crash

in this moment, the air is crowded with the things that make up your life. your right hand reaches out, as if to gather them to yourself while your left grasps the wheel.

ground glass suspended in a lattice of plastic molded to the bridge of a theoretical nose, the curvature, to ears set an average distance to the back of the head.

the beginnings of tomatoes you picked off the vine, small and unripe, as if to deprive the world the small joy they might come to represent in time.

a handful of coins that, no matter how long they might accumulate, will never amount to much of anything.

salad forks and bread knives, those approximations hands and teeth.

a book you intentionally forgot to return; a miniature, nearly imperceptible act of spite.

these fragments you disassembled, removed from the context they once resided in—now you reach for each in turn.

but you are held back by a tremendous force, a band running diagonally across your chest, squeezing the breath from your lungs. you watch as all these things clatter and slip through your fingers, crashing against polyurethane foam and glass before coming to rest in the footwells and under the seats.

and then everything falls still.

you are on a bridge that, through some trick of physics, bisects the placid and tempestuous natures of the lake it floats upon. the sound of water is indistinguishable from that of the traffic that flows by you in all the highway's lanes but the one you're stopped in. behind you, a man steps out of his car, approaches, then raps on your window.

but in this moment, you think only of how these pieces will be put together once more, in some other place at some other time.