Quietly Died

There was a dead deer in the turning lane and I didn’t see any blood smeared on the pavement or body parts where they shouldn’t be. It was honey tan and curled up like a child sleeping. I turned my eyes back on the road and immediately thought about what I saw out of the plane window last week as we left Nashville; a fire gently crumbling the walls of an apartment building, fiercely altering some lives and sending black smoke into the sky like there was something it wanted to say.

I am now realizing that the thing that joins the two images together is the silence of them. The way the building and the deer quietly died. From my enclosed perspective they were just images without sound, without emotion. I could choose to feel it or not to feel it.

There was a building on 11th avenue that made me think of a heart. A box of a brick building standing next to the old train tracks below the skyline of downtown. It looked vacant except for the top right window whose glass slid open far enough to let a torn curtain fly out into the wind. Mine is the only heart I’m somewhat familiar with, so I suppose it could be my heart it reminded me of.

It’s spring; I better start opening some windows.