Written By: Genelle Chaconas
You remember without regret your sixteenth year spent at finger’s length to disaster. Any day you could have been the victim of physical tragedy, and maybe wanted to be. Some nights you’d lie on the deeper furrow of scorched gravel between the railroad tracks, your cheeks smeared with grit, then closed your eyes. That year, you could move through the burn, fire walk across the suburban asphalt tundras. No one saw. You never flinched, even when the trains passed in opposite directions, dual howls filling secret windows to a second soul. Maybe vibration could unite you, overcome and obliterate your multiple wholes in a double wave of speed. No physics applied to you. You wanted to live as a turmoil object, as though force would and could destroy you. It was a game of physical matter, the challenge to be ready to be nothing. There’s no regret now, only envy that the urge could not return at seventeen, eighteen, or ever. It would be replaced by another urge, something nameless, weary and old. Tonight, you swear you can still see the raw imprint of flesh in the hot gravel, the sound of the deep hollow whistle carrying its bones away.