Part 4

On a clear night in Richmond, as cliché and unusual as that may be, the buildings are propped like illuminated bookmarks between the transient pages of smokestacks and time in their holiday garb, in rigid conversation with themselves like suburbanites at an inadvertent bad sweater party, drinking from the rubber chalice of the Dominion Power Company, recklessly buzzed and generally unaffected. The southern scale megaliths are arranged flatly like cards against the unwashed grid of windows in the apartment, neither played nor interpreted by it’s cement box inhabitants, wearing their own indifference and stitched seasonal inflexibly. Decaying trees still dot the oversized windows of overstuffed condominiums staked in the riverside, blinking like battery powered broaches on the saggy tits of winter, stubbornly electrified and shedding needles into the receding carpet of January. Richmond always tells you that you’re wrong. It’s 60 degrees and raining on the discarded Christmas tree skirts, but the holidays aren’t over yet and your sweater is still on. How can you be expected to stay sober, waiting for a city to wake up on a hopeless Saturday night while the river swells slowly and goes somewhere more interesting or at least somewhere else? We had plans together, you whisper as your tires massage the atrophied thighs of the city and smoke climbs the suicide windows of dead offices and restaurants empty their bowels into the alleyways. You bet the polished coin of your weekend on the windowsill spread, chanting big money and beer. And Richmond tells you that you’re wrong.

Everyone here is Tom Waits without a record deal. Everyone here is escaping the in-laws of standard, the households of guilt, the anniversaries of nothing. Mailbox Moms insistent on computer illiteracy and tucked-in tops shake the inky finger of judgment from their frescoed morality and makeup mirrors while we asleep in our windows watch the sky shatter, pregnant with prophecy, empty of promise. The cars make serpents in the streets. The mailman delivers messiah. His hands are red with brake lights, his eyes are inevitable, his bags are full.

We do not write back.

We do not believe in the gods of our parents, the sacrament of postage and paystubs. Their savior is antiquated. Our scripture is electric. Hunched over the flattened scrolls of the lost book Synthesis, you tell the world you are different, you are serious, you are filled with the articulation of destiny, the intuition of progress, intimations of prophecy, tendencies of greatness. You tell yourself you will be heard. You tell yourself you will be right. And Richmond tells you that you’re wrong.