DEAD AND GONE

It was the dead of winter and I was trying to heal myself back in Oklahoma in a tiny cabin my father rented me near the lake. The lake was half dried up and I quickly discovered there was no insulation in the walls of the cabin. I slept beneath a mountain of blankets near two plug in heaters which made strange knocking sounds throughout the night. I would lie in bed in the mornings, watching my breath in the golden sunlight as the flock of geese in the field behind me heckled the world until all at once they would lift off and head out over the mountain to the lake. One day I went for a walk and saw a blue heron in an irrigation ditch. It stood on one leg and calmly turned its head and looked at me then looked away. I scrambled over some boulders and found myself on a beach amongst the corpses of many thousand dead fish bleached white in the sun. What has happened here? I thought. What has happened to us all? Just then, an enormous C-5 from the Air Force base roared overhead. My entire childhood was spent with those giant beasts flying night and day through the sky. It was all connected, every bit of it was completely connected. I remembered an ancient man that nodded at me a few years earlier on an empty cobblestone street in Milan. I remembered sitting across from a sad, obese woman on a crowded subway train in New York. It was the way she clutched her purse in her lap with her head down, never once looking up. I had never seen someone so ashamed of themselves. I remembered the homeless man on Park Avenue who rose up out of a heap of boxes. He had a long white beard and white hair and his eyes were the brightest blue I had ever seen. It was as if no one else was there but the two of us. And he looked right through me with those incredible eyes, those watery blue eyes, and then he looked up at the buildings or maybe it was the sky? He winced and grunted and then dropped back down into his cardboard home. I stood there among those dead fish, watching that big plane arc across the sky, thinking about these things, wondering what was going to happen, what would happen to me, to us all, all of us still here, living out our days upon this silly world until we too were dead and gone.