The Stars Collect

You left the comfort of a broken but familiar home for a life with me. Standing by the railroad tracks, looking back to the past you left behind in Detroit, you smile at me. You grab the super 8 camera and roll some more Kodachrome on the passing trains.

"Are you excited for our first collaboration?", you ask. "It will be the defining document of hobo culture". You smile.

You spit into on to a spike in the track, supposedly driven there by a pioneering mechanical man back in the days even old folks can’t remember.

“Do you think humans will eventually evolve into robots?” you ask me. Your voice is obscured by the whir of the camera motor.

“I don’t know.” I never know how to respond to you.

“Here. Take this”. You hand me the camera while you light a cigarette for yourself. I turn the camera on and roll film on you and the smoke trailing out of your mouth. You smile shyly and turn your head down towards your chin. Your smile makes me remember what my life was like before it was a regular sight. Pathetic microwave dinners after an 8-hour day working at a boring temp job, television and books the only things to keep me company in the late evenings. Your lips and tongue and teeth were the parole out of my self-made prison, your hair and eyes and soft fingers were the keys out of a holding cell of my own design.

“Put the camera away,” you laugh, “it’s getting dark out anyway”

The darkness creeps in like a film around us. The stars collect in the reflection of your eyes and that collection of light forms a projector. It radiates from you to me. It projects the most abstract and beautiful film imaginable. It burns so bright that it burns a hole through the film and everything collapses.

You take my hand into yours and we walk home.