Apathy

So much beauty is numbing, or at least overwhelming, or at least a bit lonely, when you're alone. That's what I'm telling myself anyways, sitting here on the edge of a lake big enough to swallow every place I've ever been with a gulp and a ripple. I could stare into its vacuum all day, chewing on stale thoughts. In size and color, the lake is the inverse of the sky. No one locks their bikes here. This town is the inverse of New York, where an unwatched bike will be stripped of removable parts like it is an animal, dead, and thieves a part of life fit for a nature documentary. New York City makes me want to document just about everything. The kid getting hit by his mom on the Q in the heat of the afternoon. The Hasidic Jewish woman biking Prospect Park,  her long black skirt snagged in the gears, refusing help. Everyone who asks for help, each in their own way. The woman with a walker who accepts it, in the public bathroom, with buttoning her pants. How the mom who hit her kid and held him by his ear is holding him now, hand on his head, whispering something.  Here I don't want to document. I want to dissolve. My thoughts are too loud. I'm used to shouting over all the noise. Here there is none. A pretty girl, jogging. A couple with white hair and ice cream. The lake, the lake, the trees, the trees, the slowly cooling air. Sometimes I feel my particles putting up with me,  knowing that it's temporary, this arrangement we have.Then they'll be the lake, the trees, the woman on a bicycle, waving at me.  The gulls here don't fly but hang, like airplanes glued to the sky, riding a permanent upward draft. My dreams are vivid and anxious. I make effort to remember them, but don't write anything down. It seems all the couples are old and holding ice cream, or very young and rather blonde. Quiet except for the gulls, still, except for the waves and the people, passing like ants on the pier that holds in the harbor. Hunger,  but not for anything here. I realize only now I'm sitting outside an ice cream shop. I fear more than anything apathy.