Mr. Puckerson

People are too lazy to wake up at 5 in the morning. Too bad. Mr. Puckerson thought as he rested his head against grass n steel. Look at it, the sky so beautiful! But you couldn’t always look at it, like in the afternoon. A time and place for everything. Well, just a time, for the sky. He wondered if men should use words like beautiful other than for women. Babies? Cars, perhaps. Never owned a car. Never mind.

Back to the sky. He always liked the sky. Vastness exacerbated by simplicity. Nobody questions the vastness, even when the buildings and the trees corner it. His girlfriend thought it reflected the megalomaniac in him. The thought never occurred to him. How could somebody who has achieved so little be a megalomaniac? But she is right. People always were. His people were. And he seldom was. That’s why he loved his people. He trusted their judgment, even if they didn’t always say the nicest things. There was no action whose bearing alone could persuade him to love himself. Self-love was an indirect process. It came through others, of what they believed of him, of what he could convince them, of himself.

That is not to say he is not selfish. He is; he is helpless in that sense, like everybody else. But love? He loved those who had the worst opinion of him, the most. Just the way it should be, because they were closer to the truth. And he sought their approval the most. But mostly, well, actually, always, the love got too much and the change would be very little and there would be nowhere to go. And then love changed, into abandonment. Not immediately, but always eventually. Abandoning a parent, a girl, a friend, a land…

And it was now time to abandon himself. But then, that must mean he loved himself once, may be a long time ago. The tracks seemed to dig into his ankles so he tried to relax his feet and checked the watch for time. He could hear the distant woo! woo! now. Funny, happy, stupid train. Such surety, such confidence. He checked the time again. For a minute, he couldn’t remember how to read a watch, what the hands meant. He re-winded his head to the large black clock, back at his parents’ house. 5:15 it said. Alright then.