Upstream

In a concrete canyon,
where water once rested,
I made my bed, as the shadow
from the diving board overhead
rippled over the blankets I had laid out.
My mother didn’t understand
why I would want to sleep down there.
“It’s like sleeping in a fishbowl!”
She said. But she was wrong.
As I sit in my transported nest,
the only noise in the air is
that of cars on the highway,
the ones that are beginning to sound
more like a stream, ebbing and flowing,
than actual cars.
I can see them all, moving along
to the same yellow lines painted
on the asphalt.
Why are people even out this late?
I always wondered
when I was younger.
But now, I know. They’re out,
joyriding, looking to be
reborn.
Not wanting to stop,
not to fill up their tanks,
or to realize that when
the sun starts to move up
on the horizon, they will have
to return to their apartments and houses.
Every night, they are new people.
All the cars on the highway,
like salmon swimming back upstream,
to leave their mark on where
they were first really themselves,
somewhere in the city,
only to return that morning,
and drive back the next night.
All as I sleep
in a fishbowl.
But I used to wish to be one of them,
a salmon swimming with the current,
searching for myself.
But I found freedom within myself here,
In my fishbowl.