Dear Diary #24

By MLW

Sometimes I lose my sense of placement. It’s happened in a lot of cities and the best thing to do when this happens is to let the dislocation ride out to its end conclusions.

Sometimes I’m suddenly on the bus watching a young couple examine her fake nail, examining the long term viability of the nail. There’s so much love in everything they do. They do not examine the long term viability of that.

Sometimes I smell a chemical smell that sends me back to one of the mental institutions. Cold floors and strip searches and people so ugly it makes you wonder how the world could hold them.

Mostly I go back to the desert. My head is always thick with sand. I’m in Northern New Mexico or Los Angeles. I am a king in the deserts. And my subjects are stuffed with poison. And I love it.

I love it because I know the world was perfected in the desert. Or it will be. Depending on when I get lost.

I dated a woman way longer than I should have because she kept telling me I’m perfect. Those are words that can take a fella’s sickness away for a minute. And when it comes to the world, if it will be or was once perfect, it is for all time... and it happened in the desert. The perfection. And if something is perfected in the desert it wins forever in time. That’s where I will find perfection. But not yet.

And then I come back and I realize I was washing dishes in Houston the whole time. Fuck. That doesn’t even make sense. Why am I here instead of there?