something i found in an old journal (over three years ago). funny how things change (and don't!)

sometimes at night, i drive around listlessly and stare at my skinny arms on the wheel. are they really mine? do i feel them? not quite. maybe, i am not sure. if feeling nothing but seeing everything is how this act always ends, then i'd rather be numb  and blind from the start. sometimes i see people riding their bikes on the street while i drive, too. i think i know some of them, or maybe that i would like to know some of them, maybe even love one of them someday. but in a moment's time they disappear, faster than those pretty purple dots that hang around for a moment after you look at fluorescent lights for too long. they have vanished, and under those roaring lights in your beige cubicle, your skin is sallow again and your small voice escapes you. banging away on the keyboard once more, you wonder if they were even there to begin with, just like i wonder if i truly see anyone new, or just different versions of a memory. maybe these things are some kind of fleeting hope, but maybe they are just a colorful con.

and then i think of you, and occasionally see you too. and you never go away, even when you're gone. you're stamped permanently, name etched in wet cement. sometimes i convince myself that i want to feel you, to taste you, to know you like i used to, to trace the mold your index finger made while writing your name in the cool, concrete corners of my mind, but i can't. i stare at my hands as i drive, now wondering what animal the bones resemble when highlighted and shadowed by the street lights above. a spider, maybe? if so, why can't they just creep up to my memory and make another web for something newer and brighter to get stuck? or maybe the thin flaps of skin between my index fingers and thumbs are like small, pale butterfly wings that tickle my interior and help me laugh once again. regardless, the joke is on me. spiders have 8 legs, not 5, and besides...i can't control what gets stuck or what flits freely from lobe to lobe and valley to valley.

do i love you?
do i know you?
do i want you?

not quite. maybe, i am not sure. bright lights flood in and out of my car as a bass line shakes away at my dusty bones and i instinctively crane my neck out slowly like a rusty weathervane, looking at all the people, amazed at how they come and go. i'm looking at someone, for someone, for anyone but you. i stare at my arms again, and then imagine a pale spider getting swallowed by a name drawn in drying cement.