We Must Constantly Be Jumping Off Cliffs and Developing Our Wings on the Way Down, K. Vonnegut

My bags are full again. Zippers bulge like cheeks full of air, eyes popping, waiting to exhale. On the living room carpet pieces of remaining luggage, the stragglers, the weak limbed gimps, left behind, to fall prey to the hunters, the savage beasts of arbitrary sorting, saving, stowing beneath boxes of boxes of bags of bags in a garage waiting to be purged, begging for illness to tickle a gag. The sad eyes of ink lined diaries, exotic toys, and widowed socks waiting in line to be seated and watching the doors close with a mechanic zip. Steam pours from the stacks above and slowly with great effort and a hint of fatalism the great black engine pulls itself forward and with it all those displaced souls who relish in the neither-here-nor-there gap, when life the motion of life is seen as if in fast forward, the forests fall to drought and desert, tectonic plates shift secret and slow forming mountains in the plains, jagged cliffs scream for the sky, a coastline crawls up to the land pushes back the sands ebbs, recollects, and pushes forth again. I am within the body of a worm, removed from the sizzle of life, no longer a liver, a pusher and puller, a thinker, a worrier, now a spectator, a sitter, a be-er, a being.

Briefly to see or think to see a world at once large and small, at once beneath my feet and in my mouth and above my head and in my hand. To believe, without irony, in happiness, and hope without hope in the moment.

San Francisco pulls me like a slingshotted astronaut from the moon, like an arrow shot into the sky which eventually must return to the land, like a pebble tossed into an abandoned well, gravity now leads me onward, and with little thought of how or why, I plunge into a new unknown.

* * *

It’s a two and a half day ride across the desert from Fort Worth to San Francisco. I’ve got ramen to keep me full and Arabian Nights to keep me company. I’m riding coach and the train is packed. It’s 102 degrees in Fort Worth and 65 degrees in San Francisco. I don’t have a job, I don’t have a home. I have my fingers crossed.