Day 12874

Where is comfort and why is it sometimes somewhere you haven’t been before?

Day 12874

Takes off glasses
Places glasses on keyboard
Computer hummmmms
Rubs procerus muscles in small circles (radius ¾ cm) bilaterally with index fingers

Up until day 12874, he designated the time between 5:52 (Gladys, the secretary, leaves mumbling about a dentist’s appointment for her youngest) and 6:57 (Bill, the janitor, comes in to take out the trash, blaring radio perched on the rim of her mop-and-trash operation) as 64 minutes of quiet in which he could accomplish his most delicate work, the most thought intensive aspects of his day
But today, on the 12874th day he didn’t think he could stand the ventilated air
He would suffocate today

Desk chair overturned
22 flights of stairs. Sprint.
Park park park

Tulips, today
Just about to
Bloom
Green sepals
Blazing red suns
Tipped yellow
Orange

He thinks of the human race
The moon
Airspace

He thinks of the math he would need
To graph the transitions of color

He kneels down into the grass
And lets the wet dirt soak into the knees of his pants
He extends himself into the place where the stem first meets the ground
He lets his fingernails fill with silt
He reaches deeper
He keeps his fingers there

—LNPR