She Runs Through Your Mind

Sucking on a salted caramel that is so delicious I nearly lose consciousness, I think about the most decadent mouth I ever kissed with my mouth. I think about making love with you in a beautiful villa in some far away Tuscan hills, our tanned tight bodies biting and licking and teasing each other until we are fully abused and worn thin. The blue in your eyes like fiery ice as you take me to the edges of ecstasy over and over again in that way that only you can, only you ever could. As the rays of sunshine splash through the trees and onto my face, I am briefly brought back to reality from my day dreaming due to a stiff burning pain underneath my left breast. Deciding immediately that I have cancer and I’ll any day be a goner, my visions turn black and the park I’m sitting in is a viscous  glare of screaming light. In what are sure to be my final hours what will I do? Just yesterday I came across an article about a fatal accident which said of the victim “…she was thirty when she died in a plane crash,” but for some reason I read it as “….she was thirsty when she died…” and I thought how funny and sad and obvious and stupid and tragic. And how on earth did the writer of this article know this poor almost dead girl was thirsty when it all went down? And even though it’s ridiculous I also thought about how that is how it happens. You are here in this life and then you are not. The world keeps rushing forward long after you’ve hit the inevitable proverbial wall. While we are here, though, there are those rare few among us who hunger and thirst for more than this sliver of a muted existence we have been handed. I am not one who knows much about anything and I’m the last person to give advice on living your best life but in the dimpled light of this fading afternoon while curled up on a park bench eating chocolate covered candy that is so rich and smooth my whole body dissolves into the pavement, something inside of me vibrates with possibility. Do I write myself out of reality so I don’t lose my precious mind while slogging through it? Goddamn right I do. Does that make my work fantasy or memoir? Fiction or non-fiction or both? Does one not always contain the other and vice versa? I don’t know what we are supposed to be doing while we have these wild jittery bodies of ours. I know some of the things I’ve done with mine have been dirty and some have been sweet, some have been tender and some have been sadistic. Am I sacred. Am I holy. Am I good enough. Am I using what I have in service of others or myself, I can’t always be sure but if just one person finds use for my words in their life then perhaps I have done some good and so it’s okay that at this very moment I am probably in the throes of an acutely fatal yet to be diagnosed disease. Pulling on a beat up old army green jacket, I slide in my earbuds, shove my hands in my pockets and begin the slow walk home. The burning pain in my chest has let up and the afternoon is turning down its bedroom eyes toward evening, soft pink clouds now visibly glowing behind the darkening buildings. I stop at that place we like with the mahogany bar and sip cold wine, penning these thoughts in my notebook. It is quite possible that when I die it will be with words left unsaid and stories left unwritten. I know they warn you not to let that happen but happen it will because life doesn’t stop even when you do. The stories are endless and the pain and the wonder ebb and flow as they will without relent, as they must. It is quite possible that when I die I will die thirsty. But while I’m here I want to be brought to my knees for the taste of so very many things.