The Last Time I Checked

My name is Forest and I live between sidewalks, on a corner, in a city that I shouldn’t disclose. But it could be any city in the country. There is one of me everywhere you go. You’ve probably learned tricks to avert your eyes and keep your attention ahead. I used to be like that too. But now I’m just the man on the corner, amongst lipstick red and McDonalds yellow fast food wrappers and silver studded trash. I don’t do tricks like the chrome-colored San Francisco bush man, nor am I a spectacle like the New York man with waterfall dreadlocks. I’m easy to miss, but I do hold a secret.

Here, at the edge of the living, I have all the time in the world. I constantly hear the humans talking about time: Did you text him to tell him we are late?... What time should I be there?... I don’t have time for this.

They move quickly, wearing pinstripes, with satin-hued wristbands, and now they are all wearing masks. I don’t envy their rush, and I’ll never have to worry about it again. Because I have what they want with me. I collect it right behind me; time in a trap. I hold it in a paper box that previously carried shoes. The shoe box appeared one dew-colored morning after a thunderstorm broke the sky. I tossed the shoes because they were too small. But the box, untouched by the weather, imprinted with a golden spiral design, I knew held something special. The dyad of this paper bag and endless time is all I need.

At dawn, I’ll take the coins that the humans have given me and enclose them into the box. The paper material rubs into my fingertips, becoming thin like my skin, my skin becoming fibrous like it’s paper. When I hold it, I hold all of the answers to the present and to the afterworld. I can see the edge of the world where humans never go. I can see the perimeters of life as clearly as looking into ice. I can understand why penguins mating for life have established a code with the freezing weather, and how balloons wafting against the kitchen floor weeks after my fifth birthday caused me such misery. I can return to that house, with the mustard and turquoise checkered floor, so smoothly, so easily while my fingers are pressed into the box. “This is all I need,” I reassure myself, and whomever is listening.

Sometimes when I see a small, buoyant toddler ambling behind their adults, unabashedly smiling at me, I open and close the box quickly in their direction, pushing extra time towards them. To them, it looks like a box puppet, a quick mouth opening and closing comically. I’m giving them an additional 5 days, sometimes weeks, even years of time to keep with them to forever hold onto their favorite moments.

If the humans wanted to, they could get their time back. I attempt to help them, whispering, “Hey, man! Can I tell you something?–” pinstripes moving faster to get to the glass building. “What if I told you–” their headphones press deeper into their ears before I can finish. My words end up where their wastes end up–wet against plastic trash liners, in the corners of the unused places, on the ground, in the swaying wind behind them. But I keep trying. I no longer know how to give up, even though I’ve given up before.

I walked away from my apartment with a lime green duffle bag 10 years ago, swollen with tears the whole way to the edge of the city. I’ll never forget the two-year old child on the bus that afternoon. She was more brand new than most kids, like it was going to take a longer time for her to get used to the concept of cancer and the notion that things fall, sometimes dissolve, and always die.

The kid was uncertain, but she gazed unafraid, in my direction as tears fell onto the bus walkway. I wanted to thank her for this. For looking without concern or fear. But I knew that was silly. She'd never understand now, and still wouldn't when she was old enough to be grown up, and told world things by her parents. When her mother tried to shield her eyes with a cascade of neon pink fingernails, the little girl resisted, resettling her curiosity on my sadness. She didn’t see the association of flies or dirt, or my future buried into the sidewalk.

A little further off the rocker the humans go every minute. Years just pass them by. Each year, I feel another limb stop working, go numb and give up. When I first left the humans, I punched walls in front of families, miserably looking back at them with scraped up fists, emotions riding all over my cheeks. I let a soccer ball roll into the street when I could have thrown it back, a team of fourth grade athletes perplexed and saddened by my resignation as it rolled into death by car. I was a layered cliff, a new wave pulled a little bit more out to sea as the motions came and went. My back went crooked, my neck impinged, my limbs became foreign. I wondered what my veins would look like in the glimmer of the city sun, if I were to be ripped open. Cold and white with thin clear tubes where blood used to be, empty, and hollow, like plastic. The surgeons, sewing me back up would wonder whether to recycle me or slide me into the ocean. When I was born, my mother placed her hands on my toes; 5, and then my fingers; 5. This was the last time she made sure everything was in its right place. The last time I checked, I was a combination of wet and cold fish fins, mixed with beach water and squashed bananas–rotted, pushed against the rims of trash bins, a stench arena of things gone bad. But don’t forget what I can do.

Sometimes I go on long walks with the box, and try to grab some elements at dusk and at dawn. Maybe I can spread the unseen wonders to the humans too. The stuff they are too busy for. I know what they are scared of. I am what becomes of the body when it is forgotten. I am no longer a human capsule like the rest of them. To them, I’m just a collection of fabrics and calloused skin, stationary, "just fine" against clean sidewalk. If they really knew what I could do, they’d listen. If they lifted me up away from my corner sidewalk seat, they’d find a pile of accumulated love letters from centuries of life, eons of time below me, perfectly preserved. It’s important to share the gifts that you are given, and when they are as special as these, I’ll never give up. I know someday, they’ll come around.