100 Proof

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.

I had barely sat down before a song from earlier in the year came over the speakers. For its seven minutes, I catapulted to that other month, another type of weather, another moment when I would have appreciated a map, a lit pathway, a clear point of decision.

Nine years after first meeting, we had one more slow dance and kissed, holding onto something from the past that hadn’t let either of us go.

“You seem distant,” he said, two nights later. “I can tell something is wrong.”

I hugged my knees tighter to myself, unwilling to drop several defenses. I’ve learned, in the hardest of ways, to keep them solid until much later in the exchange.

“We don’t know each other well enough,” I said. All we know, I thought, is the idea of each other.

Like Max, I am fearful and fearless, adrift on a sea of imaginary emptiness. I roar load, but just want a soaring fort and something akin to sleeping in a pile.

The wild rumpus, often of my own making, started long ago. Somewhere, someone has dinner ready. I’ll be there just as soon as I find my way home.

She smiles at the camera and looks sweeter than I ever was, happier than I would have been in that tiny house with a garden on that Iowa street. Once, I wanted that so badly I clung to you no matter how you despised my body, no matter how often I begged you, silently, to love me even a little bit.

Now, I look at your jowlier face, her hand curled up against your jacket, and can’t imagine that life I craved.

Now, I dance with abandon. I risk, love, then release. It is so much sweeter here.

I will eat something at the airport, I decide. It is early, but I have been awake for hours, my body acting as if I am about to board a plane for the first time ever, rather than the first time this month. Still, I have spent the time in unplanned ways, and as the world around me has come to life, I have not left enough time to eat. My suitcase zips shut with a gasp. I roll it to the hallway, lock the door, slip away before the neighbors even know I’m gone.