Fugue # 4

Angles, principles:

"I worry that I live at oblique angles to everyone, to everything. I don’t know what oblique means exactly, but in my head it means flat - flat in the way that a sunset is flat: the light pouring over the horizon, angling low across these fields, before reaching us here in town.

There are ways to...lemme start again. Sometimes you meet people or things head on. Your path to them is relatively perpendicular - they’re standing in your way, or you’re standing in theirs, and you’re moving toward them, or them toward you, and your paths, and your lives intersect. You can choose to move past that. Or you can choose, they can, to go the same way, to parallel yourselves - and instead of moving apart you’re moving forward together.

Then there’s everything else. Oblique angles - not right angles - where you glance off other people. They affect where you’ll go after that, but you still go - you move on, changed, no longer on the same path. That’s most of what we do. Or what I feel like I do. Have done.

There isn’t a right or wrong here, it’s just..."

He stops and stares at his hands. The sun isn’t ready to set yet. We sit on the front porch, late afternoon late summer sounds. Cars of teenagers cruising after school; younger kids shouting to each other, riding bikes, playing whatever.