Snow-crusted streets and peaks and peaks peaks and peaks of your shoe print from yesterday and everyday since the first day in snowed one week ago or maybe the week before that.
Sucking the sugar off my teeth. The box says sour. I am sour. I am in the box, diversified in flavour but not really and clear almost all the way through opaque but not really and if it isn’t enough for you that I ruin the way you taste maybe stare in the other direction.
I love the way the air smells in December.
At night, it’s cold, it’s waiting.
My dog breathes and I breathe and these leaves on the ground are wet sticky garbage of a texture unfamiliar unless you are stepping on a leaf. Like wet cereal. Like soggy bread. Soggy anything.
I’m giving my ten minutes to texture.
They can’t take texture away from the Earth no matter how quickly it incinerates or how slowly it chokes.
The formula for texture, any texture is (vaguely): Solid + Elemental Influence * Time
Who are you. What’s changing you. How long will it be.
If you leave a tree in the rain for a year, the bark will be smoother. I hear.
If you set fire to a table cloth, it won’t be smooth ever again. I think.
If you walk through an icy park with your mother and your dog while mother details the way you used to play here when you were little and the boys would play softball and you would run, as if you were running away, you would run but then you were so scared of the road that there was no chance of your departure, really, she tells you, she was so reassured by your anxiety when you were a child and actually now that you’re an adult as well, she is so reassured by your fear that she feels smooth and shiny and plastic.
You listen and you wilt.
Your hair sinks.
Your face, pieces of it evaporate.
In your head you’re thinking, fuck I know now, now I really know why I can’t stand people, I realize now why it hurts so much when that guy in the morning meetings laughs at me or when someone from a school I used to attend tells me that they were always so curious about my “eccentricities” but they wouldn’t dare talk to me because “you know”.
I texturize my memories with the sounds of strangers. I never got to know anyone. I can’t hear distinct voices. All I can summon are sharpened ice skates and dead dandelion spurs.
The butterfly sings, Looks like I made it and the caterpillar is dead so I guess he sings in farts and flaked skin. He is where he is and he’s doing what he can.
Happy new year, ok?
Happy new year to you, please, have a happy new year. If the rest of the year is sad, so ok. But take tonight and have a happy new year.
There’s still time, I’m writing this early.
Buy some (insert your pleasure). Eat, drink, smoke, sway, dance, jump.
Have a happy new year because the old year is under your feet and it’s melting and you don’t have to slip on it any more. Grip into it. Crack the surface. Run your hand over the cold, bumpy nothing. And have a happy new year.
Goodnight.
Rachel Ganz 