Musings

Dear Lucy
I lie on my bunk this morning staring up at the little, black, luminescent bars that compose the bed frame above me against the stark whiteness of the mattress held aloft, and think about how bars like those always seemed to be present in my life holding me back from something or someone or somewhere. I don’t know which.

Next to me the window--with its sad drapes weeping down to the floor, old and used up years ago, perhaps to shield a queen in her castle from the unwashed commoners--is propped open and gaping, inviting me to dangle my feet out or throw water balloons at passers by in the naked alley.

The itching all over my body is driving me mad, making me feel trapped by all the tingling spots on my skin and believing I will never be free from their claws again. Free to let my skin show in public, lest I become labeled as dirty or poor or wretched like the street urchins I pass on the way to some restaurant or another to indulge my culinary appetite for delicious food.

The blandness of Bellingham will soon be upon me, the people all one color, wearing sensible clothes and walking stoically through the rain. Always the rain.
I would have one good Mexican restaurant to provide the kind of Mexican food a tongue can dance to. A small library, where the books along with their keepers are dry and moldy and sneeze invoking and passable as entertainment but not exciting in the least.

I can’t imagine my mother’s horror if she knew where I was and what I was doing with my life. Lying around reading Kerouac and Ginsberg and writing in notebooks thousands of ink marks that represent my soul, or that I think of dying every day and put it off because I haven’t finished the one last novel I had started for Anne.

I have to change rooms because of a snafu at the front desk and they want to kick me out in my pajamas and spots and antihistamine induced haze and send me to a dorm room still infested with its current owners, their clothes and skin and scent still fresh.

I fall back to sleep with Kerouac in my dreams rushing across the country to be anywhere but where he is.

Or maybe it’s me.
--Kathy