[Kaimee]: 5.Mixed Poetry&Prose.If you keep moving.TCCY

I’m not going anywhere. Which is why it feels kinda funny to be going nowhere so fast, I suppose. I’m sitting here in silence, in a bubble travelling fast to a pinpoint in the distance, and when it gets there I’m going to shoot off, pin-balling again in whatever direction jumps up first. I’m not going anywhere and I’m going there fast – it feels like I’m standing kinda still. If I stop I might be nowhere, and I feel like I’ve stopped. So I have to move faster – farther, nowhere, as fast as I can.

I’m running away. What’s kinda silly is that I’m running away from me, not from anything back there. I love everyone I’ve left, maybe sometime when things are slow and I can’t get a lift – maybe. One of those times when my teeth are practically itching needing to keep moving, go fast, get the wind stinging tears from my eyes – maybe one of those times when I see a phone booth, maybe I can hold some of it off by giving them a call, letting them know that I still exist.

I’m standing still. It feels like everything is in slow motion. Those days when everyone was there, yelling, talking, jabbering, moving, it felt like I was standing still in slow motion while everything moved around me. Now, I’m moving so fast, so fast, it can’t still feel like that, can it? It can’t, it can’t – oh but it does. I’m going so fast and the road narrows out ahead, zoom vision, and it feels like the world is moving around me, that I can’t make myself move. An endless moving scroll of world past the window, I’m standing still, it’s everything else that moves.

I can’t be heard. It’s silent in the cabin, my bubble. Changing bubbles. I locked myself into this one sometime in the dark of early morning – the scroll slowed down a second and fast forward, or maybe slow motion, everything paused so he could jump down and stand huddled drinking some coffee. Eyes met in silence, a sentence in silence, and now I’m travelling in silence. I’m so still in silence. A bubble I can’t break or I’ll spill out of my stillness, crush myself against the movie screen of desert scrolling past. Scrape my face off on the gravel, if I burst the swelling silent bubble.

I need to scream. Unbearable, unbreakable, my eyes dart around and I grip the handle, if I break the silence the world will explode. It might, it could. He clears his throat and twiddles the radio dial, slow motion. And then suddenly he glances up at me, my speed. A dark flop of hair smudged in shadow over his eyes, younger than I’d thought, I think. He’s not locked in – he says something. Something that isn’t my speed till the end, I miss the beginning.

I’ve got nowhere to go. Confused eyes, in the dark. A voice, in the dark. “I asked if you were bored, there's some books under the dash there, and whatever music you can find.” Can I speak now? His voice steadies in the air, holds it stable, washes over me. “Or we could talk you know, if you want.” Teeth glimmer in his face. A laugh, a smile. I can smile. He cracks the window and air rushes over me, moving. I’m moving. I smile back, “I…” My voice doesn’t burst anything. There’s no black hole in this sound, nothing rushes out, no explosions of grit and noise and speed. “I’d like that”, I say, and smile. Air rushes over me. I’m moving. 

I’m moving.

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Piece © Kate-Aimee Conrick. All rights reserved!