Tenses

The brown maples line 12th Avenue as I walk east out of the park. Their leaves are piled high in gutters and in yards and the Capital Hill neighborhood is in the depths of a western city fall: melting snow and brown and red and green adding barrier to my perspective as I walk toward York Street. Dry leaves and dry pines frame and point to century-old homes and new rising residential towers. Cyclists and walkers and humans interact with this new November afternoon. This sidewalk is familiar under my feet. More so than the street signs hidden behind pines, the buildings above give me reference for where I am in this city. I attempt to breathe smoothly and calm my heart rate from a rough day paying for an even more exhausting Saturday evening. It is Sunday at five o’clock in the evening and the fall sun is setting an hour earlier today marking the approaching winter. The early shadows and now quickening darkness added a heavy layer to my Sunday anxiety. But a deliberate headphoned walk while my laundry dried gave me life and a view of the sun that I had not had since yesterday. I was here, at the same park yesterday afternoon, drinking beer in costume preparing for a pandemic Halloween that would prove to be liberating and damaging as only those rare, epically-worthy nights can be. An hour ago, music accelerated but smoothed-out my fast tempo down 13th as I walked past art, around slow walkers, and in and out of small construction zones. I went to Hugo’s to grab a water before I looped back into the park up Marion and then onto 12th and finally into Cheesman from the low northwest corner. I turned south to take in the lined walkway on the west side of the park, covered by tall trees and blanketed by the yellow light of round lamps reminding me of Hyde Park. I saw sunlight on the green slope in the middle of the park. Spots of people dotted the hill side, most of them were facing west back towards the bottom of Cap Hill and the Front Range west of the city. From that vantage, you can see the summits of the Front Range and the peaks of the southern mountains outside of the city’s reach. I walked past pockets of people all seemingly sharing in the Sunday anxiety I still feel or maybe feeling their own with this heaviest of approaching weeks in a heavy year. I found a slight incline near the sidewalk across from my regular spot at the pantheon, never sat there before. It was near the side walk but isolated enough from others that I could breathe and that I could abide by the current, inconsistent protocol of this pandemic. I pulled my copy of The Sun Also Rises out of my back pocket and put it in the grass beside me, I leaned back onto my side with my legs bent and my elbow supporting me in the chilled grass. My gaze went west above the trees, matching most everyone else’s gaze at this park, skimming above the old trees of the Cheesman Park neighborhood right off the park and pushing as fast as a view can to the hope that always resides in looking west: the hope that comes in finding the mountains outside of the city, the land that is outside of your current reach, but very well within the range of your hope. I could see them. I could imagine myself among them. I could feel my body and soul living among them and experiencing the pulsing power that is exerted by the oldest stones on this earth. I set my water onto the grass, not lending attention to the balance needed for a good standing position on the hill, my mind was too infatuated with the imagination and the hope that the mountains offered me in that anxious afternoon. My water tilted and spilled onto the book that was in the grass below it. The cover of Hemingway’s best novel was now soaked by sparkling water. Fuck. I breathed. After saving the rest of the water and drying the book as best as I could, my eyes turned west again. I breathed. I breathe now.