file under: vespers

next to the hospital there's a church, pushed back from the street by a decently-sized expanse of grass criss-crossed with pathways, benches, and a few squat cement tables for chess.

at night, this park-like area is taken over by the derelicts of the area - drunks curled up or sprawled out, dealers and prostitutes in conductio, loiterers and vagrants talking or shuffling around.

there's something about this staging of urban blight that reminds me very much of central avenue in ABQ, which means that i am terribly nostalgic for and extremely fond of it. as dumb as it may sound, it's a texture i need in my life and it's one of the bigger perks of working where i do. standing outside of the hospital at 3 or 4 in the morning (tired nurses on their smoke breaks, sitting on the cement steps) takes me back to my early 20's, when i was getting to really know the shabbier parts of my hometown with shane (ah, shane! i've been missing him so much lately).

i'm not as self-destructive these days, but there are some old feelings inside that still respond to that kind of environment. i don't really know how to talk about it without it being lame or sounding romantic in the worst kind of way - there's just a feeling i get when it's that time of night and i'm outside, like i'm standing on the lip of something vaguely familiar that i've been missing.