The clockbook, "Hello"

Hello.

I am 18 and I steward, part-time, a home on the line of Orion's belt for a Lost Boy and all his questions.

I am 18 and I have migraines. Right now I can’t go to school or get a job—it would be silly, of course, if migraines had a sense of time or respect—and that's why I steward the home for questions.

         My migraines are black cars so shiny that they look wet at night, so wet that I can see it raining through the buzz of static in my vision. They find me when no one is looking. Day or night, on the street, at home, in school, during a meal at a fancy restaurant. In crowds, in silence, in an airplane, in a bathroom the black cars come and find me. When no one is looking, when everyone is busy blinking, the sneaks park and pop out of their shiny black cars. They nab me and throw me into one of their shiny black trunks. The trunks are trunks of agony, full of fireworks and black cats and reveries and doorbells and bad breath and rainbows. Full of pillows that breathe and pulse loudly against my ear because they have disorders of the chest and heart murmurs and erratic circulation. The trunks are full of agony but also full of patience—clocks don't work in there. Once I got thrown in the trunk with my watch on my wrist. I don't know what time it was when they threw me in, but my watch said it was March when I got out into the dark (it took me a while to read it.) They always let me out because I always find myself sitting, or lying, or standing somewhere far away from people. Sometimes they drop me off so far out of the city that I think I'm close to death, or I think about how much bigger the city has gotten since I was smaller.

Sometimes they drop me off in a field. I used to think that was scary—I would feel so alone in that great big field that at some point I was the whole field. You know—so alone that everything around you is in you and alone, too. So bright that you forget yourself, you forget the possibility of the existence of darkness. So loud that every fiber of you is resounding with the sound, that at some point there is no sound because there is no silence.

  The view of the city is never great. I am so far away that I just can’t judge it; it isn’t a poor view because I am Very Far Away. Comparisons won't work there, neither do clocks. Sometimes the sneaks drop me off in a line at the store, in a lineup of cars at the drive-thru pharmacy. On a phone line to talk to someone very far away, online to lookup pictures to draw pictures from. On a line in time that has questionably relevant blue stickers scattered along it. The stickers are blue now—they changed the color from Classic Red. In the city, they used to make marks on my timeline in ink, but now they use stickers. The funny thing is, the ink never stuck and the stickers don't either. The marking and measuring and especially the sticking is an illusion; they all fall off, wash away as soon as I imagine it. Far away from people, time acts more like water than a line, anyways.

         Oftentimes they drop me off in my bed, and drive away hiding under the cover of dreams. But usually when they do that they pull the covers too far over themselves, they stretch the dream until it covers everyone and everything, the whole world around me and the whole line of time behind me. Then I see the skid-marks from their shiny black tires before they wash away. I remember that the view here is not more dreamy or less real. I think I'm too far away to make that judgment.

         Sometimes they drop me off in a parking lot at night, and I'm alone. It is snowing and there are grainy mounds of muddy diamonds. Or in a muddy, rainy forest where there are diamonds and pearls full of sun and they are resting on giant green clovers. The tree trunks are cold and hard and wet. They're dark and dense, slow and real: anything but alive. There are shimmering sequins and shivers of stained glass where the sky should be a backdrop for the branches. The branches look metallic and neon. The dead leaves that hang from the trees look like hanging lights, like drought-colored christmas lights. One time they dropped me off 35,000 feet above the ground where I saw six oxbows of gold eau-de-vie, five hundred miles of farmer's quilt and the slow wrinkles of the Giant's skin. With my eyes I touched the unfeelable horizon, rainbow-colored, but dim and bleak like gray. When I looked up I saw dark gray, and when I looked down I saw gravity.

         At one point they dropped me off just in time to catch a proposal on the windowpane. Just in time to realize I have always been married and will always be married. To realize that mostly I forget the marriage, I ignore it but acknowledge it although I'm still ignoring it. Like most of my marriages, like all of my relationships that get pushed out of the working frame but embedded in the Backdrop. All the time they drop me off where there are dry brownish-blue dead flowers that fall on the ground for no reason, for me to look at; where the snow melts and slowly and suddenly I am exposed to a measureless sop of decaying leaves from who-knows-really for no reason, and I look at it. The shiny black cars drive me to the most boring and mindless locations conceivable and take away my clocks and comparisons and suddenly, slowly I am so alone that nothing is more boring or less mindful. So alone that everyone and everything, the whole world around me and the whole line I stand in, and the dream, and the black cars with their trunks and even the sneaks are in me, and alone, too. Then they are all a bone in my body, a finger on my hand, a diamond on my finger that I've never put on and I'll never take off.