Thoughts on The National-Boxer

This is for listening at 2 am and your mind traveling to the city at night. Preferably in a car with a skylight and tall skyscrapers where you can’t see the top and your mind racing. Between songs you stop at stoplights pinned to the side of the road and the lights surrounded by green yellow red halos. Wiping sleep from your eyes.

This is for holding your ipod to your chest and flying through the ceiling. Diamond slippers and sparkles on all sides when you know the world is not shiny or new or even friendly but you want it so badly to be so. Coldness and seeing your breath in the air and the silence of parking garages.

This is for dreaming a dream you can’t dream when you’re asleep. This is about control, isolation, self-fulfillment, mundane beauty, strength in leaps off buildings. Loss and fear of loss and chasing slowly down sidewalks that lead to parked cars and wanting and wanting to be wanted.

This is about the lint you find in the pocket of your dry cleaned suit and subtly flick aside at an intersection. Finding comfort in familiar things in an unfamiliar place that is altogether different and never the same. Afghans and nesting someplace warm and soft; with company if necessary.

This is about belonging to an office/couple/community. It’s about staying in touch and retaining a part of yourself that’s never revealed not because it’s so dangerous but because it’s all yours. Becoming: in better being yourself and better being others. A thousand meaningless dinner parties and the faces of Greek tragedy. Professionalism for professionalism’s sake.

This is about a threat: immediate, disarming, residual, passive, impending. Also, about a response: reluctant, questioning, worn, hopeful, genuine. What weight the past can hold in the middle of an inevitable and volatile present. Barely concealed anxiety and the angels that surround us and hold us up and look away when it gets too ugly. Or not.

This is about Christmas lights, the kind on Charlie Brown’s tree wrapped in Linus’ blanket. Resisting the urge to know everything, to see the future, to demand a resolution. Girls and boys growing older too quickly and wanting to wear a Superman outfit to work, using the cape to fly down the stairwell. Or drowning their pain in walks through the city at night, head down and hands shoved in pockets, seeking comfort in steel buildings and the concrete that patches together the ground…

This is for listening at 2 am…