Seattle, Part II

[Excerpt from a short story of mine.]

Oh, yes, these men once practiced a very different belief, a belief tethered to skateboards and up-close use of their senses: the sense to examine leaves of grass from beach towels and smell each day without knowing it (gasoline and sunscreen and wet concrete and Pantene hair and sawdust and farts and tongue), and the sense to feel how their fingers fit neatly into the ridges of a steering wheel, and the sense to sense that each thing contained a larger meaning. It was a belief tethered in doubt of parents and in love of Coke Slurpees and sunblurred wiffle-ball bats, catnaps in the hexagonal winter light on carpets and forgotten games with balls and chalk, a belief tethered to a self-reliant battle against everything, a sensory notion so feathery it couldn't be called a philosophy, a notion that all of this mattered because they would be with all of it forever and everything would forever be around them and they could effect change in themselves and in all of it and they had all the time in the world to do so.

How light and admirable was their romanticism! How Whitmanian their appreciation of the organic, the spillage, the uneven sprawl of the universe!

But somehow, somewhere, sometime, the dreamy haze of things evaporated and the hard lines and angles of reality's surface remained, unglistening, chapped, there.

And now: now they believe in Tightness. The way hide fits over a drum, a fist gripped in rage, the sheets on a Marriot bed. Tight. Taut. They have come to believe in and desire a reality that is tucked-in, precise, efficient, and smooth. Without mess. Even excess must appear organized.