April 29th, 2014

After the meeting, when we broke out of the building feeling like high school kids because we were free, we decided to get food and a drink instead of going straight to the gym. This turned into hours of laughter and talk and meeting people who own spas and salt caves in West Hartford. When we walked into the gym the air that hit our lungs was stale and filled with the burning of grinding gears. The sky was so near that when we went for a run around the plaza it fell in little pieces and hit us in the eye. I rowed a boat eternally into nothing and you smiled largely like a Chesire cat, at the man who looked like your old professor, at the machines, at everything. My muscles hurt eventually and the machine that waits like an open mouth to be further separated by my legs yawned sleepily as I climbed out of it. It was 9:40 when we left and the sky was further off then, a vague distance, facing away from us and looking dreamily out into space. Earlier that day a student had jokingly kicked a chair and another student had feigned shock and said "that's a government chair" and I thought of Jamiaca Kinkaid and her government ink.  Everything is government chairs and government ink
and the large invisible hand that provides it knows neither the words we write nor the lives we live within and without these government cinder block walls.