The Blaze

I was awoken this morning by the pain of a bed spring reinforcing it's existence upon me. I've had a terrible dream but I can't quite remember it. Thank goodness. I remembered that today was Valentine's Day and that damned spring suddenly felt more gentle than it did inconsiderate and cruel.

I rose out of bed and felt the grogginess roll onto my body like the drool of a sleeping giant overhead. Thinking a shower would fix me, I stripped myself of my clothing and began the redundant task of washing myself. I turned up the heat of the water to make sure I could still feel. The steam was so thick I could hardly breath. I observed my legs as I sat in a fetal position, the water slamming my head like a jackhammer on a defenseless bed of concrete. I watched the hair on my legs jump from one position to the next like thousands of small railroad switches as the droplets of water from my nose and mouth fell onto them.

While getting dressed I had decided that I needed a new shirt. To be honest I don't think it was the shirt that mattered, but the need for human contact at a distance. So when I was done putting my clothes on, I headed out to my car so I could get myself that new shirt. The air in the car was as hot as that of the shower and not any easier to breath either.

As I walked into the store, a man dressed in tattoos greeted me with an indifferent "Hello." I walked passed him without saying anything and went about my search. Thumbing through walls of fabric is tiring when you have no one to tell you which ones make your tits look like tits. I had finally found the perfect one. It was plain blue, like the sky. I felt like it said something about me. Something along the lines of "Hi, I'm just Dan." That's all I wanted to be now: Just Dan. It sounded refreshing, like crumpling up an old sheet of paper and taking out a new one to write on. I tried it on to make sure it wasn't a trick and walked to the register to pay for it. 

I noticed it wasn't who I wished it would have been so I silently swiped my card, grabbed my bag, and began the journey back to my car. As I was walking back in solitude, I could hear the conversations the people around me. If you think about it, people talk about the dumbest of things. Oh your dog knows how to sit now? You're torn on what kind of pasta sauce to use on your spaghetti tonight? You're angry because your child is walking around with his hand half covered in ice cream? It's all so stupid. When you hear dumb shit running out of people's mouths, you feel like that's what is running through their head too. None of that mattered to anyone, not even them, but they didn't think that.

I was thinking at a thousand miles per second and my feet seemed to be going the same speed. Then out of no where I noticed the tapping of shoes on a pair of legs people would go to war for. It was like turning off a television after experiencing static for a while. Her skin looked like it had been polished by a blaze of fire when she was coming out of the womb. It was so dark and so smooth it could have been chrome. Her head was shaven down to a thin layer of hair that you could barely see. She didn't need any hair to show people she was a beautiful woman and she knew it. Words seemed to float out of her mouth like the thick smoke of a cigar, and she walked like everyone there that day were just guests at her annual ball. I could have never had her, no one could have, and it was best that way.

I had been pleasantly reminded of what lies outside of my cave. With every mountain lion or bear that wanted to kill me, there was the sweet sensation of the warmth from a sunset on my back. I realized that I couldn't stay in my cave forever, so a departure I will make.