How I'm feeling today...

The office building is a corporate redundancy, red brick with a glass entrance and black trim. It reminds me of a low security prison or mid-level rehab center – welcoming exterior with red mulched flower beds sprouting speckled green conifer blooms and brightly colored tulips but a drab and muffled interior. Two heavy set women sit at the front desk, April and Cathy, their outfits mysteriously coordinated each day. If April wears a navy blue blouse, Cathy has a camisole that is vaguely similar. Each morning one of the women looks up from their computer as I walk past, flashing a bright, sickly sweet smile. “Good morning,” one croons, emphasizing the long “o”. Their smile follows me as I flash my badge at the sensor and enter the glass door.

I imagine a vapor lock exhaling as I let the door shut behind me. Beyond this point, please conform. Speak softly, refrain from eye contact with members of the opposite sex, and above all, be conservatively appropriate. My prematurely-aged cynicism oozes from me like an odor. I climb the stairs and go to my desk, my head peering over the penitentiary gray cubicle walls; orderly subjects all in a row, dutifully absorbed in the eerie glare of computer screens hide behind each. This is my life.

I’ve come to loathe the question, “What do you do?” How do I answer exactly? I count minutes.

Landslide

As I drove to work this morning Fleetwood Mac's hit Landslide came on the radio. Stevie Nick's acknowledgment, "I'm getting older too," resonated in the truck cabin, the melancholy way she accepeted it, like a love that is over.

"I'm getting older too." It's the mantra of the schizophrenic age in which I find myself; over a quarter century old, caught between twin impulses. - to settle down, find stability and start a family, or flee, run, seek out the new and mysterious.

I sat at my desk and twin monitors stared back. Reports, quotes, orders, specs, configurations, skus blinked by. Each voice on the phone anxious, convinced their deal was of the utmost importance. I was struck with the absurdity of it all. Of the neatly lined hushed rows of souls transfixed by computers, locked to the phones. Could anything be as inconsequential?

It's not that I'm unhappy. It's the lack of anything significant - the feeling that days tick by and no movement is made, no hills conquered, no love burning.

I've had brief encounters with love and lust over the past two years. A fluttering of feelings quickly scorched to ash. Vagueness. I experienced a hint of something real that fizzled with inaction, miscommunication, and stupidity. It ended with her boarding a red-eye flight to Australia, someone else's kiss on her lips, while I sat at home and smoked another bowl while Townes Van Zandt played in my head.

I don't know if I'm propelled by the desire to flee what it is that I've created or simply to accept Fate's invitation for something new.

Life is plagued/blessed by dualism everywhere - so why not both?

A love note perhaps?

I'll admit it, I got nervous when I saw her. I thought about her when I fell asleep last night. The woman that I've known for months but have never breathed the same air. She was a voice on the telephone, a sentence in an e-mail, a small, blond woman in another person's photos. But she was coming, already here for all I knew. Perhaps her plane had touched down in the midnight hours, the rubber of the tires squelching against the black tarmac, her thoughts going to me.

I doubt it - the most burning love is often unrequited.

I'd just gotten up from my desk and walked toward the coffee room when she appeared. Actually, I saw her companion first, someone I'd met months before. Butterflies swarmed in my stomach. I tried not to let my eyes dart away and search for the person I'd fallen asleep thinking about. I caught sight of her in my peripheral.. My eyes held to the wall until I hugged my friend and then I turned.

She looked different than her photos. More real, more of a woman. We hugged, I muttered, "Nice to meet you," and it was over. Our first contact. In my nervousness, my spooked movements, I didn't even catch a scent of her hair. I think back on it now and try to remember - was it floral, mint, something exotic, something common?

Throughout the day I snuck quick, furtive glances at her. In an attempt to avoid suspicion, I made sure to look at others in the room, bestowing on each my apparent attention. But always she was there, a smudge on my peripheral. When she spoke, I watched her lips moving over her teeth, twisting in a smirk, rising in a smile. I imagined myself knowing those lips, tasting them. Thin creases lined her eyes, like cracks in porcelain. They held a beauty that I cannot even attempt to put into words. A beauty that speaks of a life lived.

I'll never tell her any of this; never tell anyone for that matter. But today I fell in love, as I do most days. Tonight I will think of her again, looking forward to the next time I see her. The next hug, I'll make sure to smell, to let the mysterious scent of her wash over me.

And the memory will sit like a flower in vase, flourishing in the sunlight of a not-so-spotless mind.