The next little boat comes around the bend as the previous one sets sail. No sails of course on these amusement park river rafts, but standing on that disorienting moving platform I can’t help but wax poetic. I say wax poetic and I think of tall, slim candles on furnished banquet tables in foreign countries with languages that yearn to invert our *****, anglophile syntax and say wax poetic to mean ‘poetic wax’. Wax with a flair for verbose romance. Tall, slim, fleshy, slowly expiring under a weightless impossible flame, and thinking all along of shattered daydreams, looking into each like shards of glass and seeing not this melting candle but a solid body doused and extinguished with love and certainty. There it is, my croissance poétique, my poetic waxing, to grow and elaborate, as wax simply does not - under these circumstances, at least. To be sure, I am still standing before my boat as my body moves constantly on the platform with no help from me. I am thankful such thoughts find themselves so instantaneously or I would have found myself knocked under or over something or other. I board. Buckle. I’ve never heard of anyone in an amusement park on one’s own; it’s usually a pair hand-in-hand, gripping each other on plummeting coaster drops in some panic-stricken foreshadowing of the taught limbs and pounding hearts that will inhabit their sheets come nighttime. Or else a grease-stained fat lipped boy, esurient for the delicate touch his haggard mother and wicked-stepfather dole out upon his blind and handicapped sister, bound to a chair, bound to her own head, bound forever to her worn-out, frayed gingham mother and her stupid, jealous brother. Even as my calves squeak against the rubbery seat and my knees bump with some hairy father of some screaming three, I’ve still managed to romance my setting into something far out of the realm of reality. I’m afraid, though, I may be losing touch with it altogether.
Am I really there? Something about the sensation of spinning and twinge in my core that feels like sickness tells me that is probably the case, but even so, I’m relying purely on a hunch. A literal gut feeling, soon to be joined by the cold barrage of cascading water and my shoes turning wet and making my feet feel somewhat like jelly. Physical experiences that root me in this world, while my thoughts, it seems, have died and transcended some time ago. One blink and my transformation is complete, soaked to my center and the ride is over. I’m exiting my little boat, orienting myself onto the platform that has kept spinning this entire time, unrelenting to anyone who would wish can this all stand still for just a moment my shoe is untied! The father of the three follows behind, but I fail to find a story for him. The faces I pass as I exit are not delicate, they do not carry with them tragic imbalances of the past, or beam with the pride of a love that seems to last forever (because it has lasted so long already, right?), they are blank. They are blank and wet and dripping like mine and they drip like they’re melting, like they are slowly expiring under a weightless impossible flame, and it is now that it has come full circle. The world as it passes has caught up once again and will continue to spin past, allowing only a moment where we both whirl together, where we are in sync and both of us have wicked step-fathers and both of us have soggy shoes and then again she will be gone, to unite with some other fleshy entity and reduce me again to my *****, anglophile syntax and my shattered daydreams and my wax poetic. But she will be back. And until then, I’ll drip into the floorboards and perhaps when she returns I’ll have something to show her.