FILLMORE JIVE

instead of being up and awake at four in the morning while a monsoon rain rakes against my windowpane, while i rummage through luggage and suitcases filled with album after album of old family photos, i need to sleep. rather than impossibly yearn to go back in time to the precise moment captured in the particular photo i hold in my shaky hands, of my father when he was ten years old, a stone faced boy in a navy blue school uniform with a cold smile sitting on the steps of a temple in North Korea, i need to be comfortable and cozy, dozing off to dream of snacking on Klondike bars and playing guitar in a fort with a golden retriever who smokes cigarettes and plays the bass.

i would like to not be nostalgic – to not have this deep desire to get dirty and dig into the depths of time, to infiltrate history, to be transposed to the precise moment my father prepared for the snapshot and squinted from the flash of the camera. i cannot help it though; i want to know him then, know what he thought of when he woke up and felt a chilly breeze blow in from the window, when he would dip his legs into a cool lake on a summer day, when he laid on dewy grass in the morning staring up into the clouds. i want to have known him before he gave me a name, before, on lonely days, i would drive in the snow on the back-roads of Ohio forgetting to relish in the beauty of winter because the darkness of my mind put me in a slumber; before i read a poem that told me that we learn the most from what's fallen. he would not have known then, in that moment in 1953, as boundaries were drawn across the land, that one day i would figure out that all life is is an imprint on my brain of a hummingbird who came by to say hello as i rainbow-watched and smoked a cigarette; that would have been before another day of gray sky, when i would happen upon a couple of teary-eyed folk in embrace kneeling in front of a grave and would find myself in wonder and want to feel and know the depths of their anguish, and the reason for their pain; before i would take long walks along the beach for a good while, a mile or two, thinking of all of the lonely aimless souls who walk as well, wondering under the chandelier of night, asking themselves quietly under their breath, how many children want for the love of someone else?

i'd like to sleep but for some reason i can't, not even when i try to meditate. i will try to sleep soon and want to sleep soon and will give up this fantastic idea of transportation to another time and place because it is impossible to actually time-travel – and if i could, i don’t think i would be able to change anything because if i did the photo would not exist in the same manner in the future, and would not have inspired this insomniac state. so i do not wish to go back, after all; i do not wish to change the past—would not even for the chance to see pavement reunite. i just need to sleep.

but i am writing now, instead of searching, rather than sleeping. i write because to write is to be in a kind of sleep; it is free like a dream; you can write whatever and it all has meaning (or none at all). instead of being awake rummaging through paper memories i will write and it will suffice—it is nearly better than sleep.