This Could Be the Last Time

For a change in perspective:

Here I am at night. The wind’s white noise is the only sound. There’s a collective ambient light, just enough to write by, coming from the libraries, streetlamps, and cars.  The fountain across the street gushes water for the first time this year, marking spring and the near-end of this project. I can smell the water in the air, an almost sweet freshness that reminds me of humid summer evenings, and it seems triumphant, for some reason, to watch the fountain’s plumes against the purple and black sky.

A couple passes. They’re holding hands. The woman says something about Rolling Rock, about how beautiful it is, about how she’d like to take the man there someday, and it takes me a minute to realize that she’s talking about a landscape. Which is disappointing. How interesting, I’d thought, to talk about beer as a place, which I guess in many ways it is.

How would I tell someone about this place? Now that I’ve done this project, something’s different about my relationship with the plaza. It’s become a familiar addition to my life—an extra room in my apartment, a tattoo. I see it and I sit in it and I try to transcribe it. It’s where I’ve gotten over the self-consciousness that comes with writing in public (although tonight, sitting here alone under the darkened tent, I’m pretty certain I look like a psychopath).

A procession of clouds drifts southward, dimly lit from below as if retaining a few final ounces of residual daylight. The birds, who’ve been waking me up this week, are silent, and I realize that I never think of them—those tiny, trembling puffs of energy—as animals that need to sleep.

(They do, of course, and later I’ll read that birds have the ability to put one half of their brains to sleep at a time. When the right half sleeps, the bird’s left eye closes. When the left side sleeps, the bird’s right eye closes. Sleeping birds can react to stimuli in their open eye, thus protecting themselves from nighttime dangers.)

On my way here I stopped at a gas station. When I went inside to pay, a man with a bundle of newspapers under each arm charged ahead of me toward the clerk. The clerk shot him a what the hell do you think you’re doing? look through the bulletproof glass.

“My mother died,” the man said. He started to weep. “I need these. She’s gone.”

The clerk’s eyes softened.

I’m thinking about this—about how the man needed something to mark an end—as I step over the plaza's protective rope, standing for the first time in this lawn I’ve been staring at and writing about for ten weeks. The grass is damp and it swallows my bootheels, leaving a pair of divots that the rope was no doubt intended to thwart. But it feels right to be standing here after so long, listening to the breeze in the quiet night. It feels right to leave a mark.

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