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.
They picked their way across the dark sand, approaching the edge of the ocean. The wind off the water wrapped her dress around her legs. He looked down at the outline of her knee beneath the twisted fabric, then out at the outline of the waves against the horizon. He wanted to scuttle, like a hermit crab, into the shell of her heart.
Though it was not her nature, she rooted her feet and waited, through the rainiest of weather, for him to arrive. She knew he was on his way, traveling as quickly as he could, his wounded heart flying across the stormy sky. When he arrived, she’d be ready.
The radio station faded to static as they drove through the blizzard, the voices fainter and fainter until the sound from the car speakers matched all they could see through ice-fogged windows.
“We’re alone,” she said. “If we ran off the road right now, no one would miss us.”
“I would miss us,” he said.
The building came down at the same rate of speed as all the rest, its walls crumbling under the weight of the wrecking ball, its rooms releasing memories to the air with the rest of the particles.
She watched the demolition from a car parked at the end of the street, her hands clasped in her lap, her eyes open as wide as she could hold them. She’d never expected to feel this peace as it all came down.
No, she said. I didn’t ask for room service.
But the tray was there on its cart, and the man who delivered it expected a tip. He swore the call came from her room, and she shook her head.
There’s no one here but me, she said. And I didn’t call.
He lifted the metal lid covering the plate, exposed a cheeseburger and well-done fries. Maybe, he said, the phone knew what you needed.
100 Proof 