Summer

It has come to the point where I know most everyone now. There seems to me to be a lack of strangeness in the world; there are no more blind men waiting at the appleyard gate, hands outstretched and a smile like a clean, open wound. I can walk down the street and talk to people like I know them. I suppose in a lot of ways I do. I recognize the sweater draped around their shoulders, because they told me the story about their grandmother and how they peeled it from her dead hands and wept into it for days. They only wear it when it's sunny and almost unbearably hot. But these are bits of other people. That sweater is their grandmother. So is the memory of her. I get sick sometimes of trying to sort through what is shit and what makes sense when you pour enough water over it. Does it make a difference that I have no more ways to say sorry? How can one stand on the edge of the forest and not look between the trees? I ask myself this when the fiction writer I know begins telling me about this thing or that, that he is doing, or writing, or thinking. I ask myself if his mustache is ironic, if he thinks it is, or if I should. I ask myself what the fuck difference does it make anyway. He'll be dead before you know it, and so will I. I guess I'm just tired of waiting for summer and the days when the sun shines longer than the stars.