Breathe out.
Shove the impetus of the dark week of telephones and politics and annoyance out.
Breathe in.
Suck in the warmth of her sweetness that you can’t ignore. Suck in the wonderment that you can’t deny. Suck in the freedom, the patience, suck in the maybe.
Maybe you’ll get it straight in the dark neon of a Friday night. Maybe you’ll forget the nine-to-five, maybe you’ll forget the reasons you let it go. Maybe you’ll forget the mistrust you’ve learned over all the years.
Breathe out.
Force the disillusion of faith away, make the minor chords of reality force the major chords’ lies away. Dye ‘em black. Your heart can’t go out ’cause its roots are showing.
Breathe in.
Suck in the hydrofluorocarbons, stare at the brown river, feel the cold of winter that 17 years of no winter have left you unadjustable to. Make metaphors and similes and statements of literary and situational irony in your head equating the winter and the life you have with being dead.
Breathe out.
Stuff the non-opiate painkillers down your throat for sleep, live vicariously through people you know five years younger that have “got their shit together”, not because they want to, but because they have to.
Breathe in.
Stare at the bottom of that brown bottle like it has something to say that you haven’t heard before. Stare across that frozen lake like the cold breeze and the stinging white light will clear your mind and make you think of something you didn’t before.
Breathe out.
Go to bed hoping all of these confusing fucking thoughts will go away in the morning when you throw on your dress-pants-and-button-up-collar-shirt uniform and camp your ass in a cubicle farm.
Breathe in.
Lie to yourself.
Breathe out.
Lie to yourself.
Breathe in.
Lie you yourself so much that you believe. Believe everyt’ing gon’ be alright. Smell that salty spray that you miss so much. Drive down Okeechobee Blvd., letting the sunset chase you to the ocean. Drive down A1A, from Manalapan all the way down to Lantana, with that salty spray in your nose and the warmth of a South Florida sunrise bathing your face in dreams you didn’t have because you didn’t sleep. Drive 75 to 24, running from your problems. Florida, then Georgia, then Tennessee, then Alabama, then Tennessee again, then Kentucky, then that long drive through Illinois.
Breathe out.
It’s 2002, and then it’s 2007, not so different from the 2001 that you left behind. But things are different. Friends are real. Friends aren’t the ones you find in a chemical used for couples therapy in the 70’s. They’re people that you love and care about. They’re the brothers you never had, and they all happen to be brothers.
Breathe in.
Let the tears run down your cheek as one of them tries to slip away right in front of you, like two of the best friends you had six years ago did right in your face.
Breathe out.
Speak the words you had no chance to say to the first two. Stand with the two others who can stop this one from going. Pray with all the faith you have left that this one will stop.
Breathe in.