Emoticons

it's kind of prose, but whatever

You know emoticons, the picture language of texting? I found one of a bridge under a starry sky. The different emoji's spoke like hieroglyphs.

I always thought a smiley face was a sort of imposition, an 'I want you to feel this, or to think that I feel this' kind of gloss-over or interruption of a genuine uncertainty or uncomfortable silence over cyberspace and telephone lines. An elmer's glue and colored paper tack on to truth, someone playing editor and revising an incubating and frail little pause...

 

The bridge and starry sky reminded me of driving to the Cape, crossing the Sagamore bridge. That two hour drive was a summer to me then.

 

We'd approach the rotary, and fast food restaurants would glint and glitter like casino palaces on the Las Vegas strip, Friendlies a Bellagio to me. Crossing the bridge, I'd feel a rush of air, the narrow onramp, sometimes with cones, and we'd take off and I'd marvel at how we drove so straight and never wavered. A darkened bay with boats, the mouth of a withheld river, maybe the etched smokestack of a nuclear power plant, the break of a black wave I couldn't see through the rail. Suicide hotlines, we'd talk about. Eminem's song 'Stan', how that 3rd verse ended with a bridge like this one...

 

The breath of the night sky on that bridge, it was a preview of the cosmic sigh we'd get from the deck we owned at the tippy top of the world. I'd become lighter. The road curved up, so we'd float a bit and become giddy and zen with wakefulness. The birds on the wire that we couldn't see. They must have slept. They could never have been painted.

 

The tires would spit-up the shells like a tank, the darkened house itself the last figure between us and the end. That roof I'd hit baseballs off of with a plastic yellow bat. The unclasping and slamming of metallic car doors, one after the other. Breathless luggage. Laptops with wound around cords. Shifting cats in cases. My steps on the shells, adrenaline rattling me as if Cujo was standing on the cottage path just beyond. The salt smell would continue to sink in for quite some time. You have to wake up with the salt in your nostrils a few times before you can believe it's really there. Star gazing would come another night. Maybe a moment tonight. The same stars on the bridge, but brighter. Nearer. 

Reviews

[gabiaimee]

I love all the descriptions, but there are things that are unfamiliar to me (i.e. Cujo, Sagamore Bridge) so I think it would help to give some more information within all of this description. Interesting topic as well...I never would've thought of it.

[Thaddius]

oh yeah totally. I wrote this originally with some additional content as an email, to someone to whom the references mean something additional. There's something to be said for those kind of omissions that can leave you confused but hungry. I tend to like them. Thanks for the feedback!

[Daydreamer]

This piece did a magnificent job of keeping me in the present moment.
Well done!

[Thaddius]

thanks. that was my goal