You start with a wisp of memory, or some detail that won’t let you be. You write, you cross out. You write again, revise, feel like giving up. What pulls you through? Curiosity.

~ Abigail Thomas, What Comes Next and How to Like It: A Memoir

It’s an all-night dance at The Alibi.

The strobes, the churning, my personal whitewater at the base of a long spillway of a hydroelectric dam.

I pull the left shoulder back and tug it hard to roll away from a throbbing right, and then settle heavily on the left. A desperate search for comfort.

A handless re-positioning of the knee pillow, a defensive moat shielding bone on bone impact, a life-to-date action now into the tens of thousands. And counting.

Voices drift into the dreamless oblivion. The unreal is more powerful than the real…Stone crumbles. Wood rots…But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on.¹

A chill, a pulling up of the covers, and the play repeats.

Left shoulder pull
Right shoulder roll
Right knee tuck
Left knee slide
Voices
Covers

They can go on and on…

Notes:

• Image: Anna Vihastaya (Listening to Silence) via les-yeux-avides
• ¹ Quote by Chuck Palahniuk. Thank you Whiskey River.