I'm at work today, but not really. My mind is running as far away from here as possible...running on a parallel universe.

It's raining and that makes me happy. God is crying. Hell, someone else should be crying so that those of us miserable sons-of-bitches aren't crying alone.

Where is my mind today? I am home. Home in Pennsylvania, where I was born and raised. It's funny that it's not a school day...or maybe I'm dreaming that I am the age I am now, not in high school like when I was still living there. But it doesn't seem like any time has passed...I am running through lush parks near my house with the cold drops of rain hitting me each time I am caught between sharp branches; caught without the evergreens to shield me from the precipitation. And I like it. I like running through the trees, stumbling over the thick, knotted roots of decades old trees, my clothing catching on bark and branches and wet green foliage sticking and scratching at my face and when I pass, they leave their wet mark on my face. And I look up and the rain hits me in the face and in my eyes and I can see everything a little more clearly now and it makes me laugh, not giggle, but laugh heartily with that laugh I heard as a child, coming out of the mouths of those wise sophisticated women my parents were friends with - the ones who smoked the long skinny cigarettes and wore Fuck Me Red lipstick and draped their appearances in fur stoles and when they came over - before the laughing started - they would teach me a line in French. And partially because I craved their attention and their adoration...I wanted to sit in the warm sunshine they emanated...and I learned it because it came from this wise sophisticated woman and I knew she was teaching me for some reason.

God, those women, and there were one or two, they had that laugh. Like they knew something that everyone else didn't. Like that one-guy-too-many that they fucked had brought them to another plane and they were enlightened...

When these women were over, they would speak their mind and tell crude jokes and my father would say something witty and oh, that LAUGH. I CAN'T STAND IT. I can hear it now in my head and it drives me wild to this day wondering what made them laugh so.....what they KNEW!? What do you know? How can I learn what you know??

But I'm in the forest and I AM THE ONE LAUGHING and I am laughing like them as the rain hits my face. YES! There are a number of things I can identify in my laugh: delight, freedom - adult freedom - carelessness, and a sense of knowing who I am. Not wondering what I will be but KNOWING - do you know what that is? Knowing is waking up one day and looking into the mirror and after all those years of looking in and pulling at my face and squinching it up and staring it down and wondering what I would look like when I grew up...the KNOWING is waking up and looking like you always do and all the sudden there is no squinching because you KNOW, this is what you look like.

Not too bad either. Could be worse.

Where am I running? To meet my friends...those high school derelicts I hung out with? That I would meet in the woods b4 or after school to drink warm, skunked malt liquor or 40's? If I keep running like this, will I find them as we were, 17 and fresh-faced with the ever-present blunt being passed around? Will it be like no time has passed? Will they forget that I left town a year later, when I was 18, and I never came back? And now it's 9 years later, and I'm MIA?

Or will it be us as we are now, all running to that spot we know about, all of us running to escape our lives, leaving spouses and lovers and running to what we knew when we were safe?

Or maybe, no one else is running with me today. I'm okay with that.

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