Process (Daily Planet email #924)

When we finally found what we weren’t looking for, we set it in the abandoned parking lot, carefully placed in our rearview mirror. We stepped on the gas, not even looking where we were headed, what was important was that the objects were farther than they appeared. When they were quite small but still discernable, we hit the nitrous and suddenly became not street legal. The edge of town quickly passed us by and we could see our home planet receeding in the darkened, calming distance, followed by some random stars and then the box it all came in. Soon traction gone happen matter non.

We made a list of our sufferings in glorious script, arduously enumerated, even suffering the adjectives as we carefullly depicted every sinew of the downy sadness. We folded this list with long, langorous, deliberate care into a paper boat and set it to sail upon our nearest lagoon. We shot a flaming arrow (in a lovely arc, we’d been practicing) right down the center of its stupid, approximate, sail. We picked up the lagoon like a carpet and shook it vigorously, then grabbed a phonebooth, Superman or no, and hurled it atop the burning remnants. Finally, we called in a favor which was an airstrike, whereby three US-Afghan-Uzbek C-130 Hercules dropped quite literally a ton of explosives on our fair scene, obliterating paper water light air thought belief.

We put our hearts in a gingerbread house. Four walls of frame, cut and baked and hardened, held together with icing, your choice of color. Before we set the slats of ceiling, we check inside — is there enough space for two? Yes, plenty of room. Windows of sugar, wreaths of sugar, icicles of sugar, a gingerbread person with a gumdrop face standing outside in the coconut snow next to a sugar, non-functioning door. We take a picture and share it, or don’t. Then. We break off a piece of gable and eat of its goodness? We wait and watch until it becomes too old for sight or sustenance? We leave it outside for winter critters to gnaw? If it’s a metaphor, does it matter? Does it matter if it’s not a metaphor? Our hearts were never really in that house, not for real. They were out here, doing the process work. They were out here, all along. They were out, here.