Spin Me, Spin Me

I imagine how I will speak of this time once it has passed. I was in one of my poetry phases, I'll say. Reading it all. Writing what I could muster and turning, in the moments in between, back to all the books I loved as a kid. I was reading picture books while drinking strong coffee because the way it made my heart race matched how I felt my heart should feel. I was taking medications that made me sick, and imagining that somehow there was someone out there reading my blog. I knew there wasn't. But, at the same time, I liked lying to myself.

It felt the way one feels when riding sitting backwards on a train – going where you need to go, but not seeing the road there quite as you should see it. In fact, sometimes I'd sit that way and I pretended I was going to end up where I'd come from – rewinding time to arrive at my past. Trying to get a grip on how I ended up there: how I ended up here, with the toe of my boot toeing a plastic bag full of shit on the sidewalk in front of my apartment.

I knew I was on the wheel, I'll say. That wheel of fortune that spins us ever round then round again, three Greek witches behind us. I knew where I was on that wheel, I'll say. Head down, falling down. I'd spend the rest of the year sitting there at the bottom of the circle, looking up, looking around, counting down for the turning of the tide up.

Spin, spin me, I want to say. Spin me at the top of this hill so that I can bend back in your arms and look at the city that way I love – the lights sprawled across the ceiling and the floor an endless sky.