Pathology

[Poetry in the form of prose (it was meant to be another prose poem, but sadly not everything can take that form and I shifted it into paragraphs in the end)]

I see a meteor burn a line in the atmosphere above the smog smeared city, stranded for a few lonely seconds among the skyscraper sentinels watching over the wild streets of sleepless Montreal.

“A shooting star”, I say, eyes wired wide from lack of sleep and my first few drinks in months, excited over the fact that I’ve encountered an astronomical phenomenon more than anything else.

“You get to make a wish,” you say, sipping your special French liquor that I’ve already forgotten the name of, and laying the icy rim-chipped mug against a segment of your sunburn.

“Yeah. Oh yeah. Forgot,” I say, even though I didn’t really because when it comes down to it I could never forget, and doubted anyone ever could, this wishing business having been burned like infection or a cancerous spread deep in the psychosomatic human race so that when something as rare as a shooting star should shoot into the range of vision for that split atomic moment like a flamed fleck of ash from a campfire sparking up into the air, or sometimes onto your knees, you have to fight the impulse to make a stupid on-the-spot request from the cosmological space above to try and remember to beg for something worthwhile for once.

I wish.

I wish for that stupid on-the-spot request because there isn’t anything else I want anyway. Or at least I tell myself that, because I wish before I’ve even finished telling myself not to wish.

I tip my glass against my lips to take another drink, and decide, as it hits my tongue, that I really don’t actually like it, but I don’t want to hurt your feelings since you’ve spent a good portion of the night gushing about how it’s your absolute favourite drink and I told you I thought it was good before I’d really made a judgment call, so I force it back, feel the warmth and grit my teeth against the gin-licorice-Bengay sensation. When it comes down to it, I’ve had worse combinations. I’ll leave it behind for you to drink after I’ve gone home so as not to waste it on a non-appreciator.

Meanwhile you irrigate the lines between constellations, looking for your own piece of luck, but only find airplanes, the metal frames denying their gravity like a father disowns the responsibility of his fatherhood. “If only planes were shooting stars,” you say. “I’d have so many dreams come true.”

We sit and stare out the balcony, the words settling like a thick-shagged dusty carpet across both the night sky and the concrete wall that is our view from these chairs.