Symbols.
It’s hard to type from the living room floor. After running in the nighttime heat, there’s nowhere else to go but the open plains of my home. Waiting to cool down, trying not to sweat into the keyboard of my old computer.
You see, I need lessons in caution after frying my new computer by pouring a glass of water onto its face. (It wasn’t thirsty.)
The hard drive fully crashed on Saturday. I lost six months of songs, photos, beginnings of books. My backup drive is magically — or brainlessly — empty.
Oddly, I’m thrilled. I like the clarity of a cleansing action. If the ideas weren’t good enough to take over my mind, then they were probably worth leaving behind.
Over the same weekend, I broke the wooden deer from the Emblems tour. Feet and antlers snapped off in a careless kitchen fall.
Computers are one thing, symbols are another. I worry that my movements may be too reckless for this world. I wince at all the curses I can’t control.
But there’s still a plastic twin. A tougher sibling sitting across from me on the floor below Chris’s new amp. I’m going to do everything within my clumsy superpowers to keep this two-dimensional friend alive.
(Please don’t let me break Chris’s new amp. It makes him sound like Zeus.)