Up and down along the road I go. The same road. Yellow strips the only thing protecting one car from another. A hopeful calculus for the anxious. A misery for a mightnight rider belly-packed with beer.
Past the coffee — wicked, bitter grounds fine as fog, an inhalation hazard. Past the man in the highlighter vest, his helmet a brown and bald head soaking up and bouncing a white-hot sun ray into my windshield.
And then the car door opens before I know it. I’m whisked by the wind into the cold, hugging myself in a scratchy coat. An skew-parked Escalade runs a soft, purring engine to my right. There is no one in there car. I’m a ghost, too.
Punch the code, one sliding door opens.
Even inside, it’s cold. The aluminum walls vibrate with a chill. They breathe out waves of a subtle but oppressive cold. The spirit of air splits at the four-way intersections beneath a tangle of sputtering flouresence.
The ramshackle door screams against the track. My short frame guides it up and up until there’s no more arm to give or no more track to go.
Inside, a cospe of repurposed trees, now the lifeless brown of corrugation, set against the heartiness of plastic bins. And between the walls of things, more things — though less organized. Behind each door in this place must be more of the same — islands of industry.
In the bins and boxes — for things are material-agnostic — – are things from a life I lived that I may yet live again. The journey here is nothing short of a misguided fantasy.
My foot finds holes here and there among right angle legwork and twister-grade maneuvering. Between the bike, over the broom. Hold the rusted shovel by the worn rubber handle for purchase.
I am an amateur, low-height, low-impact pole-vaulter. Soon, I reach the eye — A little isthmus I built here just for me.
When I am in the mess — part of it — my eyes hop here and there, looking for the one box I’m missing — the one filled with everything I need. The one that will solve all my problems.
I have been looking for that box since my youth.
And of course, it’s not here. Not the box I’m looking for now, nor the box I’ve been looking for since. And that is the heart of my problem.
I don’t think the box was ever there to begin with.