Start with the end

The world is so quiet in the morning. I wake with the saints and ride past the sinners eager to fall into dusty mattresses and imploding couches. The sun is bright but behind me and I'm sad. Why, I cannot possibly fathom but I know it, I can feel it. I feel it in my ribs first, a dull chest ache. Soon it gets hard to swallow. Why am I this way? Often I'll cry at the soft purple pansies on the side of the road or at the grey gravel that sticks in my tires. Sometimes I'll remember that passage from the Catcher in the Rye, where Allie wrote green inked poetry into his baseball mitt before he died. He was a thoughtful boy, too young to have to leave this world, but he did. And when Holden slams his fist into the glass when thinking about it, I've never really read anything more beautiful. 

I think about long looks. I dream about bright eyes and smiles caught by mere chance. I pine for the living, oh how I'd like to live. I wish it were that simple. How I'd like for things to stay so, so quiet until I can figure it all out. At night I'l drive out far, follow the road until I reach street lamps. I'll think of you when I pull into that indigo colored parking lot and sit under the cross with the white back lighting. I'll think to myself, look how far you've come. But was it in the right direction?

Do you ever hear a name and it sounds like a dream? I don't mean it's necessarily good but more like a relic from the past. The longer you say it the quicker it dries your gums and numbs your tongue until it's nothing at all.