the intersection

My feet float above my head, ad every blink fades in and out in slow motion. My stomach finds comfort in the base of my throat and my words are trapped in the nausea. Normalcy is surreal and the waves of people swallow each other up at the shoreline . . . Ebbing and flowing, breaking and receding as another’s ambition consumes their withdrawal. I don’t remember the last four intersections, when the light turned green and when I went. For all I know they don’t exist. But now, here I am stopped at red. I wonder if they see me screaming, or see the furious tears racing toward my heart.

Is it rude to look?

I look. There’s a black man in the car to my left. He looks affluent. His eyes stay fixed forward. I scream from my stomach in the base of my throat. The gurgling and guttering plea of my lips makes me forget whether the tears come from my eyes or gush from my mouth. All of a sudden I know nothing.

I turn to my right and an Indian woman hushes the child next to her. There’s cluttered emptiness in her eyes. The gasps become shorter and sharper; I expect them to draw blood. My scream doesn’t shatter the glass and they can’t hear the captive words of my heart. The man, the woman, the child, direction decided they’ll soon pass. They may never know.

Ninety degrees away the green turns to yellow, and I know we’ll be next. I breathe a long breath through staccato reception, and let the final tears curl underneath my chin. I look ahead. I stop screaming. My stomach descends to its rightful place. Dead calm suffocates me and somehow I feel that it’s wrong to stop crying, even for a moment. Pin pricks of guilt and sadness tickle the surface of my mind as feeling returns and the novacane fades. So there they go, the waves breaking and receding and swallowing each other up on the shore. I wonder which wave I am. The light turns green and I smoothly pass.