Road Signs (unfinished)
We all just want to be loved, loved perfectly, the way we would love ourselves
if, even we, were perfect.
I keep tripping on my way up the steps towards this perfection. This is the
way traffic is flowing. This is where all the clean green reflective highway
signs are pointing. I am being shuffled into the direction all the robots are
going and I'm flailing and trying to jump to the median to stop my movement,
my free transportation on these roads that have already been driven down.
I want to do this different.
This is a detour kind of love, a detour taking me on roads I've never traveled
before, away from that place you and I have already been before, that destination
of love that ends in brainwashing and robotic symmetry of one and one, male
and female. Don't tell me that's the only way to get there. I'm so far into
this detour now that I couldn't find my way back, back to the super highway
to singular perfection.
The detours are marked with orange signs, the ones that have been sitting propped
up against the wall in the back of a road sign warehouse. The detour signs get
the dirtiest and most handled, they wear their edges jagged, splintering hands
for those that don't understand the delicacy of beauty.
Our steel supports are rusting; we sometimes fall over in a stiff wind. And
sometimes, when a semi rolls by in the middle of a warm snowstorm - the kind
where the snow is wet and sticky and covers the words we're trying to communicate
- we still fucking stand there, our structure further disintegrating the harder
and faster the snow falls.
Our evolution comes in seasons just like revolutions of the earth, but we don't
build our foundation on the belief that there will be another spin.
We know detours cause somehow our lives got off track, and all the detours before
this tricky kind of love led us for a crash in the far out, rural intersection
of Crazy and Pain. We say, "Shit. That hurt." and start tending to
our wounds. "Nothing's broken. How are you?"
One of us is up and looking around, scanning the horizon for a break in the
mediocrity, examining clouds for signs of coming weather. One of us is still
sitting on the ground with hands touching gravel, testing solidity. “Do
you guys think this is real?” Another one of us is halfway on the ground,
halfway stretching to sunshine and blue, with fingertips touching dirt in the
balancing act of earth and atmosphere. “We’re here aren’t
we?” One of us is curled into the fetal position, head to dirt, hands
covering squeezed-tight-eyes, taking on the responsibility of a breakdown for
the rest of us.
You don't need to know these names, just that there are four "one's of
us."
(to be continued...)