road blocks

I've been sitting at this airport for a lot of hours, Brad. I've been thinking about ways that I burned the chicken, and how you wouldn't even choke down the coffee.

I've been thinking about the ways I would get up in the morning, like I didn't even know you. I'd swing my legs off of the bed, so easily like the alarm clock was nicer than any of us really knew. Like we really didn't know that all this time, it just wanted to keep sleeping just like we did.
I'd make the bed with you still in it, and pull my hair into a ponytail like you didn't need to use the toilet at 5:30 a.m. and I'd shut the bathroom door and do my makeup for twenty minutes.

I know you've been suffering Brad, and I think you should go home. Go back to your mother's seventies-style living room, and go back to your dad's workshop with the peg board.
Take the hammer off of the wall, and smash whatever you need to, even though you are a gentle soul. I know I've been killing you so slowly.

I will call you in six or seven hours, and we will just breathe across the static, and the telephone company will rip us off of minutes we can't see. They'll charge us for all the seconds that we don't know what to say.

I know what I want to say, but my voice will get somewhere in the walls, the plasma, the whatever. You know, between my lungs and pit of my stomach.

And what I would say is what I've already said in the text messages and the silent dinners at restaurants.
That I'm made of stuff.
That I'm made of cardboard and charcoal and cotton balls and TV screens.
That you're made of cinder blocks and Burger King and air-filter-fibers and even sometimes plastic sacks from Target.

And for some reason, we can't build a time machine out of that. Can't go back to the beginning, and it is making me sleepy.

It's making me the end.