A letter to a park and a new place (fiction)

 A letter to a park and a new place

I think it was some time before it got dark. It was January, so this would have been about 4 o'clock, and I was on one of those walks with its own inertia. Sort of passively following something already in motion. I had taken some Oxycontin and had that great overwhelming feeling of being hugged from inside my skin. The warmth of it spread from my toes up and into my frontal lobe and cast a faint shimmer over the world in front of me. Perhaps it was the hugger inside me that subtly directed my step.

I was on a muddy park path lined with naked trees barely illuminated in the winter sunset, and I suddenly became intensely aware of myself. I felt my weight as it distributed itself over each left and right foot, stepping, walking. Acknowledging where my clothes wrapped themselves on my body, where my belt sat on my hips, my jacket on my shoulders and so on. This awareness reached my body hair, my height and other unchanging features of me. It was as if I had only just discovered the sensation of being. It prompted an intense loneliness, which I was privy to in my days of solitude alone in the city. 

I often try to listen to how I'm feeling at any moment. But, all I can usually get a read on is my general contentment and positive apathy towards my own situations. I liken it to a pristine locked stainless steel gate that you can see through and can be opened, but never is. That's not necessarily meant to make any sense, but I add it to say this. Now, I feel like a plastic toothbrush cover. So easy to break, transparent, vulnerable, small. Maybe this is what it's like to be far from home. My mind sought distraction and focused now on the path before me reflecting its properties; muddy, trodden on, still. Eventually, I walked around the park's periphery so long that the flattened soles of my feet, that begged for orthotics, were demanding a rest. So, I searched for a good bench.

I found one perched ripely between two rubble stone walls, short enough to let the last of the dim western sunset relax on its seat. I thought this would please my feet. Approaching the bench, I noticed a stone on its opposite. It looked like it had just been thrown down a volcanic cliff; it was streaked with black, and I was more than surprised to see it. I wasn't native to this neighbourhood, but I had been through this park before and certainly would have given it a second glance. I approached the stone. Whenever you come upon a stone like this one – large and regal in its emergence from the Earth – you must touch it and show that you know it is there. It doesn't need to be gentle but can never be aggressive. I rested my hand on the stone and leaned on it while bending my torso to get a better look at its plaque, which told me that "there were several interesting stories associated with this rock, the Prole…" I rubbed my against the unusually textured surface of the rock face. Some of the carvings, though intricate, were unintelligible and, I thought, sure to be done by the late night ne'er do wells of this park. I returned upright from stooping to the plaque and lingered close to the rock, squinting at the carvings, feeling uncanny about them in no particular way. 

When I returned to the bench to rest, I noticed three Heineken cans collected on one side and toppled over like broken toy soldiers. I decided to reorient them upright and then placed them all back into rank and at attention, staring out at the same stone as I. Then I took out my pouch and hungrily rolled my second cigarette of the day. When I was about halfway through smoking the cigarette, my eyes began to wander, as they do when smoking alone. 

First at the green of the grass, then to the dandelions poking their bright heads out from the green, then to the many cracks of the stone wall dissecting the park into its various organs, pumping people throughout. Then often your eyes get bored of this. They search for validation and attention. You stare at people: the mother's baby, whose rounded marble eyes polished with innocence, can't help but meet your own, then the attractive men and women more dedicated to their health than you, running around the park, making themselves slight fools but at the same time attracting jealous attention from others around them, finally to the regular folk choosing the park as a decent route to work, school, home or some other place necessary to be at next. As people continue to dart to and fro in front of your eyes, the visual stimuli begin to make you feel anxious, alert and almost startled by the sheer number of lives passing by in front of you. But in some ways, there is relief in the overwhelming amount of everything and everyone else that passes you by. To some degree it is a mercy to have the inability to correlate all of the contents of your own world. 

At this point, I closed my eyes and imagined all the thoughts that were overcrowding the door of my thinking, and I breathed in, seeing them all expand, and getting increasingly squished and pushed into each other inside this door. Then I exhaled and imagined them violently, but without sound, being propelled out of my nostrils and into the air above me. I opened my eyes and looked up to watch them fly away until looking at the low light-polluted sky hurt my neck, so I looked down and into my lap. There was a dog. Startled but not wanting to disturb the creature's placid demeanour, I tried to raise my hand to gauge why it might be on top of me (and how I didn't notice it leap onto me?). My arm wouldn't move. At this point, I felt that earlier sense of overwhelming thinking bubbling up but staying below its boiling point. So I stayed still and wondered what my options might be to find out what this dog was doing if I couldn't move. But I thought I wasn't doing anything anyway and I am a dog person, so I stayed put.

All the while, runners, brothers, sisters and partners went by and paid me no heed. That at least put me at ease. Looking further at the dog made me question whether I might call it that at all. It was more aptly an anthropomorphic creature in the size and shape of a small dog - its shifting and slightly shimmering outline gave its exterior the impression of fur. Its eyes were upon me at another glance, and it looked up. I shivered, and that feeling of uncanny, which had left a horrible impression in my gut, plummeted a pit to the bottom of my stomach. At this point, I wanted this thing off of me. I tried again to move my arms, but they wouldn't budge. I tried to look away, but I couldn't. I tried to think of anything else, but its image burned into the back of my retinas. But I blinked, and it was gone. Although the dog had startled and made me feel such unease as if I had been caught doing something sneaky – that sinking feeling – as soon as it left, so did that notion. What remained was the uncanny I had experienced ever since touching the stone. I looked at it, and it looked back. Drawn to it, I felt it again, reaffirming its presence, and walked home back along the muddy path.