the illumination between hidden and trapped

A shock of emotion which takes you down as you stand still, keeping an airy head from assimilating the victim with one more day of colorless gravity. Deep winter with no snow. Shallow parking lot that I am not the owner of. The blue infinite with a tangerine spark kissing the late afternoon good night before it proverbially dies for ten hours. Maybe eleven. A pity of shifting light and gale don't bask the metropoli over darkening hills very well… Yet it is blinding my soul substantially, as those kind of urban spectacles live in solitude through a drifting contemplation. This is how I felt when I stared at my car years ago, outside my grandparents house which my family lived in, which I didn't own.

Images. The sun mirages methodically away behind trees that should have died decades ago. A fragile, maroon windbreaker has puffed into enough spherical texture to bury me and give me new identifcation as a league-grade soccer ball. It hides my face and I'm fruitful it does, quite frankly. The oil sludges which have dried through better epochs withhold vast continents of my imagination. These massacres cast parades where dark plutocracies command the ever growing, lonely people. An image which I know well, and most importantly so, is where my eye looked out at as I was paralyzed by the seasons. Beige car, old model, older look, ashtray, cracked window, AM radio, deluged into a pit of mechanical graves apart from the millionth commerical advertising its grandchild. I love it. Everything about the car. It withstands the coldness and yet is ready for application! I am then stagnantly and excitedly hopping into the driver's seat after that solemn moment where the globe had a cigarette break and I owned something.

The dark drive to the mall scared me. If only I had known that all of life is precarious in this manner, I would have eased my hands at the wheel and have embraced the cold rush of death and life in front of me as bar signs wave my windshield into a dream. I knew too little of how dangerous it all was, yet did not hesitate to fall out from being the conglomerate between trapped in a house and hidden in a house. I suppose I thought, with in introspective eyes, that I rebelled to a certain degree. I know now I was for certain. What I did was not impossible but improbable. I was hidden in my house because I thought I was scared. I had not a lot money and I wanted to go to the mall. Would it be worth it? Would I be killed in this town I don't trust? Maybe if I just stay inside… Until I'm trapped. I'll be trapped in safety, on my own terms, and just create more continents of dark parades on the concrete. That could not be so however. One would have to define what I was hiding from. It was not the darkness out there, but the familiarity with darkness in here where I long ago submitted to a life within my own weary, constantly dreaming and stepping head.

A split-second, melodic hymn greets me as I step bargain store sneakered foot into the gates. It is a beacon of chime which is standard to the reigon, but ancient to those farther or contemporary with time. Alone in the mall. Alone in the economically dying, and as of the point of this recollection dead, mall. This is where I was at when I decided I wasn't hiding from the darkness of highway I-240. I concluded that as long as I travelled like some kind of avenger with my own company, I would be hiding from something. Hiding from love? Possible. Hiding from responsibility? I'll age into that. I think. Hiding from my situation? I always will, even if I stop hiding from love or responsibility. You only kick a dog enough times until it knows the trick and it knows it forever. Or at least a miniscule life span. As I approach the perpetually galvanizing arcade with that thought in mind, it hits me : To hide is simply to be moving. I could be hiding with the love of my life or in a building taller than buildings. I am hiding from whatever I consider next in life. So what is trapped then?.. Trapped to me is the larger panorama of scope, versus hiding. I insert quarter into the machine. I'm hiding in this game. I'm trapped in what contains this game… The arcade itself? The mall holds that. The mall? A windy city in cold, darkness holds that. An endless array of cradles until a cerulean dot in the night, and even this is debatable until end. What I am trapped in is life. What I am hiding from is anything in life. So why did I bother coming out in a precarious winter of shadows, nights, and neon when I knew of its consequences if I were caught by its marchers? By the time I figured that conundrum out, I was already on I-240 where the exit met an already forgotten memory.