shoes

weird sunspots occur before your eyes, weird because the sun hasn't shone in days, tightness in your chest feels like a belt slowly tightening one notch at a time, ever present and strangely slow and the laugh coming out of your mouth is a dumb one, something you might find on a poorly-dubbed version of Sesame Street, and instead of making your eyes water (the sunspots having now passed) the incense fragrance reminds you of an apartment you lived in 26 years ago and the girl who always said she was going to make her own shoes but instead bummed all of your cigarettes, she never had any of her own and one time she said she was going to read Nausea and you cautioned against it, Jean-Paul Sartre isn't really your thing, i'm serious that book is dangerous you said and what you think you will find you won't but something else instead that doesn't stretch or contort based on physics as we understand them, you'll carry worms in your head and how will you ever make shoes then? what happened to that girl, you wonder, you can't remember her name, maybe she never told you or maybe you were drunk or stoned or indifferent, you can't recall if she was with you when you sat on the edge of the cliff overlooking the river, the empty abandoned warehouses behind you, watching you, like sentinels, outposts of a world next to this one but decaying and just out of reach, you sat on the edge of the cliff and thought about what it would be like to fall down, your body tumbling against the outcropping of rocks, how many bones would break before you hit the water hundreds of feet below, would everything inside you turn to mush, would it leak out, the movies never prepared you for this, and as you are mulling this you think of making a film about this space, a film no one can watch because you have to feel it, you have to see the ghosts trains and sidestep the broken Thunderbird bottles and painfully tug at your eyebrows, that's where you picked up the habit that would never leave, your eyebrows will forever be misshapen because you can't stop pulling at them but even if the girl was there she didn't say anything and you didn't say anything and no one said anything and that's why you liked the place so much, maybe that's why you never threw yourself off the cliff, the quiet saved you and you aren't that melodramatic anyway, you always had cigarettes and smoking gave you a next step, always a next step when everything around you and in you lacked context, you'd eventually give the smoking up and good for you now you get to live longer with even less context, what is context worth anyway, is it worth lung cancer or the ability to make your own shoes? you'll never know, and even now as your hearing fades and the incense finally starts to make your eyes water you aren't sure that's a good thing, you are still writing definitions to words that don't exist and emotions with blurry shapes and running colors and when you go to bed tonight it will be infinite and yet you'll still get up and make coffee in the morning but you'll never know what happened to the girl who was going to make her own shoes, whose name you cannot remember or never knew.