the onset of melancholy emotion can make me breathe deeply, and can be brought on by many things; the sight of glass structures, a memory of a certain song surfacing unbidden, a conspiracy of tone and light. i let loose my hunched shoulders into the urban distance,

a length defined by color washes and wavering lights like any other mirage.

it can make me grow weak and blissful, close my eyes as if gripped in orgasm, a sympathetic release of endorphin and what might best be called religious rapture.

i call it my own personal opiate, or give it a clinical name to make it containable and therefore less harmful. i can often sense it coming from around soft edges or at the slight lunge of footsteps. i never know when it will lunge from the shadows, demanding that i stand and deliver. always i do. a week of its absence makes me feel deprived,

betrayed by an imperfect and capricious neurochemistry.

when it comes on, like a pleasant surprise, it gives me a feeling of transcendence, that a universe is contained in my body and my cells communicate by a secret code of wavering city light, moving so slowly that eternity is of no concern and moments are blurred one into another. it is perfect, and meant to always be with me, a symbiotic fate spelled out in the stars of incandescent destiny.

©1999 Timothy A. Clark