Out My Office Window

Thanks to all of you have supported this weird little Twitter experiment. You all seem really cool.

I'm also on Instagram as mikesmithofalbuquerque, and on Facebook. facebook.com/mikesmithofalbu…

If you liked the writing here, follow me at @MikeSmithofABQ, which I plan to use more than I have.

Anyway, this has been fun to write. And I am turning what I've written so far into an essay that I will be sending around to lit. journals.

In one morning I lost my two favorite things about working here, an awesome office-mate (she does deserve her own office), and the view.

The company has made some changes to where people's offices are, so I am going to have to discontinue this feed.

The mountains came back. My theory is they had slipped into another dimension, and were a matchbook in the pocket of a string of numbers.

Clouds like a coral reef. A city like seafloor garbage and muck.

From here, I can see the bright white socks of a man sitting on a bus stop bench. HEY, MAN, HOW'D YOU GET THOSE SOCKS SO WHITE?!

A haze over the Jemez Mountains, the remnants of the fire. And a haze of light over everything else, the remnants of another fire, the Sun.

And no way at all to tell which clouds are growing bigger and which ones are evaporating away.

Okay—sky, clouds, land, roads, buildings, vehicles—sure. That's fine, that's fine. But...where is this all going? What's the endgame here?

Black Mesa, a table. The shadow of a cloud, a tablecloth, covering it perfectly.

A sudden white flash from outside, not even a full second in duration. Something unexplained. Something that probably happens all the time.

It's an even longer view, if you think of the sky as a blue window into space.

Near me, the view is only about as wide as a parking lot, but it's 64 miles long, and it's perhaps as wide as it is long at its other end.

The same view every day, & it's always beautiful, & disappointing, always boring, & interesting—& nearly always the beginning of yearning.

Just can't get over that the mountains exist—that the trees exist—that the sky exists—that anything exists. All the rest makes sense though.

North America, 100 million years ago, was divided south to north by the Western Interior Seaway—by an ocean. All of this was underwater.

@DriftIndex What's the word on the debut issue?