Wind Upon Lashes

Paris is nice in the Springtime—the sun shines unquestionably the grass stands always. My shirt began to billow in the crisp wind, and bird chirps poured into my ears while the coarse path scratched at my boots as I made my way toward a bobbing shore. The plains’ blades of grass still padded along the wet marshland like paint bristles; the coast sprung weeds from sand and sand from gravel and gravel from the cliffs.

Unadulterated sunshine slicked some poriferous rocks and bleached kelp. My knee was giving out as I stayed still, overlooking herds of livestock and the waning shore. Saline spray and mordant spit breached from the Sea into the air, and everybody pawed off their noses from the strong smell of salt and sulfur.

I sat down and propped the bones of my underside into the grass and leveled my knees with the arch of the ground—I had nice comfort and a good view to match. Some seals belched and sunbathed on distant, cracked rocks while old couples left reminiscent footprints in murky sand as they carried picnic baskets and donned silk and white dress.

The clouds strung into faded whorls while the sky grayed into an intimate, warm embrace as the wind weaved into fresh pins and pricks on my pale skin.

Pebbles began to dig into my thighs, for I was only wearing thin shorts and my skin was bruised, so I threw up my ankles into a crisscross for the pain to pass. I reached into my shirt pocket and pulled out a half-empty bottle of kirsch, and clutched it so it would not slip and roll away.

The top of my hair felt hot, so I doused what kirsch was left on my head like some amniotic fluid; the new splitting cherry smell mashed with the stewing heat, and I fell into a pillowed ecstasy.

I muscled myself onto my side to scrape up a sand mound that would lie underneath the crest of my skull so I could stare at the sky and soak in the blue without straining my neck. Fitting my body to my impression on the ground, I peered into the sky and paced my thoughts with the crashing waves.

I would think of a poem I had read a while back about this wealthy Czech, and afterward, I would ruminate on Cézanne’s carving style, and finally, I lapped into counting the crashes until I fell asleep.

Climbing the ladder of the barn cupola, I kept thinking of the dingy city line—the blue fog and pale people. The grottos’ cheap Chinese food that is much too expensive to get enough of but not fulfilling enough to eat alone—grease-stained foam containers lined with intoxicating orange chicken and clumpy chow mien. I had a poorly insulated two-room on top of a neon café—St. Meursault’s—and my fondest memories picture a third-person projection of me sitting crisscross back to my radiator with a box of cold food in my lap as I peer out of my 32nd-floor window; if anything was worth the $3,200 rent a month, it was that view.

Whorls of smokestacks accenting overly excited billboards, flashing jumbotrons of late-night shows I had never watched, and iridescent skyscrapers stretching for blocks. Snow, sleet, or hail would spill over the skyline and flesh out the world in front of me into a panorama of blurred lights, golden glass, and char asphalt. I could reach out of my apartment’s eye and graze the mystical, static kaleidoscope in front of me that pulls you under or puts you on top.

I feared that life—the uncertainty if today or tomorrow is make it or break it. The question I wake up with each morning: who will I sit next to in the metro? Where the only thoughts are teenage miscreants, heartless brokers, or halfway corpses. Should I go to work? Where I must either stomach my boss making a fool out of me for fudging up a number or lash out at the paper dispenser and go home with bloody knuckles. The pressure was getting to me, and coming home and having time to live without a timer saved me—but I still want the city; not necessarily that I, my own person, would want it, yet, my body does.

The sky flashed me with some mottled red and blue-orange as I lay on the slant from the roof spine. Storm rain pelted the cupola¹ and roof and my body; it was a refreshing cold after having been smothered in the city heat for so long. The pastel wind nudged at my sides as acidic grief built up in my chest—orbs of water beating at my feverish forehead. The sunset was peeling under the horizon as the wind kept playing with my garments: a billowing, soaked white tee and flailing trimmed black slacks. What with the chicken weathervane spinning so intensely and the water weighing heavily on my clothes, I thought it was well time to come down.

I woke up with rain welling against my sides and leveraged my body into my elbows to get up—I stared at the Sea for a moment and gulped in the sea spray, and paused right before the passing foam; I dipped down into the dark sand and kept there on my knees as the Sun melted into the night.