Leap Day

While walking across the Mega Complex parking lot, arms weighed down with my box of old sport coats and leather shoes for my new digs, I looked at the sky (Heads up!) through a gap between buildings. The formation of garish pink magenta purple clouds looked like a puffy tunnel that led to another world. I paused with my burden, thought of how I could be in that world if I could jump onto a jet, if I just happened to be at an airport or if a plane materialized and I knew the captain. Hell, this is a fantasy. Let’s say rocket boots appeared on my feet and I knew how to use them, and I could shoot through the clouds at twice the speed of sound. So I’m there in a world that’s kind of like this world only way better. Sugar and fat are healthy and can be eaten en masse without bulking up or being at risk for Type II diabetes. Whisky is water, and water whisky. Your parents urge you to drink eight glasses of whisky a day, and when you’re older you’re known to go out with your friends and enjoy a glass of water or two but hey, don’t overdo it, that’s a lot of empty calories. Your siblings are supportive, your parents nurturing, or at least avoid making too many decisions that hinder your abilities to adjust to life’s complexities. Strangers go out of their way to be kind. Friends, which you actually have in this other world, are always stepping up to the plate for you, or have your back, or do other helpful non-plate or back-related things. Your life unfolds as you thought it would when you were fifteen or sixteen, and daydreamed about your future.

Underneath the fabric of everyday life, the threads are attached in ways that work out in your favor. You always get a good seat at the movies, you never worry about having to get up to go pee. Miracle of miracles you wind up in a relationship with someone you like and find attractive and interesting and the same goes for her for you. They won’t drop out of your life in an instant. Even your lamest, most banal remarks accomplish what you want them to, and of course you know what you’re trying to say when you say them. Everyone in this ideal world feels incredibly good all the time because they live in a fantastic sunset kind of magenta pink purple light. But you suspect that in this dreamworld up in the clouds, there’s an occasional sky formation in which a person or two looks up at the entrance to your cockamamie world and somehow somehow somehow (how?) finds it beautiful.