Disconnected
Keely O'Rourke
January 2006
January 2006
It was in a chair, uncomfortable and aching at the strange shifting angels I’d find. It was in me, in that moment, in that time and space.
I thought of the floor my chair sat on. The fibers of the carpet, alternately clean and dirty, the bacteria in the dirt with their little teeth. Walls white and striped with sunlight, dotted with the light reflecting on the balls of colored glass that hang on the French doors, blowing on their Tibetan bell string.
The moment was a new one, time had not stopped. I moved with it, beyond those doors to the ocean, the sound of wind and cars rushing, the liquor stores light bulbs glowing dimly in daytime light. I went the other way, toward the city and Santa Monica, down Olympic and buildings that rose, the metal spines of those buildings, there fifty years ago, the same mass holding tightly together letting people rise, work. I thought of the paper in the offices, the hum of copiers and the buzz of lights. Filtered air running through ducts and seeping silently into rooms all day. The lungs breathing that air, from one mouth to the next, a constant kissing and breathing of life. The tissue of those lungs, the tissue before it was tissue.
I moved to the 10. That straight line of pavement and the people somehow calmer, cooler than on these other California highways. I thought of myself in my car, my music a theme that I change with emotions and thoughts, the music made in minds and studios, the tape the music is put on.
To the San Gabriel’s, to the Angeles Crest and the city of dumped bodies, each having lived a particular kind of horror before passing into the time I was also passing through. I veered down, to the islands, Bali and waterfalls with wet rocks, the hiss and roar of water falling into itself, each drop loosing it’s individuality as it falls into the next. A frog would sit there, a hundred years from now, tongue wet from the lapping at the dew, toes moist and sticky. The frogs throat with it’s searching song, the plants that rise around him, giving their own air, mixing and kissing the frog, eventually to make it to me. For my kiss.
Or higher, in the Artic with the icy floor reflecting a thousand lightening bolts, dancing against the backdrop of a red sun, fixed in it’s non-position for days, in this very moment, and how it might have been a thousand times before, a million different lightening strikes, gathered energy unleashed and drawn back into nothingness, quiet sky and top clouds and north stars beyond.
Out into space floating with the expansion of every atom there, and also just beyond. This sun and the other stars too numerous to count or conceive, and the space that space is expanding into, in this moment, in the moment it first came to pass, in the moment it will cease to exist.
I shift in my chair, ecstatic.
Keely O'Rourke is in love with the idea of being in love, despite being a cynic. She lives in a state of constant heroic flux and perfect being in Santa Monica with her beautiful baby boy. This is her first time publishing anything.