AFTER THE CROSSWIND - I. Shadow Men
Dec. 6th, 2008 02:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thisnewdayFor months, forty-eight of them to be exact, I've thought about going back. The last time I was there, I had a fourth floor hotel room with a balcony overlooking the ocean. And in the morning I could watch as the gleaming, white cruise ships made their turn up the channel toward births off Mallory Square.
The next time, if there is one, I'm not at all sure what the view might be. A street corner in "Old Town," maybe, somewhere along Duval Street. A few blocks, and a century away, from Hemingway's place on Whitehead Street. A place where, at nine or ten at night, I might be standing in the shadows watching the tourists hurry back to beachfront hotels like the one where I once stayed.
I can see myself there, among those lost and faceless men who reach out from the shadows for cigarettes and spare change, frozen as in that instant when the wheels suddenly jar and then lift again before finally settling onto the runway. Like a life caught in the crosswind and unable, for that much of eternity, to find the horizon.
And the question, then, would be, what's likely to happen in the next moment after?
The next time, if there is one, I'm not at all sure what the view might be. A street corner in "Old Town," maybe, somewhere along Duval Street. A few blocks, and a century away, from Hemingway's place on Whitehead Street. A place where, at nine or ten at night, I might be standing in the shadows watching the tourists hurry back to beachfront hotels like the one where I once stayed.
I can see myself there, among those lost and faceless men who reach out from the shadows for cigarettes and spare change, frozen as in that instant when the wheels suddenly jar and then lift again before finally settling onto the runway. Like a life caught in the crosswind and unable, for that much of eternity, to find the horizon.
And the question, then, would be, what's likely to happen in the next moment after?
