Anna Bourn

Life already seems so much longer, just interminable, without you here, friend. Day one today and I forgot for a few minutes, only to remember how much less I enjoy, well, everything 

since learning you had passed, though my mind rejected this information at first, of course, and typing that screams betrayal, typing that is a crime I am both committing and validating.

I've decided to be inconsolable now that I've paid you a proper, shocked homage on that accursed site I only visit to write you weird, rambling messages and read your shorter and stranger ones.

I am adapting as best as I can, meaning as badly as possible, to the wounded animal eating most of my mind, meaning my emotions and mood swings throughout this century some might describe as the last 15 hours, a neutral measure of time, not something shatterproof shattering on a loop

Spinning

It's weird going out more and also weird that going out more is weird, though I feel light years away from the vaccine even as April 15 approaches, mirage-like. I will not believe this surreal bad dream has started to pass until I am receiving my first shot. 

The local beauty supply store reorganized and I found myself disoriented even there, a mini-haven for me of happy offerings, staring out the long window at the Fatburger sign that was now rotating, and had it always rotated? Watching one of the more obvious displays of Americana I'd seen in a while was mesmerizing, the way the word "Fatburger" spun around and around; why not just replace the word "Fatburger" with "Americana" if you're going to be this on the nose? The sign circled at a moderate but sure pace under the uncharacteristic cloudy sky, seeming as if it had always been spinning there, though I'd never seen the sign move before and no one else appeared to see it now.

I felt so relaxed the other day I left my building without a mask on, as if I was living in the pre-2020 era, only realizing the instant the door thudded closed behind me in the early morning light and I encountered a woman whose mask was missing, my Donald Sutherland snapping at the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers moment at last, only mine passed with a gasp versus screaming or pointing, plus I am not a zombie and I will not become a zombie, I don't think, although I also think we're far from done with this pandemic that does not disappear when denied, but keeps on spinning.

Michael Hutchence

This Sunday I am sitting on the couch listening to Inxs in my pink-framed sunglasses, somehow having forgotten that brand of perfection that is Michael Hutchence's voice. 

I watched him sweep into a high-ceilinged hotel lobby right in front of me once in Vegas, at that tender age where my breasts and libido were developing in tandem, Michael 

carrying only a loose, free, confident (not arrogant) energy into that hotel lobby, circa the 1990s, intoning today via speakers: I'll take you I'll take you where you want to be