Mindanever

The sun set in the cemetery at six o’clock and painted the stones hues of pink and orange.  And then they faded to blue.  The sun sets around six and rises about the same no matter the season.  There are no season really- hot and dry, hot and rainy.  Hot and dry is smellier, hot and rainy is dirtier.  Either way I am perpetually damp with sweat or raindrops.  Either way I find it impossible to mark time without changes of wardrobe and beverages.  Last month felt like it should have finally been Christmas, but it was already June and there hadn’t been a snowflake in sight.  

So no time has really passed since last summer.  I am still in a double bed on the second floor of a row house in Northeast- yellow streetlight coloring the sheets, staring at the paddle fan on the ceiling.  In many ways this is all just a dream, the people I’ve buried I never truly met, the creatures that died in my watch never existed in the first place.  In many ways I am already in the future, out the door, through a window staring at a winter storm with an American beer in hand.  In many ways I am wondering what the hell has happened to everything.  All of the houses seem too big and there is too much, just too much of everything.  

I made some coffee at 9 o’clock tonight, after we’d returned from the cemetery where we celebrated the birthday of a little girl who has been in the ground for a year and a half.  I think of how so many Westerns would consider this a morbid activity, all the while worshipping the gruesome exploitation of this girl’s relatives to fulfill their consumer-heavy quota.  I’m filled with sickness and anger.  I have not found a salve for my resentment as it pushes me to ends I’d rather not go.  The religion of the people is as rot with bitterness as capitalism is with indifference.  I have spent most of my ten month here praying at their temple.  

The home I’m lonely for no longer exists.  The winter I long for is disappearing from the earth.  There’s not a cemetery wide enough to hold our losses.