Standing before a large map on the wall, I trace serpentine lines with my left index finger across all the places I’d go if only I had the time and freedom to roam. Maybe someday I’ll see these places as more than red and blue arteries stretching across oddly shaped borders. It suddenly occurs to me that I’ve been mapping destinations most of my life. Speaking of life, will there be enough left in me by the time I’m deemed old enough to kick away these boots I’ve been wearing since I became a man in need of belonging?
The flood of austere streetlights cuts through the black of a moonless, starless night, projecting monstrous shadows onto fresh pavement – the row of tall oaks yielding to a stiff north wind. But just up the hill, a half a mile or so, is where the single well-lit porch, the faintly glowing front window, the well-worn red door, the well-loved faces behind it, are waiting to welcome me in.
Dead truck slouched deep in a ditch. Stern sun glaring down over the hills upon wide empty fields. Dirt road yawning out toward somewhere in between. Foul mouthed kid peddling along, blowing off steam and dust from his wheels, riding away from home and the litany of injustices under that roof, toward a taunting, ever elusive horizon – one late afternoon in early June.
This is where I begin, by tuning out to tune in, shutting my eyes from the light, opening the cage of imagination for imminent flight. All perceptions are suddenly ruled by rhythms, little flourishes of sound, things no longer seen, and through this voluntary blindness, I’m unbound from what might otherwise be diminished in this moving mosaic behind my eyelids.
I found inspiration behind death’s door, within the walls of a musty room on the ground floor, scattered amongst the tomes of displaced thought. From this cemetery of old books rose a simple turn of phrase that shook me out of my malaise, moved the hand that clutched the pen until a shallow breath of life was breathed again.
The thought I thought I’d lost suddenly swam back to the surface of my mind one night. I shot out of bed, groped for the light, groped for a pen, but before I could find one it flit away again. That slippery thought I’ve yet to hook into the net of my nightstand notebook. But each night I cast my line once more into a dark sleepy pond, hoping to catch whatever it is I’m fishing for.
The little yellow bungalow on the hill, I saw it once in a dream that felt so real, though it’s a place I know I’ve never been. And what if I never have that dream again? Does such a place in the world exist outside of my own head? Somehow, I hope it does, and I hope to find you still paddling for shore in that little blue canoe when I get there.
What is night but another burned-out day clad in dancing shoes and a sleek black party dress, hair down, rife with life and drunken laughter, swaying gracelessly and uninhibited to the floor pulsing beats.
Until at last, the music stops. The bands and the DJs pack up. The raucous voices gradually fade – the laughter, always the last to die, as it should be.
Then the streets become eerily quiet, though not for very long because another dawn is creeping just beyond those darkest hours.
Soon, birds are stirring in the trees, filling the air with songs of a different nature as the next party begins and the last of the night creatures crawl back into their caves.
Just an old shed is left to stand against the slow invasion of termites and weeds and time. The house is gone, and has been for years.
Once I drove past where it used to be on my way to nowhere in particular and nearly drowned in a flash flood of memory.
We lived in the apartment upstairs where the fire was said to have started. Maybe arson. Maybe a careless cigarette left burning. Nobody knows.
We lived there when my children were still children. In the mornings I waved them off from the end of the driveway, giving good fortune little more than a parting glance as the school bus rolled away.
I remember the night my ex-wife called to tell me about the fire, how she and her mother stood on the side of the road, watching with tears in their eyes as the flames consumed it all – the place where we once ate and slept and watched our kids grow.
Out in the middle of that wild field my daughter spent hours jumping on a trampoline. My son shagged fly balls on crisp spring nights, balls I hit out to him while practicing for Little League. The woods out back must be full of rotting baseballs.
A few days after the fire, I pulled into the driveway and stared at what remained. Before leaving I snapped a few photos. I can’t remember why. Maybe as proof that we were ever there at all, how far we’ve drifted since, innocence lost along the way.
Once while standing at the base of a steep spiral staircase, a fever dream stole my equilibrium – the pinpoint of light above appearing like the tiny aperture at the end of a camera lens as my fluttering eyelids attempted to bring it into focus. Heights have never felt quite right, yet that bright white eye at the top of the ceiling suddenly seemed more appealing than I could’ve dreamed possible at the moment of my ascent.
Damned if we do, damned if we don’t. There’s a dam in this river where logs used to float and jam up downstream, a rusting reminder of a once booming industry, like the billowing smokestack of the paper mill today, tainting our blue skies with toxic plumes of gray, the air stinking like shit whichever way the wind decides to take it. But the land continues to give and we continue to live, flippant of the stern reality that we are (and always have been) at its mercy.
Haunted Avenues 