Ectoplasm.
There’s a softly sloped pit in the midtown woods, in the overgrowth along the abandoned train tracks.
A natural amphitheater where the show never stops — a twig falls, a squirrel scrambles in the dead leaves, a robin borrows a moment.
Plastic bags clasped in the crooked knuckles of bushes, discarded juice boxes, parsimonious lottery tickets. Pieces of sheet, ripped on every side, the scraps of a questionable past now float and flip, gentle signs of joyous surrender.
The breeze-blown wall of garbage encircling the enclave makes the interior nearly unnoticeable. A forest hidden in a city. A place anyone could reach, but no one goes.
The pit fills up with water when the heavy rain falls. The water starts glowing as it rises, cyalume pale green, bubbling, chugging, alive.
In gray morning, as ink spills out of the night, I go here to drink the dirty city potion pouring up from the ground, absorbing our primeval treehouse memories and probing, apprehensive visions of the future. From a body that’s so similar to yours. From a mind that can’t be too far off either.