Speeding
I want to stay up all night and all day for a week, to feel the bugs crawling along my skin, to watch them scale the vast white walls of my apartment, black, skittering, the noise of a thousand legs on drywall.
I want to be fast, too fast, not enough time to think and when I do think it’s profound, of the moment, my synapses tossing around adjectives and verbs and nouns and somehow collecting them so that they make sense in a poetic kind of way and I would dance around with them, would need no company but my own words and the cat and maybe another friend, another speed freak. We would break into mailboxes and steal identities. We’d take shredder confetti and tape it back together, the speed freak’s dream of a task, so important, it requires concentration and a bit of lucid hallucination, us in the empty factory with the fans hovering above us and the ghosts of the old machinery whispering.
I can almost see the women with their grey faces and washed-out uniforms, can feel the suppressed thoughts and wants, the decades of tamping down of need, of creativity, so that at the end of the shift they left smaller somehow, more compact, robbed of a part of themselves, the rest stuffed into a corner in their minds.
There we’d be with our barrel of confetti and our Scotch tape, fitting together the credit card bills and the documents like puzzles, focusing on the paper, the pieces, against the shuffling of the women’s feet.
Can you feel them? Generations of women leaking lives out on the floor, leaving a part of themselves? I want to tell them that they are not forgotten, that every life matters, that I will listen to their dreams and record them after the high has worn off and I’m left alone with my thoughts, my too-slow thoughts. Their stories, meandering and long, will bring me back to earth, will be my touchstone, my grounding.
They are here. They tug at our sleeves, tells us to stop wasting our lives. “You have so much,” they gesture to the air, to the needles on the table beside us. “Don’t throw it away.” A gust of wind scatters the confetti and you put your head on the table and cry while I comfort you, touching your shoulder, remembering the solidity of flesh.
From the prompt "Speeding."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Image by sassymonkeymedia.
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