I have distance
I have distance from my self. I am able to hold out my hand where I see the palm and its heel and converging lines all the way to slight grey veins that begin to fan out and wrap outward and the hand sits atop the small silhouette of an apartment building with a broad roof that extends even slightly beyond the reach of my thumb. In moments of approaching my own body I see a wrist at the base of my hand giving route to veins that blood may return to the heart. I hold my hand at a distance at which the distance is drawn out of me. I see the expanse which has left me in the plains to reassemble my self stretched out across my forearm the visualization of which has made me to feel cohesive. The apartment houses swirl up the hills around blind corners and lights devour the expanses outside my body and between my body and the apartments and between the apartments and the hill and the road which ties them yet the route of which may lead me to return only to another barren patch of soil not suitable to sleep within.
The distances of lawns and sidewalks establish me as distinct from the homes and the shadows that corral shrubs into impossibilities and I have not slept at night in days. Those distances creep into my own body. My consciousness is the decentralized hum of the city where spaces hum alone and some hum to hide the humming of those not distant enough and there are parts of me in each that can know only the lines converging on my hand as an isolated web of information beyond which are shadows and questions about the coverage of a juniper shrub and the time lights come on in certain windows. Each hum of me is isolated, regarded in turn by another fragment of an entire consciousness that can never see itself but within which are all the distances across which each body has the space to regard each body and within which each fragment isolates again itself by reacting only to the most fractional understanding of the hum of the city or the hum of my hand or the hum of a hiding place lit up by the waking dawn. I am selfish in each moment that I see each of these apartment homes in relation to my own distance from them and my own devastation at the barrenness of Idaho. It is the responsibility of the fallen night to flatten the terrain that keeps me from lit walls and shadowy crannies. The windows sometimes blooming at dusk across lawns are, in the night’s indiscriminate foreshortening, mine to caress as isolated packets. Like my hand, they regard me, and like themselves, floating, I am ratified by their luminous acknowledgement.