Remi

[josephthad]

Ship is sailing. Ship has sailed. Ship will sail. A ship, a rowboat, a Victorian glory, a paper boat containing a crippling list of the reasons I don't love her anymore. Here they all mean the same thing. A strung together white t-shirt sail waves in a blue-yellow glitter wind. For some reason every grade school teacher I ever had is pressed on to each one of them. I'll worry about that later. The sky is just machinery. The clanking of gears and rusted metal is a muffled tranquility that gives noise silence. I feel the same. I feel apologetic to no one but myself. I'm too damn skinny. If I was fatter this boat would tip over. That'd be nice. I can't remember if I'm time traveling or not. I bet if I tipped over I would just fall on top of the waves. It'd be funny. Like that guy that Jesus helped to walk on water. I wouldn't be as smooth as him. I'd trip over the jagged edges and my violent red blood would castrate the somber blue sea. Yea it'd be hilarious. This crow at the top of the boat thinks he knows all about the ocean. Jerk. Blind arrogance and being blinded by arrogance always reveal the same conclusion. When I was a kid I thieved liquor from my father's cabinet. I didn't drink it, but instead used it to water my neighbor's flowers. My father reached in and borrowed my breathe to replenish his constant chaotic sound of screeching insults. While crying in my neighbor's yard I watched the roses get drunk and beat their wives. I name the crow some color I can't remember. I wander what day it is. I don't know who I'm talking to. Roses are suppose to be nice flowers. I think I hit land but I can't be sure. Never mind I can just look. Yep it seems pretty landish. There's a tree.
"How goes it tree?"
No response. Seems kind of rude. A hundred balloons fly out of it like a flock of multicolored exotic birds. It might have been a hundred or it might have been eighty-three. I don't think it's anything in between. Pay attention, this part is important. My heavy eye catches a yellow one that is on a detour from the rest of the looney and floating down towards me. Like I said, this is monumental. A looney is a group of balloons that travel north together for the summer. You would think it's beautiful but it's positively fear driven. "Is that music I hear in your head?" The tree asks me. It's my turn to ignore. I don't learn this until later but just so you know, the balloon's name is Showpan. That's how it's spelled, really, I wish you could ask him yourself. He was born in a bathtub on August 4th at 9:23 am. This isn't important to know but neither is any of this. Is his name a new one or an old one spelled wrong? I should ask him.
"Hello" he says. All of the unanswered greetings the close invisible moon fed the dark grass relayed their condolences for awkward situations.
"My name is Remi." I say
"Okie Dokie" he says.
When I was a kid I asked my parents what my name was and they said it was the same thing it was when I asked them five minutes ago.
We walk. Well I walk. Showpan floats
"Where are we going" I ask
"I don't know." He says, as if it's the most obvious answer in the world. No, in the universe. He's going faster than me. I feel ashamed to be someone who walks slower than a floating balloon. I feel ashamed to be anyone.
"Why are you yellow?" I ask
"Why are you?"
"I'm not yellow, I'm white."
"Well then why are you white?"
"Hm good question. I guess because I'm a main character in this story, statistically that means I'm a straight white male."
"What's a statistic?" He asks
"Suppose all of the windows in a city are see through except for one, statistically that window is actually a wall."
"I don't think that's right." He says
I shrug my shoulders
"What's it like to be a straight white male?" he asks.
"Well everyone says it's a really nice thing to be."
"You want to hear a story?" Showpan asks.
He tells a story and I don't listen. I can be such an a**hole sometimes. I got the gist of it. It had three verses and a chorus, much like a pop song. I want to tell him this to make it at least seem like I was noticing him but I don't want to mention the word pop. When I was a kid I got tired of my imaginary friend beating me in card games so I called the actual government and reported him as an illegal immigrant in the state of reality. I never heard from him again. Alright, you caught me, I'm an a**hole most of the time. Without realizing it we walked in to an amusement park.
There isn't much in it except for a mediocrely sized roller coaster. It’s full of children yelling in thrill. The children consist of multiple races. The cart continuously goes up and down two adjacent hills. I tell the park attendant that her roller coaster is broken, she tells me it's not broken, that's how she tells time. "Who's kids are those?" I ask.
"Some dude named Karl, with a K" she says. I have other questions but instead I ask her about her tattoos. Some people can only handle just a few questions at a time so it's smart to be respectful. She says she tattooed on herself everything she wants to ask God when she gets to the afterlife, so she doesn't forget. When I was a kid I looked up in the sky and I noticed that God was alone so I wrote him a note telling him that I also felt lonely. I put the note in a bottle and tied the bottle to a balloon and watched it float in to the sky until I was too exhausted and dizzy to tilt my head anymore. He didn't write back but the next day it rained for 9 hours and 23 minutes.
"There was a man standing over there just a moment ago" she says, pointing at nothing, "He was pretty down because he had just learned that sometimes penguins fall in love, get penguin married, then feel the existential stress of the arctic and the fear of life itself and get penguin divorced. A heavyset guy with boils on his face came over to give the man a hug and the heavyset man said 'it's ok life is beautiful.' The sad man spat in the face of the boiled man and told him to cracker off. Hours later the man was still standing there. A thin woman with a big and beautiful pair of eyes came and gave him a hug and said 'It's ok, life is beautiful' the man said 'you're right, thank you stranger for giving me that wonderful gift’"
After she finishes her story Showpan asks her "Do unhappy people truly learn to be happy again or do they just forget that they are sad?"
"Good question buddy!" I say perhaps too loudly.
"No, I was just reading one of her tattoos" he says
An inch down her left arm is the text to that question being vomited from a rose.
"Please tell me what god says about that one" I say.
"After I meet God I only plan on communicating with the ones I love." She says. This should have hurt my feelings but it didn't.
"I thought I was in love once, but it turns out I just had the common cold." I say
"How liberating it must be to not be loved by anyone." She says.
I get lost in thought about all the times I tried to be the person I thought I wanted to be but ended up being someone else entirely.
She hands me a paper. It's the paper boat I rode in on. The ink that collaborated to form my loveless reasons was now running down the page much like mascara from the eyes of a widow. It rested at the bottom to create a contemporary list of all the things that made our joined human cognitive connection real, instead of the things that made the love not.
"Who is she?" She asks
"She's you." I say.
The roller coaster starts to sway closely between the two hills, loosing momentum, then suddenly shoots up the right side and back down toward the left. The children harmonize with each other’s joyous screams.
"It's almost my bed time" she says solemnly.
"I'm not even tired." I say.