Fear #2

Frank O'Hara and Maggie Nelson and life and dimes

They say life turns on a dime, but they don’t say what happens when the dime’s up there, spinning against a blue sky, and you’re down here, waiting to see which way it’s going to fall. And in that space, what are you meant to do? How do you think? How do you settle to anything other than constant, perpetual motion: on foot, on trains, and between buses, waves, anything you can catch to numb the waiting for a while.

In the wait, life is shot with a new sort of intensity. The before, when the dime was still clutched tightly between hands, when no one’d asked you to call heads or tails, when you believed it a game with no consequences, when you lived a life you didn’t think to thank anyone for, seems too far away, seems to belong to a different sort of person, one you both envy and barely like.

It spins. And if anyone asked you to call heads of tails, you could not. You have learnt to trust chance. You have learnt to trust luck, so dumb you have to listen as hard as you can for it. It whispers. It’s there in the cherry blossom, holding itself less tightly than it was last time you were this far north. You go searching for it with both your phone camera and your shitty analogue camera, soon, pink. Soon green of the sort Lorca wanted: green, how I want you green. Even as you type, you cannot think of green as the colour of death as he did. Early one morning, you sit in the large bay window, reading Frank O’Hara as the birds swoop through the glass but close to your face still, and you read my eyes are vague blue, like the sky, and change all the time. You remember days earlier, sitting in the same place as the sun set, an red haze lowering to orange, reading Maggie Nelson does the world look bluer from blue eyes? Probably not, but I choose to think so (self-aggrandizement).

You choose to blame the way you see the world and the way you move through it on your blue eyes, looking now at the blue sky, while the dime spins and gravity begins its pull.