the real truth about it is
nobody gets it right
I had hoped listening to the song at maximum volume with my eyes closed would magically transport me to another time, like it had so many times in the past.
I like it here, now, but I’m dragging my feet. I’m safest behind the wheel of my car. Somewhere in a suburban metropolis, in a strip mall with nail salons, pizza places, and shuttered travel agencies. It’s better here than anywhere else.
Shot out of a cannon with high-speed goggles on, bending time and space, breaking barriers only visible to atoms and ants. But then I wonder, do they see or do they feel? It couldn’t be possible. They can’t feel like us. They can’t feel like I can feel.
I’m scribbling little poems into my phone while the truck idles outside gymnastics. Kids in sparkles flip figure eights above the bar. I’m squeezed between two G Wagons. Dads talking loudly with their hands. I can almost hear them through the volume of a song they would never listen to, by an artist they’d probably scoff at.
Rain pours down. The wipers are off. The windshield blurs a busy Pennsylvania road at the start of rush hour. They’re working on the concrete. Horns won’t stop. Brake lights smear into red streaks.
The song starts to peak, and I can feel a little more, like I used to. I fight the urge to air strum a beat up Fender, but there’s no one left to perform for.
It’s hard to sit still. Numbness would suffice. Numbness or stillness, almost interchangeable.
I can’t imagine waking up with a drive to go to war. A drive to insert myself where I’m not wanted.
When it rains, the driveway fills with worms. I stopped trying to avoid them a long time ago. The bottoms of my shoes squish against the WeatherTech mats, gravel dragged in over months.
But I used to feel, hard, pulsing, red hot. The kind of feeling with the strength of a thousand suns. The kind that made you do something about it.
Maybe the ones who go to war still have that.
The fog gets so thick it feels better to just close my eyes and let the butterflies trace crooked circles on the inside of my eyelids.
I’m watching Kate Smith sing God Bless America on a Jumbotron in the seventies. I’m on a stage in New York City playing to an empty room. I’m in a basement with rats scurrying. I’m in that interview, scared. I’m getting pulled into the Atlantic by a riptide. I’m putting lemon in my hair, smoking weed out of a Coke can.
I’m sucking blood from my knee, watching my friend’s sister jump on a trampoline in a bikni. I’m saying something stupid to a girl while she laughs. My face is so red it hurts, like every eye that’s ever existed is on me. I’m lying face down on the ice after a hit from behind, waiting to find out if my spine still works.
I don’t know if any of it happened like that. Or if it happened at all. Or if these are just stories I sell myself.
I hug myself and whisper, to no one, that it’s all fine.
I turn the song up louder. The G Wagons growl back, offended by the unboxiness of my car.
I’m selling the dream louder than anyone here.
I flip on my phone’s voice note, something I can’t forget.
I’m selling the dream to myself. No one else is buying.
What happened to regret? That was a good thing, right? After tonight, everything is going to be the same. I can feel it coming, that tightness behind my nasal cavity.
I have to be a man. No one can ever see me like this. No one.
These sad songs and waltzes don’t sell anymore.
I got lost for awhile inside Tree of Smoke. Coming out the other side, I am a bit disoriented, like usual.
James Schuyler is known for his poetry, but his first novel Alfred and Guinevere is really special.