Things Only I Can Say - J.C. (smart ebook reader .TXT) 📗

I

I dreamed last night. Dreamed that I was home, dreamed that life could finally be a perfect utopia, dreamed of my parents and my lost days. But my dreams didn’t amount to much. Because I woke up today, and I’m still here.
They wonder who I am, and why I am. They think that I am lonely, and they are right. To just have someone to share my mind with, someone besides these un-mown grasses and forgotten homes, I’d give anything. But the only problem is that I can’t. It’s not possible now. And so I, the lonely old bum, the wanderer, the crazy lady in rags who wanders up and down the streets this spring and is gone the next…I just listen, and think. Listen, think, and live.

Averice

Averice is a funny little thing. Follows me around like my own shadow, and even more, because I don’t see my shadow at noon, or rainy days, or when the sun has died. But Averice is always there.
I would tell you what he is if I knew, but I don’t. So I’ll just describe to you. He’s got one ear and two blue eyes, squinty and no eyebrows. Little black and white hairs, except some are gray, but not because he is old. Droopy tail too, like one of those boas some of the ladies in the big cities wear around their necks.
Averice was not always Averice. I don’t know what they called him before he became my Averice. I don’t know why I named him that either, but it just sounded so right. I suppose I heard it somewhere, outside a coffee shop in that place with all those tall buildings and one-way windows.
Today, Averice and I are going to sit still. The rain is due for tomorrow, the clouds are telling us, so we’ll travel tomorrow. Today, I’ll just stand here and breathe. I suppose I am lucky in that way. Who else can stand perfectly still in a flood of thousands moving in every direction and enjoy the air? Craziness has its benefits.

The World

The world is large. I go so many places, even travel in circles, but never have I ended up at the same place once. There’s always something special, something different about every single city, town, or lazy river. Every ocean and every sky has their own special laugh and personality.
Me and Averice, I believe we’ve traversed across this whole wide thing. And though there’s always something different, everywhere there’s one same thing. And that one same thing would be humans.
No, I don’t mean as in there are people walking around me everywhere. Because yes, there is a lot of that flesh around us. I know that. I’m not stupid like they think. No, what I mean is the human spirit, everywhere around us, even when we think we’ve escaped from it by going into the deepest retreat into the center of a jungle that hasn’t been discovered since the dawn of time. You just can’t escape it.
Humans. With our tendency to love and to hate, to need others but to shun when we have, a completely raveled enigma of contradictions in one little life form. How simple that hemlock over there is, and how free those hawks can fly above me, no care for what we have done below them. They must laugh at our stupidity, our competition, our big glass buildings and our hatred and our love. They are things that make us miserable, and they are the things that make us human.
Humans. Everywhere I go, I see them and I see their marks. What’ll it be like when they’re gone?

The Idiot Man

There was an idiot man on the street today. I know he was because he was the first person to ever try to make contact with me, since I had began this wandering of mine. He grabbed my shoulder right there and then and held out a plastic shopping bag that looked like it had been picked off the street, because it probably had been. Inside were a few quarters, begging for company. I pointed to my raggedy clothes and shook my head.
But the idiot man was persistent. He held onto me hard and opened his mouth to form the slurred nasally words, “Money fuh duh pwoe, money fuh duh pwoe, pleez.” I shook my head again, hard. “Money fuh duh pwoe, pleez,” he said again, and shook his plastic bag.
I turned and grabbed his shoulders too. He was shorter than me, which was a surprise. There weren’t too many people who were. The idiot man’s mouth fell open. I stared into his dull eyes and he stared back without embarrassment. There we were, in the middle of the street, people passing by annoyed because we were blocking the way, bumping shoulders, probably wondering with a shake of the head what in the world we were doing. Not that it mattered much anyways. It was just two dirty idiots.
He was an idiot, like me. Perhaps, though, it is the same case for both of us. Perhaps he is like me, so very very different on the inside than out. My body reflects nothing of my mind. I wonder about the idiot man. I wonder as I walked away, have I just done exactly what I hate other people doing to me?

