23.05.09
in story, fiction at 11:20 pm
Whenever I lose myself in blankets, I lose all preconceived notions, especially that of how my body is shaped. It’s easy to imagine varied scales of my body, infinitely longer or wider than I am, was, or ever will be, but it’s always the colours I become that disturb me; when my skin feels soft against the sheets, my mind can only see my body as a glossy pink that I know must feel like a supple foam, and when I draw nearer to sleep, an image of my body suddenly turned angular and grotesque grows in vividness, marred by slashes and blackened with burns. Paired with the changing scales, often leaning in favour to skeletal, spindly fingers and toes, it is enough to leave me wondering about all that I can’t quite sort out.
Chief among these things is how this lack of stable perception leaks out into the real world, where all of my senses have some scale of relevance. Though these points of reference vacillate constantly, some of the people I know will always be taller than me or have lighter hair in memory.
Her eyes. I remember her eyes in these moments. The day I woke in hospital sheets, my fingers were stubs. I touched her with them. They snapped back to normal size just in time to touch her arm. She was impossibly thin, even for someone with my mischievous eyes, but you can’t tell a woman these things. She was writing things down. I couldn’t figure out why. I asked her a question, but I didn’t hear it. I couldn’t hear her, even if I dug deep. It was the first time.
“Is it bad? It’s always bad,” I hoped to say.
Sh. Try not to talk, she wrote. The woman who brought you in said she found you on a sidewalk, supine. You weren’t moving and your breath was short.
“Was I sleeping? That sounds like sleeping.”
Your ears were bleeding.
She looked away. They always looked away when they were serious. I began to think that I wasn’t one of them, whomever or whatever ‘they’ were, because I could only ever look at someone under periods of seriousness, which were always fleeting. Everything was fleeting. Even flat on my back, I was dizzy. My eyes faded out.
Where had I been? The last thing I heard was like seeing a searing white light.
B.
It was tuned in B. When I heard B, I saw a very specific blue, a kind of blue you’d find at the waning of twilight between two city buildings. I saw it briefly before the white came. I never heard white before, not even for a second.
The phone woke me up. Each morning, I nearly throw it before realising that I most definitely don’t want to do that. It vibrates its alarm on my chest, since I can never wake to an audible alarm. I just hear the colour. F#. F#. F#. Just yellow. I rustled in the blankets of Thursday morning, two weeks after getting out of the hospital. The sound was red-orange, like autumn, or some of the leaves at least. The sky was, too, but literally. It was early morning, or at least early for me. Everything felt small and I was incredibly clumsy. I stumbled four steps across the room and found some of the clothes I wore yesterday. I put them on. I reached for the doorknob, but rammed my knuckles into the wood instead. Cocoa brown. Over morning tea, I dug around the neighbourhood for thoughts. Not many were awake. I could hear a mother running through a checklist of things to do before “the kids” went off to school. I could hear one of her children rationalising a feigned illness in exchange for a few more hours of sleep. Nothing else.
Still without answers as to what happened to me, everything feels a little more off than usual. Every one of my emotions lay scattered, yet intertwined. I cry when I want to laugh or during laughter, but want to batter the one who made me laugh. It’s as if the white I heard made me a child again. The point of reference of age is lacking. Out in the world, when I see older people, I see them. I can say, “That’s an old person, yes.” I can say the same for a baby or a child, but the lines start to blur when teenagers can be as tall or taller than me. Altogether, feeling like a child again was recognisable because my world felt smaller. I felt smaller. The answers need to be found as to why.
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09.03.09
in fiction at 10:17 pm
I woke up. It was morning. The sink was running. He’d be back in five minutes. I only had five minutes.
What could I have done with only five?
I could’ve thought everything through again. I could’ve talked myself back into my mindset: leaving. I could’ve reinvented myself a thousand times over, shedding mental skins one after a-foolish-nother. I could’ve paid my bills. I could’ve written the one letter I really should’ve written, which was to extend my writer’s grant. Instead, I put on a sweater, a pair of jeans, and my brown shoes, forgetting socks, an undershirt, and underwear. With two-and-a-half minutes, I left him a three word note on a torn page:
“Good-bye, my heart.”
and I left. With the remaining time, I wondered if “good-bye” was really four words. Anything that difficult to say must be more than one word. One word took seven years for me to say, five-and-a-quarter of which were spent building it from scraps, the only pieces left after his every insult, every bit of backhanded flattery, and every redeeming moment. Every one of his warm, tender, and kind heartbeats swayed me.
Who are you after seven years? “Couples grow together,” his friend told me. Maybe we exchanged parts, like blows or kisses. I still had my brain, though he thought it was his. My lungs, though, he had. I realised this when I saw the five minutes at the sink were gone. In place of the watch I wore only to bed, I saw him bent over the note, surrounded by inevitable gloom and the things we bought together. “I’d like to demonise him,” I thought, but he was everyone, just doing his best in spite of his issues. He just stopped growing with me. I waited. I hung around for a couple years before I started smoking. That made years feel like nothing. Soon after, I forgot about growing until three minutes of my five minutes were gone and I somehow found a brownstone doorstep.
Couples stop growing, like everyone.
I thought about taking the words back. Three or four could just be misunderstood: “No, what I meant was that I was going out and you might not have been here when I got back. ‘Good-bye for now’, y’know? And the heart bit was like what those internet kids do, that less-than-three thing. I was just being overtly literal.”
“Where are your socks?”
He could always tell when I was serious because my handwriting was impossibly small and these three or four words were incredibly tiny. Nuclear physicists would marvel at their tiny, still particles. Anything I said was always written because he would always otherwise bowl me over. There was never enough time for my words, like the no I wanted to say when he talked about me walking down an aisle with all of our friends and family watching, smiling … thinking we won.
