Some nights it feels like I’m lazing away on railway tracks, idly dragging the soles of my shoes along the gravel and over the wood and the spikes. Sometimes the track isn’t there and it’s just fields of soft grass and I’m walking and walking and the scenery isn’t changing very much, just more of the sprawling-green emptiness, and I’m content on this treadmill – sure, nothing is on the horizon but nothing is in the periphery or the rearview either, and there’s a contentedness that comes with that kind of landscape. It feels infinite, not spatially, but in a more temporal way, where there never really was a time when the field wasn’t there and it’s inconceivable to think of it ever going away, nothing ever grows or dies, and it’s warm in a way that feels like nothing to the skin, and it asks me very politely to stay a while. It’s hard to not. But then there’s the soft rumbling at my feet, the vibrations shooting through the steel and into my shins and teeth and the green dissipates and I’m back on the tracks, laying with their forwards-and-backwards, their Onces and their Nows and their Soons and Ends, and the train crests the bend behind me and the conductor pulls its chain and its whistle looses itself from its iron throat and whizzes past my ear like a bullet. There is a jolt when the gears are shifted like this, that switch from pleasurable and aimless nothingness to an awareness of the past and future and how life is pointed towards something, some end. Grief has a certain way of announcing itself is all.
jeez, louise 