Thursday

Long slow twilight, just the baby and me. I shield her little eyes from the barbeque smoke, prod the charcoal. Gueralita sola. Bottle rockets pop and chihuahuas are the ones who really run the show on this block. Ice cream trucks are finally (finally!) silent - a neighboring dj makes a tentative Thursday offering. I put the baby to bed, crack open a beer, pull meat directly from the fire into my mouth, the way God Himself intended. Onions too. Cats are still roaming in the empty lot. All the stomae are open in the garden and the aroma of carne asada is cut throigh with soil and honeysuckle. Pandora cycles through a list of music that was new fifteen years ago. I slap her down when she brings me hootie and the blowfish, and we achieve a new level of understanding. The fire will need to be extinguished, lest the canyon burn afresh, and all the squirrels and bounce castles and mariachi with it. Can i bring you here, to this twilight? Will the words i pull together act as a preservative to anyone but myself? This fleeting assembly of moments, the private memories that i havent even shared brought about by the music playing, the way that one bright crescent planet hangs there; can i give any of this to you, truly? After Nova is asleep in her little nest, empty gums determinedly working some phantom air nipple, am i still alone if i reach out through the internet and tell you about my steak, my beer, my neighborhood? Does it dilute the solitude? Or simply present it for your appreciation, a dusky purple summer magic trick - solitude shared in the hum of helicopter blades, children laughing far away, cool air, hot grill. The promise of the workday tomorrow. The soft cheeks of the slumbering infant upstairs. Matter, energy, considering itself for a moment. I have an evening, its tones and textures represented as a series of impulses in a vast wet network of thrumming cells. I make some letters and now your cells are thrumming too and you can maybe even see the sillhouette of the hills against the darkening sky, the observatory, the stadium, hear the freeway. But even if we were sitting next to each other, eating the same tacos and listening to the same Tom Petty would we be any less alone? Would we be any less identical? When the universe is so freaking vast how can we even think of ourselves as separate anyway?