clean pillow
Back when I was living in Philadelphia, there was this guy, his name was Jacks (yes, plural), he would walk around with his head cracked open. Each morning started out the same, he would wake about 6:30, feed the cats, make a pot of coffee, then sip it on the porch while reading the news, out loud to himself, from his phone. He usually did it after that, that is, he would trudge down into the basement with a hammer and bang it against his skull as hard as he could over the slop sink. Jacks lived off social security checks, was the kind of guy who knew everyone on the block, spent his days either walking up and down the street or tinkering out front with an ever evolving tree-like sculpture with branches made of blood stained PVC pipes which extended from his porch out over the sidewalk. The area was old fashioned like that, that is, people were still eccentric, sat outside, talked to each other. He was well liked, and no one seemed to mind the bleeding much, it was just the way things had always been—Jacks, the guy with the tree sculpture out front, the guy with his head cracked open. He was polite, too—kept rags in his pockets, always made sure to clean up the little pools of blood that were left after a visit to a friend's stoop. By about sundown each evening, after a day spent outdoors, the continental pieces of Jacks’ skull began floating closer together until merging again into a single Pangea, clean pillow, and the next morning would start the same.
.
It was August, I had just returned from a two month stint in the woods, and the city was complete purgatory, hot as hell, frustrated, existential, as anticipated. The only place to be was in your bedroom with the window unit on, and that’s where I was, sprawled out on the bed catching up with a friend via phone. We were having the same conversation everyone was always having, centering on dissatisfaction, on precarity, on disconnection. This friend was never making their art because they were always working and always depressed and didn’t have the capacity for much else.
I just, I feel like I need to get out of here for a while, they were saying, but I don’t have the money to, I can’t figure out how to not be working.
Yeah, I breathed, that makes sense.
I’ve been so tunnel visioned, they continued, I need to experience something, I need to have my head cracked open.
When they said that, I thought of Jacks, and the house I’d lived in in Philly, and all the people I’d loved there, and the person I was at that time, for the first time in a long time, and it all felt like a past life, and it was, the way past lives always are, close as your nose, and also, very far away.