(or the Slow Slide of Vertigo)
By: Alex Wright
“The distinction between the past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” – Albert Einstein
“I’m right there, swimming the river of hardships but I know how to swim..” – Jack Kerouac
It’s been almost a decade since I slow-kissed the track that I was on and put 2,653 miles of space between it and myself. I had to wake from my Pacific Northwestern dream and make my way back to the Bible Belt. It wasn’t my first choice but it’s where I’d come from all those years ago and still had my love/hate relationship with.
I remember my first visit home after Scott had taken his own piece off of the board and feeling like it was a totally different and darker timeline. I wasn’t wrong. I was afraid to come back to that and even more frightened to get stuck inside again.
The Rocket City’s never been short on strange and has a black-hole-like nature to it that I’ve never been able to properly explain. When you leave, it still has a way of pulling you back into it. I’m not sure you can ever truly leave.
This hasn’t stopped me from escaping in my mind to drive amongst the Douglas firs with my arm softly skimming through the air in rhythm with whatever Metric song is coming out of the speakers – re-stitching itself into the seams of my memory with every word and note that beckon to the basking sky.
Sometimes I walk down 4th Avenue and catch my eye from across the street at Solomon’s Reef where I see myself sitting at the counter with my coffee reading Desolation Angels, wrapped in gratitude. I remember looking up, catching a glimpse and wondering why I looked so familiar but shrugged it off.
I’m still grateful. Even though the slips and tangles were what they became and even though I’m not sure what name to call them, even in memories. It was still worth it to swim in lakes of love for all of those seasons. After all, we thought it would only be one until we pushed the delusion as far as it was allowed to go.
Just enough rope to reach the edge of space and dangle our legs but not enough to fully go over.
Savoring the slow slide of vertigo as we slip through signals.
A beautiful dream to be shaken awake from.
I feel it float further away the harder I try to hold on and the more I try to remember.
It both feels like it never happened and like it’s actively happening.
Some people believe everything is happening all at the same time.
They say that we are falling in love and getting our hearts broken and scraping our knees from tumbling off of our bikes and singing Whitney Houston songs at college night karaoke and having tea with our moms and eating at Big Ed’s Pizza with our best friends and driving alone across the country and understanding how people go missing in the desert and why they might want to and deciding to save that for another timeline.
Still we might find ourselves feeling that maybe the only meaning any of this has is what we assign it but also it sure seems like we’re all made of the same stardust that makes up space so maybe the meaning is just that and we’ve got to figure out what exactly to do with this information.
They believe we can hold this all at once.
They believe it has to be like that.
They believe we are in Washington and Alabama and London and Tokyo and 2025 and 1986 and 2064 and all of the space between that has come and yet to be all in an instant.
Perhaps that’s how they’ve managed to accept the piled up pain, sorrow and suffering so persistent on this plane of existence. It seems heavy but, if they’re correct, it’s all a blink happening in a single quick motion. All the good and all the bad lasting exactly the same length.
One cosmic snap.
We just perceive serialization to keep our brains from exploding and to give the weird balls of light inside us an opportunity to learn and grow through experiences that only time and space in a human shell provide.
I like the thought that we all chose to enter this dream together and get to wake up with one another all at the same time.
Even if I have some questions for the divine when we wake – I like believing that the only sorrow is on this side of space.
*Originally Published in CHUM Zine Issue 11 September 2025*
ALEX WRIGHT CONTAINS MULTITUDES 