He was talking with a good friend. They had known each other for many years. The most significant years of my life, he thought, were spent with my friend. It is disturbing to think she is going away. It is hopeful that she has such courage. It is enduring that her skills have also massed, though not like a moldy cheese puff or a green apple. These skills, are they much different from Adam and Even being expulsed? What is expulsion, allegorically? These thoughts all drifted around like the undry splashing of oil paint. He wanted to create a new universe, but all he could think of was the half-empty mailbox that would be completely empty after five minutes, emptied by his own hands, expulsed simply by the changing of the guards. He thought about the mail and he also thought about the sun little more than a cowardly blanket above the clouds, and not some great holy symbol that is was cracked up to be. And he imagined how air outside felt thick and heavy. It was disturbing to imagine all the faults of the oncoming summer.
The call was lost. Quick and redial, he thought. And he did so. It's true, part of him did feel merely obligated to talk to her, to formally say goodbye as soon as it got time to clock into the one point five hour work shift. But it's also true that part of him felt a gentle misery in talking to her, a misery of the past. It was the usual longing, the usual romanticism associated with home. Home as the place he convinced himself never to return to. Home, as the place he associated with suicide. No, he could definitely not live there again, he thought. But how could he solve such a stumper? How could he leap over such a wet, brick wall? He continued to listen to her, a lovely though dispirited or concerned voice. It was her all right. Not being enough, the electric light overhead dimmed as he closed his eyes, setting the telephone down.
He had not had coffee at all, not since fifteen completely separated hours ago. Maybe that was the cause of such absurd, finger-twiddling damperings. Or maybe the combination of two other stimulants inside of him at once, another type of swirl, a type hardly fashionable for someone in his position. Or maybe it was that lack of hunger. That ferocious voracity covered up by guilt, shame, sorrow--all the great piqued traits. Behind him was the past. In front of him was the future. The present was transition, and he looked at it meekly. The optimism of previous days was temporarily damning him. Another juxtaposition, similar to when he had sat on the stone bench and stared at days-old flower bloomings, all bright pink. That day had been a good day. There had been an understanding on that day. Why not this day? Why couldn't he notice the pink on this day?
A little later the man sat down at a desk in the basement. The sounds of mechanical fans whirring behind him went on unnoticed, as they usually do. He talked about sea salt and thought about sadness, and tried to remember single room occupancy in Toronto and the last time his shoelace broke. He thought about his friend and stared at the clock for a while longer, before reaching for an orange highlighter.
