All rise for the vacancy.

The house across the street is vacant now. It's viiisible... Gone. Viiisible... Gone as she watches its image fluttering over the roof of her own house, jumping on the oversize trampoline in the back yard. She expects that it's forlorn enough to be gathered up and scattered by the wind, after all that it had and had lost - but it just sits there, steady as nothing is.

It is an atrocious house, to remain so unmoved.

Living in that house, one can come to believe of the leaves to cackle as they fall. She too has surpassed her salvation - the sucker - like pencil marks invisible on skin but felt nonetheless. Like Jesus, even, or as poised as this moment seems to think it is. She's lost her unknowing companion, so that she might now remember that it's cold.

The in-between is what she wants. Its darkness. Like writing the words for their depths, or wondering about truth.

She sat in her car a few days ago and saw an old man walking, as slow as you like with his hands behind his back as though pondering. It hit her, then, the beautiful intricacy of this life. The excruciating frailty of this web that at times is the last strength in the universe. The only truth: that this life will go on; that hers won't. Whether it tears or shatters or snaps, or is tossed from some traitorous vehicle.

Her life had seemed so complicated, but that old man...she knew his life must be complicated as well. It would consume him. He had needed a change of scenery just to comprehend the one from which he'd come. It was surreal and perfect. That was it. Astounding, the sheer perfection of all these fumbling attempts to attain something already possessed. Like bus-ride snippets of conversation, conveying the almost-magic of the everyday. Just that there wasn't any to begin with, all along.

-L (1/29/12)