(no subject)

I knew I'd camped on the river too long when the first person I saw in town was as fascinating as a dying soprano. She charged the whole air with the meaning of the last seconds of an opera. And she was sixty-five or so, had awful teeth, a hairy neck and shorted me a nickel giving change for my cigarettes and candy bar. I didn't want to let our meeting go. We kept nodding at each other, her less and less certainly, me moreso. But somewhere between her and the second I met, the mailman, that magic dissolved. Let me correct that to nearly all of it. There was a crackle playing at the edges of his hair and ears, the stress folds at his uniform's elbows, the zigzag brights at the tops of his boots and especially the toetips. Like the morning itself had been waxed into them. Just enough, really, to confirm both the reliability of the phenomenon and how quickly it was bound to fade. It was a bit like when you were a kid and a stranger stays over at the house - a distant relative or your father's business associate. We sometimes use the word starvation in this context, starvation for attention, for a new perspective, for a shake of the rug. I'm not saying it's not like that, but I think it helps us see a bit more of what starvation's like than we usually do: it's not just that there's food missing from your insides, there's also food missing from the center of another you you didn't remember existed till then, the you in your head. This you is sized differently, and mostly transparent, and in places on permanent fire, and when empty his stomach stretches all through him like a second nervous system, seething not exactly as a fire would but more of a churning mist, unstable in most ways but reliably ninety-eight six. But the stranger thing about this second you is he's not just a you, but a little patch of transparent land covered in avant garde glassworks. And looming large in this apparatus are a couple people-shaped vessels a bit behind you, in the peripheral viewzone, touching you, somewhere back there unobtrusively but definitely wired or soddered into you. And in front of you, and this is where the opera comes in, the opposite of a statue. Facing you. The one thing that will ever face that second you that's maybe really the first or only you. These vacancies get mostly filled, by what's immediately around you mixed with what you're most used to seeing, your day, at most week content. All sorts of faces congregate in that convex right before you, melt and merge like funhouse mirror flesh-flows playing tag. You get so you're seeing them come and go, telling them apart not just by eyesight but as presences up in your head, till you forget that little island exists apart, as something more than the lamplight formed by your reach and other sensory horizons. That cold gleam of glass only hits when something's missing. When you're out past safe water so far a first raft-plank gives way. We can stand when there's no floor, but it's no longer standing. Every surface in that clump, that ghost island brain bunch, is floor. But only when there's planks enough to hold them up. You see why we forget. Nobody wants to remember being hungry. It's a memory almost as unpleasant as biting into spoiled food. Which makes it almost my story, you're guessing. But not mine alone.