exchanging occasional messages with people who do not at all care and to who you don’t even fully exist

the pile of yesterday’s at your feet grows by the day. every so often, you fold. you assess. you place some back in their drawer, back on their hangar. some get wadded into the gray mesh bag, slumped onto a different section of flooring, left to wait.

it is a stunning day.

a salt breeze from the north and from the west angles perfectly into your opened doors. the tape that holds your plastic door in some semblance of together, it has dried in the briny air. it flaps like nationless flag in the mineral air.

it is a stunning day.

in the parking lot of the local store, they set up a grill under an awning meant to shelter bicycles. people mill about, lightly moving their heads in time to the smear of parking lot music. hands in their pockets. political slogans on their hats. hair in the same cut since high school. decades ago.

it is a stunning day.

youth taut and lithe bounds and flashes. chemical scent like super cell. age slow and shifting moves little save for the tremor of the hand, the slide of the velvet eye. sloughing scent fervent like sigh.

it is a stunning day.

the hillsides both a monolith of forest and a dazzle of so many individual trees. a young body sits all day on a dock, waiting, waiting, waiting. hours go by, whole days. Summer has ended. Fall drops in all around us. the air tastes of moss, of rock. the breeze out of the north, out of the west, angles perfectly in through your opened doors.