Constipation—that's what brought me to the Seamerstreet Collection. They say humans don't hibernate during the winter, but, jeez, our insides sure do. If it were sunny out, and the sidewalk not slicked, I'd be out running right now, working on my half-marathon time, instead of plodding up, down and around these five seasonally-decorated levels (that's three levels for structure #1 & two levels structure #2). Should I have just joined a gym? Would that have kept my plumbing without hiccups? Probably, but exercising in a small space makes my, like, soul sick or something—treadmill THUMPS covering up heartbeat THUMPS: Not my style. Better—was my thinking at the first big snow-dump—to forgo kinesis altogether and focus on more sedentary disciplines—reading, writing, drawing, playing piano, maybe get in love with watching movies again... The possibilities of how to lazily-but-engagingly spend my time were endless, and I was fine abandoning my strict Instagram-body regiment, not "losing" my gains, per se, but just giving them a well-deserved break—what I'm running towards should cycle with the seasons; all it takes is to invert the horizon of the outside world into an interior one for myself. No school, no work, just a long winter vacation—maybe even my last—back at home before graduating. I was actually having great success exploring my new "muscles" by getting at what I thought was beautiful and/or worthwhile. I've always wanted to be sort of a Renaissance Woman (at least a Jane of All Trades), and as late in the game it may be to finally really know how poetry works, and despite its not really gelling with my aims for pre-med, when else am I going to get the chance? I can make a whole universe for myself from a few words or notes or lines, a world free from the endless (and mostly depressing) medical jargon of chondrosarcomas and ovarian hypoplasias, at least for a few weeks. Gross anatomy—as fascinating as it can be—IS called gross for a reason, after all. And it's not healthy for anybody to focus soley on that kind of stuff anyway; a true ideal-world wouldn't have any of those visceral terms or their real-life equivalents—even less extreme things like blood-blisters and ingrown toenails—; a true, beautiful world would tick smoothly and flow—"Rrrrgh..." And then the colon cramps started, and before I even realized it, I had just spent thirteen hours tinkering with a subpar maiden-voyage chord-composition in MuseScore without really eating anything "good" at all the entire day: The perfect recipe for a colongic logjam. After a harsher-than-usual BM, I went out for a cautious walk (more like a minesweep) around my block, now coated white as a thrushed tongue—ice was everywhere beneath my feet, and what used to take three minutes to run to the end of my street now took fifteen minutes of pitiful penguin-shuffling. An anathema experience—to say nothing of the chill which was just as bitter—that made me feel dumb for even trying, "pretending" it was even close to being okay-enough outside... Repeat this cycle of desk-bound deep-diving into poor diet into abdominal cramps into progressively unsatisfying exertions, and you get the kind of scenario that drives a (not to brag, but: very) healthy twenty-two-year-old woman to mall-walk every day like a goddamn senior citizens.

Collection-walk, technically. "Malls" are an extinct idea—"collections," commericially and linguistically, are unmistakenly the next link in the chain of concrete capitalistic cathedrals. I always loved roving through malls. In middle school, it was such a rush to out-of-the-blue see a friend, or eye a teacher in the wild, or just plain people-watch. As we got older and earned our licenses, my friend-group's defualt meet-up spot would always be the the local mall, and, solitarily pacing around Seamerstreet today, I've reminded myself of some of those more subtle moments of ours: Scrounging for change underneath vending machines to throw away into the fountain; a friend realizing they've forgotten their phone in a changing room, and the mad, adventurous panic of us all racing back to retrieve it; the sneaking around into the mall's then-closed-off mini-cinema, only to instantly regret it and become paranoid at having been security-camera-recorded and getting sent to prison... Fuck me, is this what it means to get older? To "reminisce" about our gooey teenage-girl stuff? I haven't even had contact with any one of them in, like, over three years now... That's different career paths, for you, I guess...

So, yeah, exposition or whatever over: Every day I walk around Seamerstreet for at least two hours in order my fucking colon doesn't turn into a stopped-in-traffic cement-mixer. I started off listening to audiobooks on my consumer-brisk circumambulations, treating the place like one big track, but I've since relegated Brontë to the car stero; I've grown fond of the "vox mallana"—the mishmash-overlay of one storefront's speakers' trashy pop-music over its neighbor's; the cooing of young parents to their unruly offsprings; the sneaker-skittering of grinning up-to-no-good teenagers probably getting more of a workout than I am... It's chill; I like it here. And also—yeah, it's no lake-front horizon at the park, but—Seamerstreet is MASSIVE. I was listening to this philosophy podcast, and there's this phrase about 'not being able to be in the same river twice', or something; it has to do with how the world is always changing. Seamerstreet is, like, a river of bloodstreams—it's rare to see the same person again. In that way, it reminds me a lot of uniersity—I big ol' revolving-door organ. Replace the carrels and classrooms with shops, and violá—it's the same hemogloblatic story of deposit and withdraw, an exchage of paper and plastic for cloth and cologne, intakes on top of outakes, fluid-fueled as the hydroneumatics of the elevator-flanked fountain in structure #1, up and down and back and forth—clockwork.

I think thinking about things this way is the perfect in-between between vigorous exercise & lost-in-thought dreaming—a kind of blurry motion that pulls you in as much as you push from it... Speaking of pushing...


Out of all the small comforts in the world, (and yes, this includes women) perhaps none of them are more important than taking a good dump. Sweet equilibrium. Don't mess it up now by going for an Auntie Annie's Pretzel or anything, lol. God, fastfood's so disgusting to me now... Now that I know what it can—what it does to your...—I eye a family of some overweight collection-goers—I wish they could see what I see, see the interplay between balances in their own "collections"...

I find penny on the ground—heads-up; minted my birth year. I stroll over to the façade-marble aquamarine fountain-pool: "Please let everyone see what I see," I say in my head, and flip it in, breaching the membrane of the pool's surface tension and injecting its mettalic optimism into the sanguine-blue solution.

Immediately, just as the coin deliers a muffled clink at the bottom of the empty basin, something strange happens—the lights go dark. The bright, red-&-green-themed tinsel festooned all around extinguishes itself, replaced by a meager soft-blue light. I look up, and see the full moon hanging out above the glass roof, drooping its beams on me... and me alone. I'm naked, but there's no one to see... No metrosexual IT guys on their dates; no wannabe-valley-girls wandering with their cliques; no sunglassed out-of-place Texas-hat-wearers... They're all gone. Seamerstreet's empty—shuttered. I another pain in my abdomen, sharper than before.

END

by ineptia !!BCfeOlVwRRQ

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Pub: 03 Feb 2025 22:55 UTC

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