Trimming The Hedges

I'm lying in the sand, it sticks like a cold, wet paste to the back of my head. The air is water and dust. The fog above the crest bends and folds like a cloudy mud puddle after the rain, dark and muddled. The waves are falling, swirling against the dirt and the sand and my feet and I'm waiting to be washed out. I can hear the sounds of cars, or maybe that is just the ocean, like the inside of a shell. Or maybe it is just me. I shake inside an emotional trap, like some hunted beast. The cold pang of nervous love and the sweaty disaster of anxious escape. I go in and out, around, like a lighthouse, but there are no ships. There are no sailers. I am alone and surrounded by fog. As the fog becomes thicker, the water droplets numb my cheeks.

I remember spinning, lying on my back on a playground merry-go-round. I was full of the coldest and sloppiest feelings a person can have when they try to resist feeling by thinning the blood and swallowing light. The paint on the metal was rusty and peeling. The cold seeped through my shirt, into the skin on my back as my wet eyes dribbled pretty paths into my hair. I leaned over and puked off the side of the children's toy. As I watched this murky liquid gush out of me, I wanted the rest of me to come out too. My stomach, my liver, my heart. Get it all out. Get it out fast. Of course, it never happens. I swallowed the rest of my saliva and the rest of my thoughts. I wish I could not think to myself in words. The english language has already failed me so many times, how can I expect to be able to adequately express any emotion? This simple invented code? Every word is a symbol, a concrete symbol of something that is never concrete. I can't express. I rip and I pull and I alter my thoughts to the sky in the forest and the black, clean air. I remember driving down the highway, surrounded by tall and spindly firs and pines. I was young and life was still saturated with color, even in the dark. If I pulled over, I could get lost here. I could walk into the woods until I disappeared. I could vanish.

I can feel the fog getting thicker. It makes the air so wet, that soon I am breathing liquid. I can watch myself fade from a distance as I remember the beauty and the light coming through your hair. It is gossamer and dangerous like a spider's web. Its these memories that led me here, and now they will let their hold on me slip, so that I can fall through the cracks and melt away. I can hear hear the sun. I fold my hands and wash away.