coral reef

this is hardly the time for feelings.

find your own by diving deep into the coral reef, where you will be met by all sort of strange types. Perhaps there, along with colors and textures and shapes you see only on screens, you will find that complex thing called emotion, and you will pull it up, wet and slimly, out of the furtive depths.

it may open its mouth and ask you why it took you so long. You will shout at it (for after all, it is emotion) and you will close its mouth and ask sarcastically if it had a fine time in its plush landscape, kept from looking in through half boarded up windows at dark counters, and over the tops of the flimsy doorkeepers people call masks.

we eat our crusts in silence, watching the face of mankind next to us; wondering what he thinks or what his political agenda is, or if he has a sign out front that we should throw tomatoes at. We walk down the street, tripping over ourselves, keeping away from each other. We stifle our tears and encourage our shouting. And we wonder why some of us have to put on diving suits to find a resemblance of reality.

we are as numb as Minnesota in the middle of February, at 7:00 am in -40 degree weather, with windchill. (You don’t know how numb that is, and I will not take the time to explain it to you.)

fellow man, what do you know about my life, we ask? And we forget that we have not opened up our jacket to him and shown our beating heart, so what can he know? We speak frailty, and we wonder why only echoes answer us. We are far from each other, but we should not be surprised, as we have swam this distance at our own request.

call one another St. John Rivers or Edward Fairfax Rochester, but take care, as one of these actually had a beating heart, and the other, just a cold shell.