<\/p>\n
I\u00a0had a wife almost.\u00a0 Then I had a cinderblock house with palms.\u00a0 I had a dog.\u00a0 At night I had the hours.\u00a0 The dog wandered room to room, paws ticking, until one night\u2014a taut absence of ticking.\u00a0 I sensed the dog by the bed staring at me in the dark.\u00a0 Mouth open, tail going.\u00a0 I sat up to rub her ears and put my feet down in a half-inch of water.\u00a0 I bore it for a moment.\u00a0 Then we both slapped through the house and out to the backyard where I could sit and splay my feet in the dry airy grass and look at what stars were still there.\u00a0 I was in my underwear, skull hooked over the back of a plastic chair, dog off somewhere.<\/p>\n
Wrenches, I thought.\u00a0 Where are my wrenches? \u00a0The Yellow Pages. \u00a0 Broken something.\u00a0 The water broke.\u00a0 The star I was staring at started moving around a little, like my pupil was greased and nothing could sit still on it.\u00a0 In the corner of my eye some other stars slipped around too, slipping outward.\u00a0 It was discouraging.<\/p>\n
Normal, maybe, but not good.\u00a0 Here it comes, I thought.\u00a0 The great sliding loose.\u00a0 The quiet landslide of sense.\u00a0 I was recently thirty-two and already demoted to the back halls of my life, the back offices.\u00a0 There were channels addressing to the water and I did not know them.\u00a0 When did I go from being president of myself to being, say, secretary?\u00a0 And from secretary to janitor, then to something beneath vocation altogether, wandering the back halls and back offices, for years wandering?\u00a0 I had been wandering these back halls and back offices looking for some work to do but not really looking because there was no work; the offices had been abandoned, file cabinets gaping, desk drawers overturned on the floor.\u00a0 There was only the wandering, this lurking around corners or more often standing still, staring down another long hallway under the drum of air ducts in the ceiling.<\/p>\n
This notion of back halls and back offices I had derived likely from my little bungalow\u2019s brown paneling, linoleum floors, and stained ceiling tiles. \u00a0It had been I believe an office of real estate, so an office in fact\u2014my bedroom in fact a back office proper in some dead year.\u00a0 Day and night my dog, too, wandered these rooms, ticking across brittle linoleum, lost to her own back halls and back offices or to mine.\u00a0 On occasion we would meet in a doorway and try awkwardly to dodge each other before turning back the way we\u2019d come.<\/p>\n
How long had we been bunkered away?\u00a0 This slipping loose has\u00a0been<\/em>\u00a0happening, it occurred to me.\u00a0 I should write a poem.<\/p>\n The stars have been let go<\/em>\u2026\u00a0of<\/em><\/p>\n But it was me.\u00a0 Me let go of. \u00a0A person named Peanut once let me go from his warehouse crew and I laughed.\u00a0 It\u2019s inventory, I said, all you do is show up and count boxes.\u00a0 You can be drunk.<\/p>\n But Peanut was acting under soberer agency than he knew.\u00a0 The joke was not his joke nor a joke at all. \u00a0I peeled out across the warehouse lot and Peanut watching just got smaller in the rearview, and it was like\u00a02001<\/em>\u00a0somehow\u2014I had been swatted into space, where nothing\u2019s funny anymore.<\/p>\n This inability to keep track of inventory\u2014of boxes, wrenches\u2014what I had thought a superficial confusion\u2014gave way under those skittering stars to a real, foundational confusion.\u00a0 It hit me then: my brain was marbles.\u00a0 My talk the clacking thereof.\u00a0 This was permanent.\u00a0 The linoleum had felt buckled and curled under my toes, the water like lukewarm plastic.\u00a0 I was never going back in there.<\/p>\n Seeing stars so far off yet still undeniable.\u00a0 To see something that far off and at the same time to believe, to believe that thing exists\u2014it drove me crazy as a kid.<\/p>\n Space!<\/p>\n Space, and the stars slipping up in it.\u00a0 I beheld stars as a child.\u00a0 I beheld stars once on a cold Christmas Eve.\u00a0 They were very far and still.\u00a0 My eyes watered, my ears sang with cold.\u00a0 Everything was still.\u00a0 Beheld: what a still, holy word. Where is my dog?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I had a wife almost. Then I had a cinderblock house with palms. I had a dog. At night I had the hours.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5482,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1731","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fiction","writer-jacob-white"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1731","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1731"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1731\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17655,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1731\/revisions\/17655"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5482"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1731"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1731"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1731"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}