just you, just passing by which you are always only doing anyway

Looking out over the bay, black water and shimmy of lights on the freeway, the hills on one side, the city on the other, like some impossible place, I was struck with a thought the certainty of which was so intense that it was exhilarating: you could be unhappy anywhere. I said it aloud and laughed. I might not be happy anywhere, but I could be unhappy anywhere. I didn’t owe it to a place or a person to try to be happy, and all that trying always only means that happy is always not happening.

But if you could be unhappy anywhere, anywhere would do, any series of anywheres would do, no need to confine oneself to the imaginary places of cities or tick-tock suburbs or the don’t-imagine place of trailer parks, although perhaps some indefinitely prolonged tenure in one of those pull-in-here- we-got-a-pool places where tired dads finally give up the wheel and there’s a lounge of some kind nearby with those knobby teardrop candle holders the ones waitresses light by holding the safe end of a match between two fingers, lucky if it lights the first time you’re always going to burn a finger now you’ve done it.

Some guy shows up, you thought he was already dead, and there’s this faraway low bank of godforsaken hills like denuded things, something about them that you really shouldn’t be seeing like that time you saw your boss in an unlikely place actually sitting no shit at the feet of her boss with the mooney look of worship on her mean face, don’t look now but then you can’t undo seeing, and the lowlands stretching out to the horizon like a, like a I-don’t-know-what, and you’re alone in the pool at night, floating in a sky where you can’t land on anything. There might be something to that, or nothing.

Or you could just be on a plank road headed down into something hard to get out of or in a boat stitching into little ports along the southern coast of some island, some world. Or a little sticky place above some small-town shop the walls the color of old newspapers out in the sun, always smelling like newspaper, too, or cold toast, the window up there open, the sound of the typewriter reaching across the road up there, no one else awake, just you, just passing by which you are always only doing anyway, just wondering what someone is typing on a manual typewriter, maybe someone just a tad mad or just some forlorn someone wording and rewording something for someone who will never love them, the words barely holding off knowledge of the kind that cuts a lonely space around you that will never go away or that you always carry with you like something you can’t put down, you can’t let go, the thing you arrive at the party or the port with and no one anywhere knows where to put it, not even you, jackrabbit.

Anywhere, at least not some place where it’s winter almost all the time, but somewhat textured weather, maybe even occasional hail and a tornado or two, but mostly warm now that all the sexy parts of you have melted not that anybody anyway, nobody phoning up for you or mailing you a letter, like you care, but you don’t, you know, what a relief that finally you really don’t anyway. In some anywhere where you could be unhappy all that could just be over with, then maybe you or someone could say come over to my place, don’t have to be happy unhappy, don’t have to do anything say anything, don’t have to anything, just be.