travels

drill

Somewhere in this building, someone is drilling. All the way up here, it still sounds powerful. If you take a moment, maybe you can even hear it from where you are. I swear the whole apartment building is vibrating with the sound so loud, so relentless, conducted through the same thick concrete that separates all the units and all the floors. This ash-grey honeycomb vibrates and sets each room going at its own resonant frequency. And we're all so detuned it's starting to scare me. I know the whole building is starting to shake, and there's nothing we can do to stop it. In a few minutes this address is gonna be a pile of rubble on top of a drill that no one's turned off. And I'll still be nineteen floors up, suspended in midair, like in the Looney Tunes cartoons I watched when I was a kid. You don't fall until you realize you've got nothing under you.

we must do this again sometime

Richard's life changed in a moment. That's how he tells it, anyway.
For a while, he was starting to get hung up, bad. His life had changed, but the first few months were spent pondering the countless if-onlys that had led to the change, and without even the least of which, he would never be where he is now. Pondering the if-onlys. For months, which is a bit of a stretch no matter how you cut it.
He could feasably have kept pondering them for the rest of his life. But he didn't. That's another bunch of if-onlys right there.
It doesn't take long to realize why he says his life changed in a moment and just leaves it at that.

the country is more than just the space between cities

rushing headlong but looking sideways
as a dozen colours, maybe hundreds...
yes, ten thousand earthtone palettes per second,
the sum total of all the autumn days you never noticed,
blur horizontally in a naked honesty
that all the neon signs in the world could never hope to match.

and while your gaze stays fixed
where no reference point can exist,
your mind rides that invisible line on the edge of vision
where everything resolves into
six billion leaves, waiting
to fall softly to earth.