Baby, have you noticed the sky is rearranging?
I flick the TV off, am up past my bedtime, but am jangly from an evening run and couldn’t-sleep-last-night and tomorrow-is-the-first-day-of-school.
The city’s quiet even though I have a window yawning big-wide-open. Manhattan is not supposed to sound like this. But tonight’s chorus is the chorus of Maine, the chorus of Indiana, the chorus of Berlin. As if, in anyplace with four seasons, the scaffolding of mid-August is the gentle braiding of singing crickets and solitary locusts and whispering autumn.
Hopelessly into you
’cause you know how to
Unwrap my feelings ’til I’ve
Opened up from inside
No reason to be shy
Every reason to be mine
Tomorrow night. Linear algebra. Not since 1994.
I’ve been in classes since. Couple of MBA classes five years back. Five semesters of writing classes. These are nothing. I mean, they’re not nothing. But to grip from De La Soul, with math, stakes is high. Three thousand feet high and rising.
Numbers whirling, dancing, shift, shimmy, spiral. My first love. A safe space, an ordered space, where rules mattered, reason breathed, and action n+1 was predictable.
Fall into a head space
Deep into a new place
Spinning out of control
You should know
I don’t want to be safe
Every reason to be mine
I kill the lights, worm my way deeper into my couch, and look out my window. Wow. How did I miss those clouds? The city bounces off them. Makes their spirits glow amber.
Nothing’s really sane but everything’s amazing
Slowly taking over me
Baby have you noticed, the sky is rearranging
I feel it move in me
I remember, from childhood, late night drives with Dad from Chicago after free White Sox games. Past the orange lights of the big city, looking out the window at the clouds, that color! Back home to Indiana, darker, darker, darker, the sky soon blanketed us, no more brightly lit service islands, now just two white arms of light feeling their way around the highway in front of us.
And still, all the way home, the chorus of crickets and locusts and wonder.
Look at the sky, I think.
And tomorrow -
And tomorrow.
Lyrics: William Orbit’s Spiral, from Hello Waveforms
