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.
Transformation
November 20, 2009When boxes scatter across a room, it becomes clear: this is not ordinary safekeeping. Floors tilt, glass cracks, water spills out of unexpected places. We try all the usual remedies, but in the rending comes the transformation. Best to let it happen, because at all times, unpacking into a soft, new place can only begin after everything that came before has been sealed with tape, bound with wire, and replaced by dust settling in its wake.
Baby, discovered
November 16, 2009Every morning until yesterday, we slipped through the water like ghosts, cutting the fog that hugs the surface. We found peace, and solitude even while we sliced the water side by side.
Both of us want to return to that moment just before we realized our paddles had caught not seaweed but baby. Both of us want to close our eyes like him, ignore that his lips, eyelashes, earlobes had been eaten off by something that recognized it only as food.
I don’t know when we’ll return to the water. I don’t know when we’ll open our eyes again.
The idea of each other
November 14, 2009Nine 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.
Wild thing
November 12, 2009Like 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.
While heart
November 10, 2009She loved him with her while heart*. Not the whole of it, just the pieces available while she waited for the right person to come along.
It was easier that way. Her whole heart, then, didn’t break at the weight of his need, his desire. The little parts could withstand the force of it, and she could tear away from them, if necessary. She could leave them behind, float above them, observe them on the floor.
And after awhile, it ended, and her heart moved on to someone else with whom she could while away the time.
*Thanks to Dottie L. Guy for planting the seed of the phrase.
Stasis
November 6, 2009There was nothing ordinary in her closet, which is why it was so hard to throw anything away. The dress made of wire and sea glass, the shoes made of impossible angles, a silk coat that changed color with the wind—each one is a memory, she thought.
She settled on the closet floor and wrapped herself in the coat. Somewhere on her street, a black dog barked. Somewhere in her city, a juice glass shattered on a tile floor.
100 Proof 