You aren't in a bar ordering a Wild Turkey, aren't looking for work, aren't talking to Jeff about the account that leveraged municipal bonds against Treasury bonds and at some time in the near future dissolved.
You aren't worried about the numbness in your arm.
You aren't thinking what's the point.
You aren't going around saying, "If this, if that, then I'm out of here. Maybe Canada. Maybe Iceland, if it doesn't melt."
You aren't the woman bumping into me with each turn of the subway whispering an incantation against our blowing up, buried alive.
You aren't out of breaths.
You aren't weighted down, fifty extra pounds. You aren't wondering if you need help. You aren't thinking, "I won't go to the car to eat the Fritos hidden in the trunk with the spare tire."
I wonder if you are like Stanley, asking me why I didn't put him in the acknowledgements. You are my therapist, that's why, I told Stanley. I thought we were friends, you would've said, if you were Stanley.
You aren't pretending to take pills because you're afraid of the side effect: aneurysm.
You aren't falling asleep two minutes into the twenty-six minute body scan meditation tape.
You aren't standing on a subway platform waiting for me, or in a doorframe somewhere, or maybe in my checkout line.
The Greeks called it apostrophe, this turning away to talk to imaginary things. Or absent figures, gods and parents. O death! O Father! In words, the apostrophe signals omitted letters, like the no of can't.
O second person! O you! O missing letter! Where might you be hiding? Where might you be found?
© 2013 Randall Brown
