March 28, 2024

Nashville Never Was II (A Prose About Lost Religion)

(Image of small, holy city in twilight.)

 

It was a feeling you usually draw lines to when considering “the last time I felt something before I realize where I am.” I never quite realized where I was and that could have possibly been my snowy, saving grace. The ideal was not to be and I fathom that the trajectory I was pinged at put me toward a more frugal path. A path where I believed in less known mystics and more myths of my own. Enough to write bloody home about which is miles and broken lamposts now from this fading, novelty pen.

 

The frame of a used Cadillac’s golf-tee door lock seemed like a joystick by the highway lights passing on. A flashing cross the size of radio towers glew like a starpost and this vessel was about to dock as our squad secretly needed God. It was all space travel to me and I believed in melancholies to-be-yet defined that each little, lonely factory was a planet where workers felt satisfied by the moon. I never saw these places prior to noon where smoke fumigated the atmosphere like many hopes out here. I was on my planet most of the day printing third-world diagrams for my self obtained and contained first-worlds. It was a flat place. It was a home planet much more mountainous as a cortex scarred with visions of stars that nobody else would have, and good for them.

 

It was a sublime feeling to have in the crevaces of chipping, backseat leather. It was a great feeling for Saturday night when a concept of fright was not defined and never suspected  I was dropped off at youth gospel activities because I needed a friend. The mode turned out to be executive protocol by the vessel captain who parked a broken down Cadillac nearly breaking down herself. Blue tears as the neon cross glimmered in belt-like artifice. Maybe this hunk of pitiful metal needed foreign fuel to reach another constellation. Maybe we just needed a damn rental to run away with. Maybe the caption below Joe’s All-You-Eat told us to park here cause we both needed a map on how to avoid I-235 asteroids hitting us intermittently. There’s a difference between knowing and feeling. I went by the stories of first-worlds I printed out on a third-world paint program, so I felt. The captain went by the stories written since billions of years past with doubt they exist, so she knew. Another revolution ’round this waterless marble gave hope to brave a sudden night of holy trial and error. In we walked to place and time. Both Saturday.

 

Before I dive too deeply : a word was never memorized that the captain received herself. The meaning would have escaped me, and to this day full of manuals I’ve desperately sprawled, it still manages to do so. I shifted pant-legs in the halls with young disciples like myself in open, porcelain space and technicolor paper. I think back to that day where I felt that thing, and now know, that those things were probably sold. A dancing simulator in the form of four-square mechanical game that was surreal in a temple of light. Large, instrumental gloves to inflict nerfed harm that felt surreal in a temple of light. Blurring by and naive teenagers speaking of lights extending from the tips of their lips which felt somehow surreal in a temple of light. I felt like I was a street light animating with the motions as these thin bodies of the cross’s blood skipped about in ambivalent whim. I was on this planet now. I was on my own planet while I was on ‘their’ planet.

 

I found myself staring at a window much like the dilaphidated rims of the cadillac for the night’s remainder. I found beauty in utopia’s artifice. I stared out that steeple window toward a moon that barely lived, believing something in its own melancholy wisped on it. This was until it struck time for departure once more. Blind cheers flowed superfluously about my adolescent, beating heart. The stomps on the machine were faith against metal. The fluffs of the gloves was an elitist caveman’s bone to lower caveman’s skull. The clicks on a little mouse operating third-world applications I ‘thought’ I owned felt adequately impersonal. As captain, earlier than expected, signaled for my dismissal from the hall of inconsequence I configured the correct amount of spiritual fuel to sustain me. In a place with more than enough bloom to bless the throng of dreamers, somebody would lose the key to all kingdoms for sacrifice of them all. I breathed in, felt a cadillac door lock, and breathed out invisibly “I’ll lose that key with a smile on my face because you need me to.”

 

We had insufficient funds for our vessel to park on this holy planet. It became less a planet. In fact, it was probably a country studio or ageless barn converted to a place of misrepresentation. To us at the least. I laid flat on tangerine leather encapsulated within the shelter of the backseat, pretending some knife slash atop the ceiling was a shooting star. I heard captain’s head hit her arms on the driver’s wheel. I listened to a place surrounded by shadows and speeding diesels on quota. Possibly ignited by a single headlight that just couldn’t turn on due to offness of an inner soul. I looked up at the knife slash I made believe was a shooting star. What were we going to do? The vessel had more than enough fuel to go home. Deep in my heart which would be somewhat plunged in the oblivion of knowing too much later, I knew a little why we couldn’t take off. Maybe I didn’t want to. I wanted to stay in this shelter because the further we were from this planet, the more the idea would remain that return is not an option. Maybe I wanted to stare at this slash in the ceiling all night and meditate on its disaster that would soon become mine since we might not find a loving planet. The engine revved all cylinders and the one’s in my chest were fixated on that slash. At least we had Sunday. At least we had all of it.

 

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