Chapter 2 Draft: Counterweights Don't Always Show Up On Time

2. Counterweights Don't Always Show Up On Time

When I stepped into Denver, I was overcome by a mix of smells. This was highly unusual, as there were pesky polyps in my sinuses continually playing red rover with pollen and pastries. I'm sure I was reacting to a combination of the unfamiliar and all movement around me, but I was sure it was spring and summer in a potpourri dish. The walls were dried out and ready to share their aroma.

Trying to act nonchalant, I made my way to the departure display. My flight to Salt Lake City was delayed two hours. The weather outside was fashioned from the stuff that made carolers belt out into the starry night sky. I had been through this drudgery before, so I found myself a nook to briefly scribble in before I set out to find some food. It may have been the snowflakes outside, but I was drawn to the figure of an old Japanese man strolling through a sun dried landscape. It was calming and took the form of twisted clocks.

For as long as Kaji could remember, he’d had a partial yearning for the desert breeze. When the scolding air slammed against his cheeks, everything stopped in wait for his reaction. He was caught between wonderment from the blinding flash and desperation for immediate relief. The kinetic foundations of the godless horizon mixed with desert skin. With rolling mounds on either side of him, the wind billowed in like so many furious bones.

Kaji’s stilted sandals quietly cracked against pebbles beneath as the beady sky tried to force desperate conversations to all that would listen. A large reed hat shielded him from smalltalk. It was curious that reeds weren't available to harvest here, nor were the contents in his satchel, but such thoughts were unyielding to resolution. He was a solitary laborer on an isolated plane, with no one to voice these kindly musings to. 

His knees creaked as Kaji’s body bore the weight of a frivolous pullover. Age was a casualty to this place, destitute and meaningless. He had forgotten how to measure rhythmic events. It had fallen to the wayside with parallax and monuments. This place was just him and the universe's children. Connected by golden threads, everyone else pays bidding to their thoughts and sentiments. We struggle to find meaning while they lay hidden, weighted by stones and dust, on all sides, in rows upon rolling rows.

In a sense, he was devoid of meaning, being unique among everyone else, without a puppeteer to guide his every intimate moment. Though, he was still unsure, which is more appealing. Sometimes he could see countless lines jutting out of the desert landscape, blending into the bright sky. Permanently glowing with splotches of white and champagne. A rippled record on repeat.

He could still recall some moments, before infinity gained his trust. Flapper dancers Louis Armstrong.

As he walked down an aisle of dislocated and desperate ideas, he came across a pair of touching hands, sticking out of the dirt and into the garden trenches. Out of place limbs were not wholly unusual, but a connection like this was subtlety concerning.

Writing this down brought familiarity to a complex of nestled recluses inside of me. One floor housed dozens of mathematicians and sorority girls, while another one was full of empty space. This ancient man was meaningful to me. I had been thinking about him for some time.

An hour and a half before my flight was scheduled to leave, I decided to scavenge for food. The airport industry is full of fast food and magazine racks, so I found myself gravitating towards a sit down Japanese restaurant. It wasn't a coincidence that I was also reading a book by Murakami. When I get into a novel, I become highly influenced by the characters routines. Murakami was known for describing the food and daily minutia in detail.  I always feel more at ease when reading one of his books.

I ordered a teriyaki chicken bowl and searched for a good spot to sit. Sometimes I feel like these decisions are life changing. Should I sit next to the obviously disinterested teenager or the shaken middle aged man? I took a gamble and ventured toward the man.  He wore a white leather jacket and matching hat. He looked like someone whom the world had repeatedly ignored, someone who desperately wanted to be heard, but had been brushed aside for forty years. Maybe he had been blindly turned over so many times that I appeared irrelevant to his cause. I laid my book on the counter, started to pick at my meal, and read about unicorn skulls. It absorbed me immediately and I had to frequently take conscious breaks to eat. Generals passed skulls to universities, which eventually led to tuning forks and sensitive eyes. 

When I was finished I put Murakami back in my bag and looked around the room for confirmation of reality. The leather man was focused on a sculpture of a twisted train track. His eyes moved like he was languidly watching a steam engine follow through loops and whirls. I briefly thought about unmasking my thoughts on him. How vibrantly empty this place was, with age old waste bins and restless exchanges of oxygen and carbon monoxide. There wasn't a single tree in sight, just fake representations. Maybe Plato was on to something. This was a strange place and this man happened to accidentally mimic a dead albino leopard. I wanted to tell him how fitting it was that he was eating here. In a not so Japanese restaurant with a not so natural backdrop wearing a not so energetic mammal. I could see him having plastic kids who took summer jobs in clothing stores. The belly of this was unrealistic. I gently tossed my bag over my shoulder and walked toward the departure gate. As I was leaving I could see him blend into the white walls around me.

On the way to A24 I stopped to see if my flight was delayed any longer. It was conveniently bearing on the already late course, no detours. Life can sometime make you feel like your at the teetering center, when you learn a new word or idea that suddenly becomes popular. It's this deception that can make fate so sporadically appealing. Maybe I was inside a translucent alien box that resonated with everyone around me, to bend wills and fool its contents. Or maybe the plane was just late. With this in mind, I sauntered toward the seating areas outside A24 with forty-five minutes left.

I found a seat on the fringe of two gates. San Diego to my left and Salt Lake City to the right. There were three middle aged ladies sitting between me, a television, and an exit sign. They were talking excitedly about inspirational conferences and pastel hair ties. The conversations were so disjointed it was difficult to exactly decipher their overall intentions. I reached into my bag and decided to read more about inklings and unicorns, in an attempt to distract myself. It was no use. All I could hear were strange epiphanies emanating from talking heads in green blazers and pink blouses.

