Now, you were driving home from the liquor store—small pint of chardonnay in tow—for a few hours spent dragging and dropping things on the internet. The glitch itched behind your ear and there was moonlight on it, came away with your thumb like mud and the mixed memory of a few years back when you had friends to call. You’d been away from the computer too long and daylighting in public felt like the approximation of clown paint poured down your throat. Talking had become so intricate, lately. No cursor’s guidance, veritable sailor’s star for neurodivergence.
You were compiling something and the itch for alcohol had blocked all business until you’d gotten up, checked the stove, and left. Building an archive by scratch felt like spiritual business, a variation on Genesis: pixels in place of bone, and the eyesight of an overlord rested squarely on the soft spots of your shoulders as you click-clicked and drew lazy geometry with the added bonus of plug-ins. This was your porn. A glazy activity that glued your mind shut at the very seams requiring it most. You hadn’t participated in sex in two years, but were making up for it now through obsessive dedication to font choice and 15 pt line spacing.
While driving, you glimpse the three does in the partial field abutting the partial swamp abutting your apartment complex, and it’s nighttime, so the headlights of the Honda grow yellower against their simple movements. Above them is a large cloud with heat lightning at its edges and center, stalled and thinking, neural with so much spontaneous light. You’d been watching the trill of light earlier from the black gate at the side entrance of the complex, waiting for your delivery order with your hands knuckling the folds of your pants pockets, fingering the grape vape next to the coin you’d found in some expensive saint’s candle. St. Benedict, harbinger of good against evil, the kind of man old maids like yourself sought out when you lived alone with a half-feral cat for company.
The deer are in a crooked line and grazing under the cloud light, oblivious to the storm above them because they stand for G-ddess, don’t think too much of other natural phenomena as they themselves are avatars of the greater, and their greatest care in this moment is to feed, then flight. The storm is quiet, so you are too, and you drive past them at a respectful clip, looking over your shoulder to guarantee the scene isn’t mirage or worse—side effect.
On the way up in the elevator clutching the brown bag with guilt that feels easy and sheddable you message the video of the heat lightning to socials and think about waking up in a cloud and the metaphor behind it and the way in which the trauma feels lately: cottony head and a mind bent on erasure of risk; the plugs and light switches and faucets that tap-tapped despite your knob-twists. There’s peace in proving to yourself that you have the power to check away danger, that it happens–best–like most things, in sets of threes.
