Untitled #184 / 3:35 P.M.

3:35 p.m., Thursday afternoon school’s just let out, and everyone’s joyful for the long weekend. Here I pause, outside the vocational building at the summit of the hill where I have been many times before, but never in the past three years. Giant yellow leviathans still roar by, spewing dust and carrying cargoes of lost souls, just as they did when I rode one of them to school on my first day of sixth grade. Now I’m a senior in high school, and soon I will leave all of this behind physically, though spiritually I be gone already perched high above, I feel as if I have transcended my peers, each the consummation of some love long since past, who even now laugh, smile, and carry on as they scurry into their cars and drive off. How happy they seem! How full of life! How innocent! But they are so far away! Right now my soul is closer to the blue, blue sky, through which I am soaring, far across the distant hills that roll out to the horizon like an enormous sheet of Astroturf casing the falling sun, far, far above any mortal strife, carried on the backs of sunbeams, past where clouds would sit were the day not perfect my face is kissing that enormous yellow ball of love …no! No! No! No! No! But I have stayed too long! Ah, my eyes have strayed too far! Even now they are drawn to that tan pickup truck belonging to my lost Love! Even now they are scanning through the ants in the parking lot to find that pink backpack, that flowery dress! Even now She is passing through the calamity unscathed, accompanied by two friends and another man! Even now they are tossing their bookbags into the back, piling into the cab, and slipping away! Oh, the world is so deep and so wide! and amid the heartless rubble I have already found for myself a flawless Jewel! but now She is falling away, out of my heart, out of my grasp, out of my sight, into the arms of the sweet hereafter.