Free Entry, Spring Break Week

Light-hearted, I mock the wind as it blows through the open ceiling of Spanish architecture. I see how it quivers for me, speaks through me, each dog-eared leaf and coat-tailed branch shake, beg, and settle. The movement of this city makes it hard to find a breath, and I'm left black-faced in front of Planeta, each of its carefully selected ivies thriving in the concrete, tended for lush survival and hung in the air to join a parade of meticulous absurdities. This city has made me heavier, feet weighing down clouds with every step, pulled to the stamped sidewalks like skateboarders: up, down, hours, hours. Imagining the tiny hills of cold chills on their t-shirted bodies, watching the thrill of momentum rising from flexing, contact, calf-muscles; wheels, trucks, and the slight bend of black sandpaper glued on smoothly sanded wood, painted and branded. They mimick the wind. A face appears and stares. Waves politely, wordless empathy. The buzzing of mopeds, motorcycles, Nissan Micros, and two-toned taxi cabs; bees in a hive. They provide the background of my dreams until the wind picks up and sings in Russian, "Remember how like a tree you are" and settles back into the stillness of muscles spasms, blinking, or the stillness of earth in orbit.