Not like this

She isn’t like this, she’s less ethereal or perhaps more physical, some thing like that. A peculiar essay on a clutch of thoughts and imaginings that transcend the actual and become somehow more beautiful. Particularly when she’s not there, she’s more beautiful when she’s not there but when she’s here I can become speechless, for short periods because of that same thing. Confused and complicated. Of course she’s with someone else and rightly so, perhaps that pushes her into the untouchable ghost world. My ghost world and over the edge.

In my head I still live by rules, I live differently but there are rules, parallel rules that fluctuate between being extreme and unworkable and liberal and unnecessary. Claudia has now become caught up in this messy mesh of unworkable rules and she, not me has broken them and so is guilty. Such is the bizarre justice system in my ghost world, it is quite unjust, unfair and unpredictable. Tomorrow it may quite different. Tomorrow if we can put some road miles between ourselves, the ranch and Claudia then things will change, the fever would lift, the ghost world’s boundaries will adjust and the panorama beyond the wide windscreen will take over. That is how I see things.

I stood on the ranch porch watching the rain and listening to the drip symphony from the roof gutter and onto the wooden boards. Rivers of rain ran under the boardwalk into puddle lakes where more frogs sat looking at one another waiting on more rain drops, as if that was their sole purpose in life. The drops continued relentlessly, the frogs remained focused. Tomorrow the weather would clear, we’d pack up the car, say goodbyes, clear the mud, check the mirrors and go. Finally go.