Limitations framed in cubic feet.  It suddenly felt unnatural, the entire experience, colors and shapes ending into gallery white space.  The geometry of calculated chaos, the unknown inner-dimensions of everything we had ever felt, adolescence loomed behind us like a forgotten basket, carrying all of our dreams.  

It was almost cold outside.  I walked onto the patio, my bare feet feeling the cold cement.  I lit a cigarette.

This is my bread and butter, I reminded myself.  These are the bare bones of my life experience, the summation of my skeletal self, writ in the borrowed language of paraphrased lines.  Little by little I could feel the season fold in over my body, like I too was a tree in mid-transformation, changing colors and shedding leaves.  I tried to imagine myself as a tree.  I tried to imagine myself as a human being, any other human being but myself, but when I opened my eyes I was still who I was before, a photo-copied duplicate of a self mere seconds from this present, still standing in the cold, still smoking the same cigarette.  It was dark but I felt like I could see into the shadows, I could count the leaves as they rustled in the wind, fingers over an aged abacus, carved from bamboo trees that lined our parent’s childhood yards. 

I dreaded the regret that I predicted months before, the familiarity of feelings: The product of choices brought on by unpredictable mood swings.  The unreliability of emotion: This was the headline to my middle-aged self, bold-faced Helvetica letters branching off into the family tree of failed relationships.  I knew this all too well.  The genealogy  of my regrets, lovers lost in the receding waves of insecurity and frustration, beached jellyfish reflecting the moonlight, the last of its stings dripping into the sand.