Hamilton's Barn

<looking in nervously>

Any one here?

Hello?

<seems to be alone>

Alright. It may be safe.

This morning, in my car, in traffic, politely keeping the volume of my radio at a level so as not to offend neighboring cars, well wrapped and insulated by my steel-mini-van-cage, trying not to pick my nose or sing so someone can hear me. Looking around curiously. Maybe hearing a little Tejano music from an old, maroon Explorer. Maybe thinking about things I've wrecked along this patch of road. A truck once, a relationship another time. Maybe thinking about people I knew thirty years ago and if I could even recognize them inside of their newly grown armor and pads of extra pounds. Wondering if the insides have become creased with the same lines as our faces. If our wonder and our passion is balding, too. Wondering if the over indulgences of our bodies have grown roots all the way to the middles. If that sort of luxury or poor diet has corrupted us all the way through.

I do not know how other people feel. I have to assume they either all feel as soul sick as I do or they feel nothing. I have to guess if maybe everything is amplified by the shape of my head or my heart or the series of bad chemical receptors and poorly firing neurons are only mine. Maybe every one feels everything but it means something different to them. Maybe they don't notice. Maybe the place they had to go back for their wreck of a pickup doesn't make them spiral down into a feeling of absolute failure. Maybe the loves that died don't show up every so often like Dickensian ghosts. Maybe their inability to saddle every failure in their marriages and ride them into something newer and better and healthy isn't performing some painful acupuncture on them.

Maybe they are all judging themselves on the carnage of a life they've created or openly weeping in their hearts for the things they survived without moral. Maybe they haven't noticed the way the weather has added rings to their base but stripped their trunks bare and left dead and dying branches all over them.

I'm just here in the car. I'm just driving to work. Like everyone else.

I don't know what they're thinking or if it hurts like hell.

I only know it does in here.

I only know that I'm no longer brave enough to turn up the radio and sing.

<looks around again>

Maybe no one can see. Let's hope.