Day 1,639.
It’s been eighteen days since the coyotes came by. Nights are lonely. Believe it or not, I’m actually starting to miss their company, despite their canines tearing into what’s left of my synthetic fur. In it’s own way, it reminded me of the unruly kids who used to be bold enough to crawl on stage and try to attack me mid-show. There was always a kind of love along with bewilderment in their young eyes just before their parents snatched them seconds later. I remember their faces. So maybe it’s just me but the putrid scent of the coyotes has now become a permanent fixture in my nostrils much like I’ve become a permanent fixture in this Wyoming wilderness. Ain’t nobody coming for me. You know, it was probably the songs that kept them coming around, just before my internal battery finally shorted out a couple of days ago. The coyotes don’t say anything, but the way they’d encircled me in the blackness of the northwestern night was its own form of taunting, like they, although having never experienced human civilization, knew exactly how I got here and my fall from fame. Even though I had no control of the songs playing, I had now become their entertainment. Without words, my prairie-wolf tormentors mockingly demanded me to play another song when “Out of This World” would trail off in a chopped and screwed-like fashion. “Naaa na na, naaa na naaaaawwwwwwwuuuhhhhh”. Like I said, I really don’t have any control of all that, but my captors asking for songs is perhaps one of the most humiliating experiences I’ve had in this wilderness wasteland. How can I sing the songs of Zion in a strange land?
And yet, it’s what I was made to do. As long as the songs played I had the memories. The odor of the coyotes would be instantly replaced with the aroma of grease-saturated pepperoni pizza on Saturday afternoons. The howling of the dogs was replaced by the commotion of packed parties, the low rustlings and high screams of joy, excitement, and terror that poured from the mouths of terrified toddlers and impatient grade-schoolers playing games. The growling from the engines of trucks passing by and the mechanical sounds produced by the nearby cranes and compactors reminded me of the animatronic movements of myself and my cronies during our sold-out shows every weekend. But now the music is no more. My only company is the stars that fill the beautiful Wyoming night sky above me and the rodents that creep across the broken and trash-filled floor below me, avidly searching for food for survival. It’s wild that I’m made in their image and they don’t pay me any mind, right? I swear it be ya own species. That’s fame though. Chewed up and vomited out like the birthday pizza at the bottom of the ball pit. I guess I expected it one day. I had my time in the spotlight which has now been replaced by the sun’s that-much-more intense spotlight. No regrets. There’s a time to mourn and a time to dance.