Solo
After Ryan Brod
In this city I go for a run only on evenings when the wind is substantial, it’s easier on the lungs, and the ribbon of asphalt adjacent to the freeway is a land of bipolar possibility; with the wind or against the wind, and if you run a full circuit, you get to live the whole of it, which is a false promise, but it is worth believing in, and that’s a good enough theodicy for my father and his father, but I have decided that it ends with me because you can end anything you want to whenever you want to, no matter the weight no matter the costs, I learned this from a lover I still dream about sometimes, only sometimes, more often I dream of a tilted landscape that remains mute no matter the way I scratch at it, I think the landscape is childhood, I tell myself in the dream that I need to talk to my lover about this place of no language, but I get confused about which one, which isn’t very odd if you think about it, we love who we love in the teeth of it all and the margins of contingency can only accommodate so much, like these buttons of light on the freeway crawling into the night—who’s to say if the future is anything more than a hairpin turn and all my lovers are one blinding wound of light hurling towards me, that the time of the mind is a knife and it chops the world in livable slices, here is a slice grating the lines of my throat as I breathe, there is another on the footover bridge slicing its plane in a perpendicular precision as the bus driver applies the brake, a cuboid of people steps into my time and moves along like the moon of my childhood, mathematically it is accurate to think of all these vehicles as moving units of discrete time, then the landscape is a liquid of time, a function of possibility, which is mathematically correct and also a metaphor, all math is a metaphor and I am floating with the wind as a linear sequence of temperatures, a set of lungs reasonably sound, but not sound enough, not yet the way I want them, I want to pull off a Roger Bannister one day but I get bored with the monotony of it, it’s the routine of the world that I hate, I want to keep on digging in invented directions, I want to take a photograph of this place as it exists, as the bougainvillea sways in the freeway breeze, and the metro dives into the earth, and swooshes of velocity wave back and forth and back and forth, but the camera isn’t enough, the lens isn’t enough, my vantage point isn’t enough, nothing is ever enough, I should have been that fleck of grass on the sidewalk, and the stone under that flyover, I should have been the trigger on that soldier’s gun, and the bullet that reduces a moving vague to a static precision, there is a wound in want and it’s a need, I don’t like the weight on my feet, and the stone in my belly now hitting at the side, silhouettes shimmering past me under the jagged streetlight, there is a horizon past this horizon, in the burn in my chest I can sense it, sooner or later, I am headed there.
Abhinav (He/Him)
Abhinav is from Kanpur, India.