Mutatis Mutandis

[having been changed, being about to be changed]

I counted the rusty blue rivets along the bottom of the postbox.  The United States Postal Service calls them "snorkel boxes," possessing a protruding, oddly shaped appendage ending in a thin rectangular aperture that gasped desperately for the mail that sustained it.  They were probably designed for easy access from the driver’s seat of an automobile, but tonight, on this night of all nights, traffic was sporadic.  A passerby stepped over my prone legs, paying me no mind.  His long frock coat ruffled and snapped in the breeze, and the collar was turned up.  Although he cringed against the wind, his chin against his chest, he still managed to ignore me.  I yearned to call out.  My lungs could not; they were filled with something, but it was not a pitiful plea for help.  I felt like I was drowning.

His indifference had bothered me.  The opposite of love is not hate, but is instead apathy.  Did he love me so little?  A soldier snarling behind a bayonet would love me more, and lead me to a place where nothing assails.  Is that not love?  The flash of stainless steel on a side street in the city…honestly, it’s the answer to everything.  Does she know?  Will it matter?  Individuality is a pretense, proof against that rude terror that we all are eminently replaceable, and, eventually, the universe will replace us.  Some murderers are simply murder weapons.  Garish verandas stretched down the avenue; broad-shouldered umbrellas stretched their arms against the sky; black iron fences capped by black iron flowers held in the empty outdoor dining areas.  Lilac shrubs, lavender and pearl, were beginning to wilt, their panicles’ shoulders drooping under the gravity of summer falling.  The smell lingered, though, a gentle hint at future springs not yet arrived.  How many springs can a man survive before summer sweats him dry?  Summer is the relief of spring, overripe.  Here, this far north, there flourished few plants so fragrant.  No matter how commonplace, I always eagerly anticipate the fresh flush of flowers.  They are harbingers of spring, satin-eyed and smiling.   A siren came closer, and flashing lights signaled catastrophe from across the street.  Beneath the makeshift visor of the mailbox, the shadows against the bottom of the shaking leaves circled in the spinning blue and red lights like lazy vultures.

I was tired, and tiring.  My feet were numb, but I could hear the rough scrape of my synthetic souls against the sandpaper concrete.  I couldn’t see, but I’m certain that the quartz glittered gleefully in the streetlamp, flashbulbs purifying white from the orange glow.  Why hadn’t the cops crossed the street?  I heard a forceful knock across the road, and I knew that they hadn’t come for me.  A pity.  Some disturbance not transpiring beneath the backside of a postbox.  The fuzzy percussion of my shoes had drawn the attention of a panhandler across the street; I felt his bare toe nudge me in the side, just below my ribs.  Oh, how my heart thumped, I thought it might escape its bony cage!  Then I felt his fingers slip behind my right heel, as if a reverse shoehorn, and then he quickly pried it off.  As he moved to the left, I silently marveled at the strange swishing noise of a pliant shoe escaping its foot.  The man’s head faced downward, and his long, greasy hair hung limply past his chin.  Maybe he thought me a drunk or an addict, passed out in the first place that beckoned to a disorganized mind.  He glanced hesitantly up as prepared to leave, his loot in tow; we made eye contact, and he knew.  The half-open mouth, my pupils shivering like a tuning fork; he heard, and he fled.

There is eloquence in all things, but some languages stubbornly defy understanding.  I knew a man who wore sadness like a cuirass, and he saw such a cold, blue-iron beauty to it.  Blunt weapons in wild hands had smashed the metal shirt’s straps, and he could not take it off.  A mind buried beneath a fresh snowfall, before a single step had defiled it, the green grass safely hiding underneath.  He cared nothing for my triumphs, only for my defeats.  The happy might understand all, but the sad only understand sad.  Most of us get it, but only at the end.

The world devolved into confusion.  It always does, until we rebuild it beyond our silly sense of sight and our quixotic love of life.  Mutatis mutandis: having been changed, being about to be changed. In order to gain some pittance of solace, I begin to count the vehicles as they rattled past.  The loud, growling ones I attributed to the diesel trucks and the motorcycles.  The ones that seemed to whisper I figured for the sleek, catlike sedans that speak through their tires instead of their engines.  Tires on wet concrete sound sticky, like a roll of adhesive tape slowly unrolled.  My shoulders contracted and my back arched; a weight seemed to compress my chest, and inwardly I groaned like a bridge collapsing.  They will find me in an hour, exsanguinated, empty.  Where does a man beneath a mailbox fall to, though, when the ground beneath him gives way?  I remembered a conversation in a darkened drawing room, the metal-grated walkway encircling as if the battlements atop the tall walls of Dis.  Looking at her, then: The people we could have been will never cease to admonish us.  Never.