Then again, when has the power of sight ever failed in painting the more resonant picture? Top of Rockefeller Center in New York City…the newly opened suicide dreamer’s Candyland.
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Some things, I’ll never understand. Like heights, for example. Or Vertigo…and why the fuck I put myself through it.
My fingers need to touch foundation, no wandering.
Short, quick breaths…constant shivers.
Testicles retreat into my lower intestines.
People think I’m a 24-year-old crack baby.
I make unsettling, involuntary noises.
I close my eyes and dart through narrow passages with the bravado of John Bobbit moments before his second, “first” sexual encounter.
I laugh to myself…a calming of the nerves.
The alarm in my stomach calls for vomit…but nothing is locked or loaded.
Bitter, freezing wind. Every moment, I waited for it to blow hard enough to dust me off the landing, foster my date with destiny. That never happened.
There were three platforms...and stairs leading to those platforms. This means one could elect to see just one platform and head down…or elect to see all three.
In spite of the buckets of personal anguish I share…I elected to be an idiot. I elected to eliminate the potential regret of not making it to the top.
It’s that same trigger that likes to selectively fire. Tell me what to do? Go fuck yourself. Don’t eat arsenic, it’s bad for you? Yourself, go fuck. The same stubborn shit applies to my own instincts.
My heart beats 54 times every minute. For those 8 minutes I spent on top of the world… double that. And when I walked past an engineer speaking quietly with one of the security officers…
“Not super smooth. The main elevator just crapped out.”
Triple it.
My insides shook something fierce. When I finally made it back down, bet your cabinet of illegal prescription drugs that my hand ran across the marble on floor one. Trust me, it’s not cliché when you feel shit like that.
…
Of course the city was great. There was a distinct sweetness I was hoping to find. Spirits were high…crowds rampant. Everyone follows “The New Yorker’s Guide to Mastering the Holiday Dating Trifecta: The Scarf-Wrap, Arm Brace and Sidewalk Strut.” I passed dozens if not hundreds of couples with a smirk, freezing my naked face off…knowing they would have a place in my Blogville. Usually…the uniformity would tempt my desire to dish swift facial roundhouses. But in sincerity, I dug it. What else are the holidays about?
But wait…
Breed that, the reflection of another great and wandering trip to our country’s great city…confusion, wonder, exhaustion…and the ache of my desire to return home, to my city of angels…and I’ve earned allowance to drop something a little more profound…
What else is life about?
