With A Concrete Head

    It may be the drying paint you watch in a corporate office when it’s cold and the lights are hardly, truly, lights. They are more like dying fireflies. You can feel little shards of paint in the air, floating into your nostrils. It’s ticklish. And there’s the polar touch of newspaper under your nimble fingers. You rub it and feel its softness, but you also feel where the recycled bits and bumps peek through—little mountains, on an empty field. Your nails, slightly grown, crease and fold every edge of the newspaper you can get your hands onto. The shape becomes misconstrued. Instead of a semi-smooth, thin, slightly transparent little thing in your hands, there is a crumpled ball. Thick, and sharp, and antagonizing. It matches the room a little better though. If the walls were knives, perhaps they’d stab you, too. It is the color you see when the boss yells at you. It always surrounds you. Maybe in every other corporate building, too. It’s not quite black or white. You need the job. It’s not awful to earn money. But it isn’t heavenly either. You wish you could do something else. Maybe go outside and stare at some clouds. But the onslaught of this color (or thing, really) makes you wonder if other colors even exist anymore. You are misconstrued.

       At quitting time, you think it may exist or live within the crevices of your coworker’s salad. The parts that look at you through the ranch dressing, and the tomatoes, and the little cubes of bread. Hidden there. Almost as if it’s shy. It passes through your hands later in the day, when you purchase a salad yourself. It’s a sad thing. Gas stations don’t make them like Panera. The soggy, thin piece of what may be a vegetable, clings sadly onto your fork. It does not want to be there. The meager pieces of paper you have folded in your pocket, do not want to be there. The grass, which dies, and bruises, and transforms into a pale blanket of snow, does not want to be there. The heat presses against it, and it’d rather pass away. It’d rather say goodbye.

       And that same color from before, that crawled over your absorbent little eyes, still paints every picture. You still see those newspaper words laid out across the world. Every scene you stumble upon, every street you walk; it lies there eagerly, waiting to greet you. But somewhere, you think, you may see another creature. A thing you knew before, same as the one hidden in the salad. It feasts upon your eyes when you’re tired and bursts out at you when you stop at the stoplight. But you don’t want to stop. So even your face seems to reflect the essence of that same being. You don’t want to stop, but you still linger near stop signs and flickering toll gates. It’s not that you want to stop, but they want you to stop. Why do they want you to stop? And you might feel the beast, hot and wet, pressing against the inside wall of your cheek. And it pulses, and pushes, and inflates the flesh there. When you see that man from the corner store, who looks nice, and good, and healthy. And you don’t like the feeling, and you wish it’d stop, but it doesn’t stop. And when you don’t want to be angry, but you’d rather be doing something else rather than doing work, and it doesn’t stop—why don’t you stop? You can’t stop. The staples they’ve nailed into you, have hardly punctured your skin. It is a good thing.

       Maybe this one, this color, sits proudly and boldly on the brim of the street magician’s top hat. Maybe his wand conjures up a plume of feathers that are the same shade. It may sit at the bottom of the rainbow you occasionally see, standing over the river. Sometimes, when the river shivers or quakes, or ripples, you think instead of fish leaping there, it may be the rainbow’s legs bounding about. They’re long. They stretch. They reach out to touch you. It may be warmth, that you feel on your face—or something else. Either way, the colors phase into that familiar color (is it a color?) from work. You can almost swear your head is wrapped up in a block of concrete. Your head is heavy. You walk with pain, and a certain sort of blindness. Couldn’t really see the rainbow anymore, even if you tried, if you really tried.

       And in your bedroom, you think it might have been your favorite once. You know it’s staring at you at all times, and that it’s stuck to the walls, but you see it peeling sometimes. It’s nice to look at it and think about the breeze from your hometown, or the seagulls bouncing on the ocean waves. The duality of the sky and the sea. The scent of salt and sweat-dripping people. With shorts, with tank tops, with bikinis. With music blaring somewhere, not near but not far. Maybe a song you had heard once or had yet to discover— “and we’ll all float on, again.”  With ice cream dripping from a cone in your hand, and mustard from a silver-wrapped hot dog in the hands of your father. And the feeling of wood under your nails when you sit down on the old bench. The creak of a swing. The laughter of a few kids. The wails of a needy baby. A groaning mother. A rustle in the grass, a few birds screaming and bounding and leaping in the air. A few people dancing and tripping over themselves. A picnic basket sitting near the beach. A picnic blanket. A happy couple. Red faces, purple shorts, black mascara, green shirts, polka-dotted straps and silver belts.    

     Maybe the rainbow lived there, once. And it tries to follow you, but you won’t let it touch you. You can’t let it touch you. Why can’t you let it touch you? Don’t you wish it’d touch you again?

   Slip back into the four walls. Stay there, don’t sip on sweet tea. Stare into the lights. Watch them flicker.