for Andrew

Baby, you’ve got this. Today’s the day when everything clicks into place, I can feel it, I can feel the stars aligning, the high musical scrape of the celestial spheres grinding against each other shivering into an unexpected harmony, the pendula of the universe have all synched up for you, this is it, baby, it is breakthrough time.

What that looks like, who can say. Stare at the skydivers as long as you want, you won’t know what the fall is like until you jump. The future is here, it’s today, the world has been building towards this for untold eons of time, it’s all been leading up to this moment, this realization, this sad man looking out the window toward a night sky erased of stars, this sweeping orchestral music playing over a car leadfooting it out of town, these gunshots over the lake, this bloom of fire from the refinery.

Possible futures; but stay awake until your teeth hurt, the dawn’s coming anyway and the present slips horribly, inevitably into the future. You start awake, into another bodily epiphany, like so many before, like however many yet to come, the present is eternal, the future is always on the brink of being born, the past is the spit you smeared on the inside of your swim goggles to keep them from fogging. You’ve got this, baby. You’ve got this.