Down The Road

Averice and I travel today. We leave the big city with the idiot man behind, following the cars as they speed out of the bustle to where all the laziness is kept. I hold my possessions in a little knapsack and Averice skips at my heels. It as raining, just as I knew. We are happy, and dance.
People say that the rain is heaven’s tears. We do not believe so. The rain isn’t sad at all. Sometimes it is angry, but it is not sad. It is life. The rain is the sky’s way off sending us just what we need the most—a new start, a clear mind, an unblemished world. It sends us those things that we are always looking to but cannot touch—the sky gives us its clouds when it rains. And so Averice and I are happy.
Follow this wide road with its black cement and white line. The cars can travel at a thousand miles an hour and the colors blur past us and shift the air. But they are jealous of us, we know. Because when they whiz around and their wheels fly, they become blind and impatient for the end. They cannot enjoy the rain in there like we do. They do not know what they are missing out on.
I tell Averice a story as we go on. “Averice,” I look at him, and he makes a sound that tells me he is listening. “Once, there was a blue blur, and a gray blur, and a green blur. They were having a race.” My thoughts paused. “On and on they went, caring for nothing but to reach the end. They forgot about what they were traveling on and they forgot why, or they just didn’t know. And then, the gray blur, it stopped. It just stopped suddenly, right there. Maybe it realized what the others had missed. Maybe it saw that sometimes it’s not always about being fast.
“But the gray blur, it had been too late. Once you join the race, there’s just about no way out. So the others flew into him, and he flew into the raining sky. And now you hear those sirens and you see those flashing lights coming all the way from the idiot man’s city. See that there, Averice? See that there?”
Averice doesn’t turn his head but I don’t doubt that he has heard me. And next to us, the sirens sing their wailing song to give farewell to that gray blur who had thought too late.

Three Lovers

We are out of the city now, to the place where the big-bellied and high-nosed live. Their houses all look like each other, and they all look like each other too. Straight fences and terrier dogs. This is the worst place for me to be. This is where Averice and I are hated the most. But to get from the hustle of the city to the place of only grass and sky and naivety, I have to pass by these tight-lipped men and flip-mouthed women.
Their children are partying down the streets tonight. They go to the gas station and buy boxes and boxes which they load onto their shiny cars, rattling and heaving with the beat of their music. The boys don’t pull up their pants and the girls don’t pull up their shirts. They scream and shout and pretend they are having fun. They don’t know how much more fun Averice and I can have.
It is amongst these that I see them. The three lovers. And they are real lovers too, not just the lusters that most are. They tell their story to us and we watch like it is a movie, a real life drama, though the characters do not notice that they are behind a screen and that Averice and I are watching and commenting and remembering.
She is another one of those girls. Left shoulder shows because her shirt is slipping and she likes it too. Her hair is straightened and chemified, her face too smooth to be normal. The two boys too are like the rest of them. They are wearing saggy baggy t-shirts and jeans that look just about identical, except one has a cap perched on his head, rather awkwardly, and the other doesn’t. The three of them, and we wouldn’t have noticed them because they were just so alike, but we did because their eyes held something special. Eyes were glazed over, in love.
The girl hugged one boy, the one without the hat, then stood on her tip-toes to kiss the other on the cheeks. The one without the hat retreated into the shadows, out of the way of the streetlamp and headlights, while the girl and the hat-boy began something passionate. They were ecstatic, and the boy in the shadows was emanating rage. Averice made a throaty sound, and we wondered what would happen next.
The orange light illuminated the shadows of their faces. The hat-boy, and the other boy. There was something different about the two, if you looked a bit closer. From the way they carried themselves. The hat boy was fire, and no-hat was solid rock. It would be hard for that little girl to choose, and it did not seem like she was having fun. For her, this was more than a movie. This was real. She was the jewel, and right now fire was winning.
The streetlight would soon shift. Jewel slowly pushed herself off of Fire’s shoulders, her face mixed with confusion, his face longing, wanting, angry. Her mouth moved to form some words, and the sorrow in her voice echoed on into our ears.
Fire showed his sparks right then. His fingers dug a bit harder into her shoulder, fire from the heart, fire called love. He wanted her, but she pushed him away. Further, and then she turned to the shadows.
Now Rock emerged and he emanated victory. He raised his arm and he became one with Jewel. He was satisfied, but Jewel still was not. And Fire would not take this. The raise of a hand, a voice and the two