We walked down Decatur, and I wondered if the pavement felt the same underneath your feet as it did mine. The ways that the bricks were sunken and worn down but the cement surrounding still held firm, making one teeter a bit with every step, felt pleasantly strange, as it made one take notice. But more than wondering if you noticed the tipsy topsy nature of the pavement, I wanted to crawl in your head and find out *how* you felt it, if it actually was the same to you as me, or, if perhaps, the experience was subjective and shifted according to nerves and skin, foot-body-brain. And did the smell of the Quarter sing to you, yes, sing, the right word for what it did to my brain, did it sing to you in the same way? Like a faintly remembered lullabye from a previous life's childhood, unknown and yet infinitely familiar and comforting? Like something struggling to pull memories hidden to the forefront? The magnolias and stale beer and whisky and water and cigarettes and andouile and dirt and grass and bougainvillea and fried chicken and coffee and beignets and sliced bright watermelon and crawfish only to be made brighter by the way it saturated every pore, suspended in waves of humidity? Did it feel the same? And how is it that, in those moments, I also thought again of somehow swimming in your brain, to feel the way your consciousness moved in the world, the way that your body moved in the world, and the way your smell served to turn the key in a music box and play out some long lost strain of music and made me wish I could simply inhale and never feel the lungs subside...and as it started to pour, we ran down streets and in and out around people and in and of bars, laughing.
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