In Between Days

Isn't that where we are all caught? Suspended like fish in a fisherman's net. Not in the water anymore but neither on someone's dinner plate or packaged in neat little rows at the grocery. Not yet. Suspended. Hanging on. Gasping for the breath to sustain us long enough to get to where we're going. Or to get back to where we once came. Our eyes bulging out before us trying to compact the events of a day into a brain too complex to regurgitate our sights back to us in absolute clarity. Our bodies convulsing with the adrenalin of our accomplishments, our failures, our fears, our mistakes. Our very lives hanging so precariously like the thread of the net hanging from the pole. And the pole, gripped tight between the calloused hands of the fisherman.

We are all right here... in between days. Waiting to read the next chapter, to listen to the next verse. Our struggles, our pain, our misunderstandings. The things that make up a soul. The things that make up a life. The things that make us who we are, who we were, who we will become.

What are those things? Can any one person ever really know us? Are we so much more than can be understood?

It is not so much to know a person's favorite meal, how they take their coffee, their preference for storms, the way their chin lifts in indignation while their eyes cloud in sadness, the freckle on the inside of their knee, the scar along their collarbone.

What about the way the crowd in the room at the Christmas party in 2004 made them feel as if all the air were being sucked from their lungs, or the way the spider lilies looked on the hillside outside Decatur and the digital camera in their back pocket did nothing to justify the beauty, or how their heart ached for the girl crying on the cement steps outside the Bob Dylan concert. Can you feel it too? Does it destroy you just as surely as it destroys them?

Will anyone ever really know us? Or are we all destined to bear the burden of ourselves alone?

Will we be like those fish in that net...swimming together, hunting together, procreating together...until we are all caught by the Fisherman? Will we hang there in the balance as our fate is determined or will any of us have the courage to flop, gasp, hurl our bodies back over the net, back down into this murky pool for one more chance, one more go round, one more day, one more opportunity to connect our souls.

Or will we simply keep living in between days?

I want to get covered in your filth, whoever the fuck you are. Let's cake each other in the shit that stirs in our soul and then bathe in the cleansing stream of its release. When are you coming around? I wish you'd hurry. I'm tired of waiting.

"If I die before I learn to speak, can money pay for all the days I've lived awake but half asleep?" Primitive Radio Gods - Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth With Money In My Hand