finding mars and shooting stars

i am fervently burning for a change.

i am packing my bags and aiming for denver.

i feel like an arrow about to shoot off into the sky.

i am untying myself and i am letting all of this mess go.

i am poised and focused. i am ready to soar into the great unknown.

i am ready to travel again; to be on the open road, to pass through unfamiliar towns, each different in the some barely discernible way from the last, to meet people who will aid my passage or oppose it, to weather the weather, to feel the curve of the continent passing beneath me- the slow flow of landscape changing from one expression of itself to another. salt flats and pine trees, mountains and rivers....

and of course there is the matter of california existing somewhere out in the uncertain, but i am not going to california anymore. reasons are reasons, and this one happens to be a long boring story that, no matter how i tell it, ends the same exact way: casual sex is selfish.

this is how i choose to remember it to be:

about three and half weeks ago, at 2:45 a.m. i was restless in my bed, thinking about someone who was not thinking about me (which, if you don't already know, is the leading cause of insomnia).

i walked outside to my backyard and laid a blanket down in the grass. i stared up at the enormous sky, watching the dark night. the sky was a wheel with a crescent moon and utterly cloudless. the air was dry and the stars were sharp points in the dark. there seemed to be a great many more of them than i ever remembered seeing before. and without any foreknowledge that such an event would i occur, i witnessed a meteor shower. spouts and shoots of light, both thin and broad, arced over my head. i ran inside to get my scope and considered waking my roommates. the notion fled my mind quicker then my feet could send me back out onto the blanket, where the heavenly hosts performed just for me. i stretched out in articulations, opened the scope, and peered through the universe. i must have spent hours looking through the eye piece as if into a well. and the longer i looked the deeper down i thought i saw. the shape of creation appeared like a funnel; ages upon ages of nebulous life spinning and existing in front of my eyes. orion in his winter garb, swinging his blade below his belt. the seven sisters, once distinct but becoming a singular and blurry patch against the dark as my eyes wain heavier. and the lonely moon, so blue, streaking across infinity, in whatever phase she was scheduled to show at this particular moment on this particular night.

it's alarming, really, how the wheels of the world work- the shifting constellations and orbital planets, the four seasons, and 13 moons, endlessly turning in some supernatural milieu, foreign and uncharted, but still the only probable proof of time.

and time is such a calculated device, levying limits on the pieces of our lives. but without it everything would happen all at once. a beautiful and horrible explosion of simultaneous events, an instant of awful frenzy and then, ever after, black nothing....

so of course time is necessary, but nevertheless damn painful.

so here i am, 3:22 a.m. awake in the night, lying on my back under shooting stars because desire abides. the sun can not bleach it, nor the tide wash it away. how amazing for a thing as vaporous and fickle as desire to survive against all the depredations of science. the world can ardently toil away in all of its mysterious fashions, with its pathological rotations, it's weather patterns, and changing positions, but neither the phases of the moon or the divisions of the year can curb this feeling.

desire is all we have that stands proof against time.