A Syrupy Slide

A short stack of thick pancakes, thigh high rump pumpers sloshing white whipped butter into my syrupy reflection, helping me digest my wife’s words regarding it being a good thing in fact that Katz had had such a long line. My French toast being good enough to relate to her the passerby comments of the place being overrated. The line here so much less, I say, and coffee on tap. We do better in diners anyways, not trying to prove anything to anybody.
 
But let me tell you, my accomplishments are worth toasting over.
 
To which she agrees, saluting me into the nearest liquor store and buying me a bottle’s worth of Rittenhouse, which I picked out, before tossing three ibuprofen into my head which was on course to painful sleepiness.
 
The sky, a shredded chuck of cotton candy, catches against the door, tearing space between the stars and sucking time into the void. The shadow realm becomes me as I knock my feet through the sidewalk. Floating in the disconnect, I reach the key of myself back into my pocket and turn back towards my true life lived in death. Home again, I’m coming though I cannot go. My feet spinning scenery around the puzzle at my core.
 
Let them be the way they are, says the wind. There are things you don’t need to think about. There is a pain in your muscles loosened by taking a back seat to matriarchies, minorities, sexual preferences, and political ideologies. The clatter is of the earth. You are the cream of the crop, says my dad quietly over his shoulder. And you are loved, says Oona, which is more than most can say.
 
A smoothing tide of coursing music washes over the plaque in my bones, eroding my spirit into the scene where I can be the room, my thoughts painting the walls with my dreams which are roaming beyond my ears in flocks of noise draining into the pillow, the mattress half cocked against the curb, a raft through the trash into the mountain’s maw.
 
A cold wind turns the whiskey into a fifteen year scotch that was bottled back in 2001. That’s all the way back into my freshman year of highschool, back before my first drop down in Mexico which was paired with a cigar’s first smoke to touch my lungs, back before vaping was possible, before my first cigarette. Such a sneaky kid, always floating away. First it was my family, then my friends, into the arms of my wife, and now away from her as I’m sneaking away into the only place that I can get myself to sneak to these days, the internet, or shall I better say the we of us.