l i f e
Double Exposed
It rained like hell here last night so I went out. Walking. First the hair matted down like a dogs and I ran my greasy fingers though it over and over again. Glasses became useless and water soaked through the stiched soles of my shoes. Still I walked. Fabric beacme heavy and I dug deep in my right front pocket and felt a couple soaked dollars bills. Around the next strret corner and into the coffee shop. I stood there waiting in line amoungst the hip, the young, the carefree, dripping water on the formica floor of their full-time sanctuary.
Aren't these places amazing? So much gets said and really not a single word changes anything. Seems whenever someone has something soul searching to share I hear, "Let's go get a cup of coffee." A bad alternative to the bar. But that's another story. All I want is a cup of coffee and it's all I wait around for. Then it's back on the street and down to the bus stop.
A few cars go by. Some kids yell. The rain picks up, the bus arrives and for some reason I can't get the song "The Ledge" out of my head. (The Replacements for those of you who aren't fans)
On a city bus you're nothing. No Thing. On a city bus at night in the rain you're invisible. To run like the water into the sewer. To fade into the dark, be it alley, bar, park, or simply the backdrop of a thousand snapped images.
One flourescent light flickered toward the middle of the bus. I sat in the back. I perched above the heat of the engine, with the desiel fumes and looked out the window. I rode around for hours just thinking, but the thing that caught me the most was the weird anomaly when the bus passed under a street light and for a few brief seconds I was starring not at the empty rain slicked sidewalks, but a rather unsettling, ragged, out of focus apparition. Me.
It shook me. More than the coffee in the paper cup now rolling around at my feet. More the the other nameless I see, though I could have been any one of them. Anyone.
That's what got me. I thought of some negatives I'd picked up earlier and remembered they were still in my jacket pocket. I held them up to that flickering fluorescent light. I couldn't make much sense of them at first until I realized they were double-exposed. I had perfect ice-covered branches creeping their way across a sunset. Impossibly small farmhouse shutters were dwarfed by smiling friends all crunched in the same image. I myself smiled though the face of a mountain. I have no idea how this happened. I'm not nearly the photograher to have done it on purpose. And it was the random placment that had me shaking. The random placement of my facade over normal things. I'd been there. Forever I am there. Always. The world sees me. Sees us. No matter how invisible we feel. No matter how faceless we think we become. The world will steal you back.
In bus windows. In the minds of others. In cameras.
"I'm the boy they can't ignore for the first time in my life I'm sure..."
goodnight 11.22.97
