The Endarkenment

The Quicksand Hourglass

12 The Quicksand hourglass I went back to the tree where I carved my initials, and the eighth-grade desk where I scrawled the word fuck, and the subway wall where I spray-painted my tag, and it’s all gone. You try to leave your mark on this chalkboard of a world, and they always wash it over, scrub you out, say you ain’t gonna be nobody, and the Hollywood thing seems so big, but even those stars aren’t permanent. They grow old and fall apart, despite their little handprints in cement outside Grauman’s Chinese Theater, as if they could say halt to eternity. But where are all those people who passed through the subway station in my chest, who dropped in a token? Like those kids I used to hang with on Philly street corners when I was thirteen and sporting a silver rope chain and a tank top that covered half my abdomen, tube socks shooting up my calves, my first hairs cutting through my genitals, how it was all one big explosion down there. And now I’m thirty-five, can see the life that’s ahead of me, the life behind me, can see where my biceps will turn into mush, where my lungs will unravel like a cashmere sweater. And what about when the person you’re out of touch with has your eyes and freckles and inflections, sucked from the same tit as you, got hit with the same hairbrush as you, hopped the same fences as you? And that person can’t even leave his room, like he’s under some personal house arrest, and you know the feelings in his head 13 are so compressed you’re worried his brain might explode like a bottle of soda left overnight in the freezer. And just hearing the word family sends a rat running through you because the one you came out of was broken, and you tell yourself it’s ok to be the one egg that didn’t get crushed in the carton. And you think of all those people that have moved through this heart, this Grand Central Station in your chest, just big enough for them to reach their hands in and press their fingers into the wet cement. ...