"It changed my life forever."

"His ten easy steps completely redesigned who I am as a person."

"You've got to try this new cleanse."

In frustration, I fixed my eyes on the television. The commotion drowned out the sound, but it appeared like a newscast anchor was giving highlights from last nights talk shows. Between Leno and Letterman, I caught a flash of Kaki King playing in front of a blue backdrop. There was my focus. There was my distraction. It was a reminder of how hard and delicate we could be. Years ago, when I first saw her on stage, I felt a shift in consciousness. All the guitarist in the past century immediately put down their instruments and realized they had been playing everything wrong. She was so beautiful. It was a blur of hands and an expression that fit inside each fret she touched. Without hearing the sounds, I could feel the abstract vibrations in my finger tips. Music was the only thing that could reshape me like this. I could name the albums that morphed me into a sharp staircase, each step a new way of thinking. The more I thought about this the more I knew, I was really no different than these women.

When I resurfaced my eyes above this sobering moment I was sitting on the plane staring at my old friends, the digital clouds. My row had two seats and I was alone, next to the window, staring at a mountain. I use to have such an affinity for mountains. Each one was filled with rocky springboards alongside shrubbery and jittering pebbles. They inhaled with a force so powerful it couldn’t be seen. When I was young I thought it was God and when i grew up I knew it was patience.  I once shared this experience with Summer.  She was a young christian girl who lived in a newly constructed housing development near a friend of mine.  To me, she was what a petty coat is to most men, an in-style garment to avoid the weather.

Let me preface this by saying that I now consider my actions juvenile and beyond repair, regardless of how you look at it.  I wasn’t fond nor very close to my friend that lived up the street from her.  He was frustratingly annoying, much like a toddlers sippy cup in the middle of the road. I had a difficult time justifying our relationship, until I met Summer.  He was stuck in a vicious childhood crush.  The type of faulty pressure that masks itself like a drug users casualty without the option for rehab.  He begged for Summer’s companionship and she kept him at arms length, unable to stop his motives and wreck his delicate frame.  I’ve never seen someone more nervously fragile.  She was as friendly and witty as they come, growing up in a structured home-school environment.  A place that favored the timid and oppressed, a place that begged for friendship outside of family.  So, they found each other one day out of necessity.  Both profited from this encounter, one searching for pride and the other yearning for the sun.

It’s difficult to say when I stepped into this equation, but I took to Summer’s elegance immediately.  Never had someone made me feel so unique.  She was passionate about intriguing ideas and notions that resonated with within my amber eyes.  To this day, I imagine her curled up in a ball, somewhere between the water line and the pebble tech of her pool.  The sky would rush through it’s daily routines and the tectonic plates would grind against their neighbors, but she was free from their actions.  An immobile breathless object immune to the Earth’s clatter.  I didn’t fall in love with her until much later, though I’m sure I could have if I paid attention.  Our interests in each other was something like a game of chess played through the post office.  Summer was always several moves ahead and I was too lazy to read her responses.  When she was fond of me, I was oblivious to her needs.  When I was fond of her, I took advantage of her convenience.  It was during the latter that I called her and asked that we meet on the outcropping our mountain.

What the millennia had made wasn’t impressive and on a map it appeared a bastard son to the local ranges, but this mountain was important to us. It had character and was able to insert nostalgia into our lives with very little effort.  I had succumb to a night of drinking and debauchery that was foreign to me and there was a yearning to wear her around my shoulders.  It was odd how I separated her, someone so important to me, from everyone else in my life.  My only comfort is the daily admission that metaphysics and reality never fit well for me.  Or maybe I just can’t admit my mistakes with honesty.  Regardless, I met her on a bench that the community added, probably promote outdoor exercise.  She was wearing jeans, a gray hoodie, and her usual glasses.  I’ve always been a partial to glasses.  We didn’t speak much at first, but walked down to the adjacent golf course.  It was nighttime and I’m sure I unconsciously led us there because I wasn’t comfortable with the innocence of the mountain.  It was a beacon of nostalgia to us, but I couldn’t take it’s glare. 

We stretched out on the surface of the driving range, at the top of a ridge that looked over the days failures. Both of us knew what was happening, but we trekked on anyways.

"Do you remember when I forgot your birthday?"

She took in this admitted error with ease. 

"Yes, but it wasn't your fault. How have you been lately?"

"I've made some mistakes I'm not proud of. I think I may have had sex with someone, but I was drunk and can't really remember...I should have been with you when you needed me. I'm sorry."

"You'll always be precious in my eyes."

"Just bad timing"

She nodded in silence. The yard lights that dotted the scenery flooded my eyes. A white blur shimmered with a violence akin to found footage horror movies. I was thousands of feet above Salt Lake City. The other passengers didn't seem to notice these time skips as much as I did. Sure, some of them were phasing back into life from a patch induced nap, but I'm sure I had interacted with the stewardess during the flight. There was a half empty cup of water on the tray above my lap. Clocks were warping through speakeasies in my brain. The thumping of my heart moved my limbs while people filtered through synapses and empty tubes.

The stewardess asked me to put my tray in its upright position and prepare for landing. I looked under my seat, but there weren't any eddies or torrents beneath. The descent was full of clarity. The bags shook with a sharp rapping above our heads and the pilots voice took residence in a halo around us. In this spiritual moment, I couldn't stop thinking about how green the golf course had been.