Evening

Click.

The door shuts behind me.  It is a metallic noise, a slot filled with a metal male into a metal female. Their connection a barely audible sound.

A sun hides behind trees, low in the West, hide and seek to an afternoon that is tired of chasing it.  It is the yellowing of a Kodak evening, edges curling like an old photo, a patina sheen to a day that was filled with numbers and voices, key strokes and conversations, the bane of a chore, the hamster-wheel going around in a cage.

Click.

The noise that I heard when you shut the door, a departure, a removal.  A jettison.  You, then not you.  Not even a pair of footsteps echoing to at least signal a movement away.  Just a sound, a metallic click that is not slammed in anger or frustration but rather of civility.  Business-like.  Hello, I'm done with you, Goodbye.

Click.

The classic toy view-master, advancing the picture scenes in colors across a plastic lens.  Next.  You and Me.  Next.  You without.  Next.  Me.  Next...a catch in the gears or something.  Mechanical.  It just stopped working.  It just stopped fucking working.

Click.

A fast iPhone photo.  A shared text.  A sent message.

Click.

A silence.

Click.

The aperture of the day is closing, the co-mingling of colors is becoming rapidly a darkened ink.  With each beat of a blink the day is just basically heading down a disposal, mauled together and blackening.  It has no rhythm, no courage.  No colors really.  Like a child spilling glass jars of paint in a single space, just a somewhat lengthy amount of work to what the day will end like, which is just a blackness.  A horizon trimmed with a burnt edge, but losing it quickly, a blink, then black.

Click.

The noise of a Sharpee as it crosses out another day.

Click.

The sound a file makes when removed from a drawer, placed on a desk and opened.  It is a memory jogged.  It is you thinking about it in the middle of the day, it is an unpleasant invasion, not anticipated and unwelcome.  It is the click of the gears in your mind, the cold hard machinery of a memory that you want rusted and chained and unoiled and unkempt and ossified and archaic and untouched and unmoved and unearthed and unveiled and uncomfortable and unseen, unknown, unavailable....

But every now and again, like a fast last bit of an orange sky immolating against itself before retreating completely into black...you hear a door shut...in your mind...of an escaped memory that has left whatever prison you created and is now roaming around for you to suddenly attempt to catch it...and with it, catch a glimpse of me.