The More You Wait, The More You Wait
By: Davy Carren
Tags: Life Change, Moving On, Fiction, Human Prompt

I was right in the middle of retooling the junk shop of my head when I got delayed by someone else’s lateness. It wasn’t the brightest mode of being that I’d discovered, but it lighted my days well enough. I made sweeter rolls of decisions into ragged pastries of inaction. Everything I was in the habit of giving voice to was being taken lightly as sprinkled powdered sugar anyway. And then, without even an intonation to my name, I thought, “Well, that’s a recipe for resting in peace earlier than you’d like.” All these people with bad breath asking me worse questions. Right or wrong, I’m getting away from this…all of this. It’s not like telling someone who’s insisting on pestering you to just shut up. Get all those tattoos redone. Change your hair style. Wink and frown at harmless strangers with bowtie souls and grape-jelly appetites. Be someone different. Take the roots of home back where you left them: all ways always away. Just another cheap Christ substitute that you’re spilling all over me. Christ. Just the messenger. What’s the matter with a dirty mouth if it gets you a reprieve from thoughts of dying? And dying’s just the one truth you get to have in this life, the only thing you can depend upon. Montana’s got better shrubbery for my disposition. Or maybe Ann Arbor. Besides, I get too planted in the desert’s barren lack, and then, well, all of my shouldered chips and ships start shuddering with the damned dry-land shakes, brittle and fast all the way to my bones. Both feet in the disappointing shallow near. But that’s a matter of taste. Still, I don’t plan on any of it sticking. All of my pipe dreams just get cracks and grow rust and leak all over the pusillanimity of my rotting sanity. A plague of choices that keep making themselves. Another poor excuse to run out off, or on. Plus, I’m sick to life of all the cancer-wielding chemical purveyors around here giving sweet gals heart attacks to cry like bowlegged, armless mannequins over. Ok. I’ll be the one running out like dawn from an ocean liner, settling on a new, unique, statement-less fashion where people don’t know my name or my best sort of weather. Purpose suits without a plan, or pants. Just set on something, you know, and get done what needs doing while you’ve still got the time, before you’re long dead and gone, singing a huffer’s lullabies to the streetlights. All these boring plain girls who’ve never saved my life before, with their failed fake emergencies and their lost train tickets, their hectic freeway driving and their sad pouting manipulations, who never smoke cigarettes while riding beach cruisers, and who never face the aft of generalities, generally just wasted, in a way I once always was. Names get elusive but faces char along the banks of memory. Hell. It’s like silent ambulance streamed through glass particles of sleep — a real sustenance chaser. And me here, alone and griping, now with both kids lost to this godawful war. Damn it. Just a scene for the credits to roll over. Honestly. I miss the clatter of dishes and that special crunch that a pie tin makes between fingers. So, well, I’m getting gone while you’re still sifting through hindsight’s plenty, and more, as the fridge’s buzzing rises to a cacophonous roar with desuetude’s long, long senility. You see, there’s just not another roundtrip left in these galoshes. I do not know what it is about me that fades before it ever has a chance to bloom. Besides, there aren’t any toes, not even a lily’s, that are softer than the snow’s.

I’ll take the check now, please.