Anything to shift the future.

Let go looking in the rearview mirror, let the past fade to black.

REARVIEW BY SHAWN LACY 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 71

The future is not so different from the past if your glass is full. Oh not the proverbial glass half empty glass half full kind of picture. No. Rather the glass full of brown liquid. The thick syrupy sweet kind that burns so good, that tastes like the sheet coming off the clothes line after baking in the sun all day and mom takes it and whips it across the bed and it floats like a parachute so slowly that you dive under it as it settles and caresses and is warm and cool at the same time.

The future is just the same if your pocket has a pack of cigarette papers or a pipe that sits next to a plastic baggie of stems and leaves and residue with a few matches nearby.

The future is the same as the past if the packet of white powder still has your name on it in invisible ink with a magnetized strip and it moves in your direction unbeckoned seemingly.

And it’s the same when no eating, no sleeping, traveling in death circles chasing the hide and seek phantom, and mother MAY I?

Same shit different day when the atoms and molecules sit in those same spots, never shifting thus disabling any effort to navigate a different path, one that could very well change the channel illuminating a new vision of what the future could be named.

Where Hope Street might find Faith Avenue and One Day at a Time Boulevard and Why Are We Here Road, and keep It Simple Stupid Lane and, well…

Anything to shift the future. Let go looking in the rearview mirror, let the past fade to black.

+

SHAWN MICHELE LACY

I write because I live. Writing is life-giving‚ it makes it all worthwhile, to be able to share the stories, the lessons, the pitfalls, the secrets‚ the way through to survival‚ where the next step is to thrive! I am hoping very soon to celebrate 32 years of continuous recovery from drugs and alcohol. Rearview is an acknowledgement that it’s never ever over‚ that always closely behind me is the one thing that could cause me to lose my life. The vision, in the rearview, is palpable, almost tangible, and the perspective can shift and result in a calamity. Neither time, place, distance, serves as a safety net. The rearview is truly like a surround sound theater always there, never far.