Pink Hills

Whoever knows hope – has felt it run, tickling through their veins, has watched it from the side of their eye so as not to scare it, has become mute so as not to determine its materialization before it is ready and therefore degrage it, whoever has known this knows the silence of the boys on the railway flat, the bags packed and assembled, the pink sun on the pavement, the distraction of one: gesticulating and naming times; another shuffling and nail biting; a third, holding some three books in hand listening to the first one’s times.

The hills of South San Francisco, gold and pink, the train sliding towards the flat, the shuffling one first to board – all of it mixes into the progression of arrive by car, fly en mass by air, and depart again as individuals that consumes and conveys the thousands of daily costumed travelers. From above, the silver of the railway track becomes bare again as the shuttle cars slip onward. The station is silent again – without tension or suspicions of hope, without person to witness. Without a person except the janitor, and perhaps the unhelpable, unlucky man who will always arrive, sweating and out of breath, just after his car has left.

Watch the boys move across the lanolium. Attempt to discern which pulls ahead and drives their motion, which circles the group anxiously: front to back, back to front. Watch for if any straggles, distracted by the infinite things that distract a boy of twenty-three. See in each of them a fear; the very fear that always hounds hope at the tendon of its heel. Notice, if you have keen eyes, the untethered directionlessness they hide so well, from passersby, from eachother and most doggedly, themselves. See in their boyish steps – if you still care to strain your eyes towards the insignificance of three figures in SFO – an attempt to approximate a man’s walk. Not the walk of a grown boy or the suits they are bombarded with daily, incessently and to the point of exhaustion – no, nothing so simple or temporary – rather a walk, or form of movement, inferred without knowing – impossible, in fact, with knowing – from their fathers.

As it can be useful, and there will momentarily be no one to mention it, I will provide a cursory physical description of these three boys. Sal is short a bit shorter than the others; his hair is chin length and dark-brown; his face has a shocking physicality to it, as if it were made of clay and exudes into the air around it; he has a large nose that some have compared to Adrien Brody’s and deeply baggy circles that cup clear cornflower-blue eyes. Percy is middle-height, slightly kinked forward in the neck, dressed in a smart sweater and tight courdoroys; he has brown hair, overgrown in the sideburns, but originally cut in the manner one might get in elementary school for picture day; when he squints in thought his eyes are hidden and could be as equally likely blue or brown; in the rare event he is not in thought, the shadow of his sharp brow and his long eyelashes obfuscate their color. Corin is tall, with light-brown hair down to his collar bones; he is thin as a stick with a gaunt face; his eyes are brown like a doe’s and his lips turn up, impishly, without cue, at their corners.

Three boys, five bags, half asleep at six am on their way to gate fourteen.