100 Proof

On the page, a boat slices water, and the mind’s eye sees liquid parting. But a slice, in food’s context, indicates something flat, whether it be thick or paper-thin. Bread, cheese, tomato, prosciutto: one reads they were sliced, and sees them arranged on the plate.

The heart, too, requires lingual precision. Spellbound feels differently than charmed, than fascinated, than transfixed. The heart can want, can wish, can demand, but still sees deficiency and responds by not requiring. As my heart tacks in search of its harbor, I’m sorry is not the same as I regret.

In that moment, it felt as if a conversation were continuing, not starting, as if we’d been on opposite sides of the room at a cocktail party and had finally made our way back to each other. Later, I clasped my shirt around me, watching him map the molecular structure of corn syrup in the air, and wondered, Is this where it finally begins?

Several times the next day, I ended up at my window, staring at the raging sky and wishing for calmer weather. Time slipped against itself, sandpaper-rough and grating, and I watched the seagulls dip and soar through the edges of the rainstorm. Jealous of their agenda, I picked the most merciful tasks from my list, and attempted, in my own way, to follow the updrafts of the afternoon.

His business trip coincided with the Fiery Foods Show, and he returned with three jars of habañero jelly, dried chilies, and a bottle of tongue-singeing hot sauce. “These were my favorites,” he said. We carried the jelly, cream cheese, crackers and beer to the table, where we ate and drank silently, filling our mouths with the first heat in months. I wondered if he’d kiss me later, even if the heat would have dissipated, carried away by the blandness of its accompaniments. I wondered if there were enough fiery foods in the world to start things up again.

I burn like gasoline on water, my anger smoky and blazing, difficult to smother in the moment. It rides on top of my stillness underneath. Part of me swims under it, looking up at the billowing rage, and wonders how everything sizzled out of control so quickly. Another part of me knows I’m the one who gets careless with the fuel.

“Patience,” says the woman with the peaceful soul, taking my singed hands in her own. “If you don’t learn it now, then when?”

This year started strangely, a dozen days that mixed photographs of sunrises and sunsets with slideshows of data. Peace, then bitterness, then balance, then struggle. A night of solid sleep bookended by restless nights when I awake, mid-night, with my head cocked at a hard angle and my arm flung over it as if to keep it attached. This time is uneasy, rocked by eclipses and retrogrades. I sit with it, but I am restless, my heart like a knot of tiny, grasping hands.

It’s not often that I actually show up somewhere and read these little stories out loud. After all, in a flash, the reading’s over. Therefore, it seems appropriate that I’ll be reading them as part of “Quiet Lightning,” a new reading series kicking off Monday, December 14, at Cantina in San Francisco. Bring a dollar to donate for candles and postcards. Buy a drink. Hear some stories. Say hello.