My Cardboard Balcony

The Noise Upstairs by Belinda Roddie It was a twelve-string guitar, grunting out the entire Dave Matthews discography, accompanied by the cough syrup-clotted rasp of a stranger with his brain on fire. Said stranger had strung his limbs up on straps as thick as Twizzlers, their needles slurping insulin and fury beneath his bulging clavicle, but still his fingers were free, and his calluses rose in ridges against the thin, intestinal steel. Pulled from the guts of salvation, he stayed alive so he could sing and pick, for another twenty years. As Matthews intended, the ants started marching to the music, and the man as a boy played under the table and dreamed big dreams, and all rhyme and reason dissolved like a giant gel tablet into a glass of whiskey. All homage. All dedication. All breathing below the satellite.

You believed I was doing more harm than good, throwing away my education, in your words, for an RV and a video camera. And that was fine; you could believe anything you wanted. In the end, I was the one editing fragment upon fragment of documentary, reliving the local stops, bars, and laughs with strangers. I was the one baking my heart in the desert of Arizona while cooling my brain along the Atlantic.