I am riding through the old-time suburbs.
The city of salt pillars
I pass a bike or three
A jeep
A van with a six-inch lift and chipped orange paint
I round a corner
And suddenly all is quiet
Except for the squeaking of my old bicycle chain.
And I ex-
Hale

If you were here you would ask me why I sighed
And I would reply
"It's not a sigh, I just forgot to breathe"

I just forgot to breathe.

And I'm breathing now
My shoulders are at ease
And my bike is squeaking.
I wonder how often pockets of silence bubble up in the city
For a moment-
In this one spot-
It is still-
And then a car drives by and we resume.
I found myself in a pocket of silence in the center of a beehive this afternoon
And I sighed
Because the silence made me realize that I was holding my breath
So I exhaled
And relaxed

And then a car drove by
And we resumed.

Madeline had visions of you falling down the stairs this afternoon. She was sipping her coffee and reading a scrap of paper that had materialized on her table from some article about a meteor somewhere and it hit her like a ton of feathers or a ton of bricks.

Doesn't really matter which.

She gasped back into the present and fell out of her chair spilling the tar-black grog she had been pawing at to the oaken hardwood and sat staring at her hands there for a minute or more.

They were pink against the tan-ish floor.

Pushing against it she regained her footing and reached for the home phone her friends chided her for owning and called me crying you won't believe what I just saw I can't believe what I just saw I think we need to call her do you think she's alright?

I had just gotten off my flight.

I don't know I said I don't know who you mean where are you are you alright I just got back into town I was going to grab my bags and catch a taxi do you need me to pick you up

She finally noticed the fallen cup.

Catching her breath he slowed her pace and started to stammer how she didn't know it didn't matter never mind I need to go and make a call I'll let you know when I get out.

I still had no idea what she was talking about.

She hung up the phone and placed another call after a half hour no six hours no six weeks of ringing someone picked up the line she had dialed and she wept and laughed and asked if everything was okay and if she needed to go and if so how far she was a primed cartridge in a loaded gun

Everything was silent and the room spun

A voice replied something inaudible and Madeline laughed and cried not cried and laughed and wondered how she could have been so rash to believe a daydream like this

She rose and gathered all her bits

And together they walked her down the hall from her sun room to the kitchen down the stairwell-

And she fell.

And for two point five one two three seconds everything stood still but her and the world stopped turning she couldn't hear her own gasp or whether she screamed or laughed or cried she just hung in the balance she hung from gods fingers she hung above a pool of sharks and a pit of lava and everything she had never done she fell far and fast and hit the ground

An no one knows whether that made a sound.

A chasm stretches itself before me.
And I will cross it
But it is not so simple as that even
I will make it so that no-one will have to cross it ever again.
Casting a chain from my side, I find a hold on the other
I swing to it
Then I begin to dig
Digging deep into the earth I pull the chain behind me
Together, we emerge from the side of the cliff I just clambered across
I pull at the knots I have tied for handholds
I pull with all the force I can bear
The ground shakes and I have slack
I toss the remainder of what I have to the top of the opposing cliff
And shimmy across it.
Reaching the fallen end, I begin digging anew
I emerge after tunneling once again
And
Heave
With everything I was born with
With all of the matter that comprises my feeble,
Fragile
Human
Frame;
Nay, with
All
That I am.
The opposing side of the chasm shakes
It groans in the protest of a thousand-year sleep
It presses even against me
But I pull it all the same
Inches
Closer
And with it a length of chain
Which I use to throw to the opposing side
Which I use to climb
Which I use to pull
Which I use to throw
Which I use to climb
Which I use to pull
Which I use to stitch this colossal divide back together
With all that I am I am pulling these two opposing forces
And there is
NOTHING
That will stop me
From burrowing into the ground
And pulling these earthen demons
This great sleeping wound
Together
I will mend this
Or I will
die
trying.

I stared into a void, deep, wide, and truly awesome
and felt as though I were a single grain of sand in the belly of the ocean
infinitesimally small
and the void stared too,
back into me
and I wondered how I must look to it
a blinding light?
a void of equal size?
perhaps it perceived me as I perceived it
More likely, I was virtually invisible
something to be ignored
for what is being in a sea of non-being?
and I grew tired of this, this void
this great and mighty nothingness
and I began to fill the space with being
faster and faster
I grew and it changed
from nothing to
something
and something filled in all the cracks where nothing had been
and twisted and contorted to form shapes
and waves of somethingness across a background of nothing
and this sea, this
great and mighty somethingness
surged high and drowned out the nothing
until there was only something
and there was no nothing
and everything was exactly the same.
but I realized this was the same as when
there was only nothingness
and without negative space
there was no difference
between what I am
and what was
before.

But,
there was one space.
a space
infinitesimally
small
which was blank
a point of something in a
sea
of nothing
I watched it for a long time
and I am
sure
it too, was watching me.