filling the room when those that had not were finally opened, as if a rotten sarcophagus had been unearthed in Egypt, or worse. The children's faces withdrawn in crumpled cries of unison. I wonder what projects students must do now, consider the differences of a cardboard soy container. What assumptions can be made. Those days must be long lost, the ones in which all children drank generous portions of daily milk, plastic jugs being a norm in almost every home. Those days must be gone.
If not, then soon, though not before the rains have lifted.
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