Where would I go now? Who would I see? It’s been forever since I was allowed to talk.
Or was it? Did I choose to submit, to surrender? To give up? Who was to blame? Did that even matter? Could I even dissect seven years fairly?
We lost. That was all.
My feet started to sweat. I felt for my phone, one of those movements that you learn to do, like checking for your keys, but I realised I had neither my phone or keys. I was beyond everyone. It was liberating and terrifying. I could’ve done anything. I did.
I took off the watch. I wasn’t in bed, so I rubbed the sleep from my eyes. The sun was coming up. It was the first time I noticed time. I went to the river and watched the sun climbing across it. I thought about meeting it halfway. I wondered if I’d bother swimming.
But as the sun rose, I rose. I rose to meet it even if I stood at average height. Things wouldn’t be so bad as long as I kept my choices. As long as I had choices, I could be and somewhere, maybe behind me, I heard something say that I had to make a choice. I think it was me.
So I did.
Here I go.
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31.01.09
in story, fragment at 1:13 pm
It wasn’t the first time I’d taken his picture, but it was my favourite. He was laughing, running, and holding the hat he’d teasingly taken from me close to his stomach as one might clutch a football. His broad smile, mischievous eyes, and perfect teeth were the best parts, but this moment was exactly who he was.
I was laughing, too.
We were playing a form of tag mutated by adolescence. Every moment felt alive, but slow and with a tugging of us to each other viscerally. Each tag was more charged than the last with our excitement of playing around what we really wanted, which was, at root and at best, dark and carnal.
I read somewhere that it takes trains a quarter mile to stop from full speed. Hearts are like that, too, or the feelings that live there are at least. Regardless, it does seem to follow that neither can stop before causing any damage. So that leaves us ploughing through the lives important to us. All they can do is already be along for the ride or try their best to get out of the way. I wonder how long it would take me. We don’t ever think we’re going all that fast. We’re just moving along, trying our best to get to where we want to go and all else is always incidental. The best and deeply ruining things in life are incidental.
“Take a picture of that, too. Like you do with your mind, y’know? And maybe you can draw it later so I can see.” So I did. I studied every bit of it. It was a bird on his back, a wing spanning onto his shoulder. I’d connected his galaxy of freckles with a blue Sharpie marker and gave life to a new being. We were both mesmerised by the idea of it. In old kingdoms, he would either be hailed or feared. I think I was doing both.
Miles lived in a three-family house, though it wasn’t a three-family anymore. It wasn’t always one, either. First it wasn’t, then it was, and it wasn’t again by the time I knew him. He would decided where he wanted to eat or sleep based on mood. When he felt low, he’d sleep on the first floor or set up the cot the previous owner left behind in the cold, dank basement. When he was daydreaming too much or needed to feel safe, he was on the top floor, the third floor. There weren’t enough rooms, I told him, for that. I told him that there were too many emotions, that people were emotional soups and it would take hours to find only the pieces you wanted to use when you wanted to use them.
He laughed. He was like that.
The house was near the train tracks. That might be how he came to own it so young. Everything we knew was near the train tracks. It seemed right to carry on. Even our elementary school was. When we grew to be obsessed with travel, wandering, and transience, I wasn’t surprised. No one else talked about it, so I don’t think anyone else was, either.
Across the train tracks was an abandoned factory. Broken factories with broken windows, rusted out machines, and miles of Technicolor graffiti blanketed the town he lived in and all of its neighbours. On its wall, I’d painted a lantern fish eating a frog eating a mushroom. Miles said he liked it, but without thinking, I was painting over it the freckle bird in blue. Maybe I could finally tell him with it, I thought.
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13.01.09
in story, fiction, fragment at 8:15 pm
We were on the subway. It was supposed to be harmless, two little brothers holding hands, adjusting each other’s superfluous hearing aids in a teasing game, vying for the affection of the other in the form of grunts and groans of frustration they themselves couldn’t hear with the volume down. The younger one made rewarding faces, but they both ended up laughing.
The brakes screeched a lot. I think only I knew that. I watched their father and grandfather sitting across from the playing boys having a fast-paced conversation with precisely accentuated gestures.
Arrogant dyke and
she can’t do anything right were some of the dance-like moves I recognised. It seemed as though deaf problems were the same as anyone else’s. I watched the grandfather spell out the curse words behind his hat with his left hand, so the boys couldn’t see. Most of what he was saying was spelled out.
When I first started learning languages, I didn’t see the application immediately. The outside world didn’t exist, since it surely didn’t come looking for me. It was only after I heard a Spanish-speaking couple arguing in the grocer that I finally understood why it’d become my new obsession. What looked like a careful debate over the softness of fruit was a carefully calculated, passive-aggressive circling around the real issue of the man sleeping with another woman.
F-a-g, I saw. I wondered if he knew I was watching. I wondered if the brothers knew this part of the language. I wondered why anyone would.
The whole time, the father just watched and nodded. If I wasn’t busy daydreaming, I probably would’ve caught the context, but I had to keep that detached look so, if caught staring, I could “snap out of it” before anyone asked. I’d seen people entranced by sign language before. I’d seen that stare on my own hands when I first met [name]. [Applicable gender pronoun] dropped a folder full of papers. Why do people carry around open-ended folders full of papers just waiting to be hit or tripped? Maybe they like to hear or see the paper fly until they remember it’s something for which they’re responsible.
Damn. Before that, I’d never seen a deaf person curse out loud.
Curse visibly.
Sign language was my fourth language. The proceeding ones were all Romance languages, with obligatory Spanish in high school leading, so it isn’t as impressive as it sounds.
Be more careful, I fumbled with my hands. I hoped it was just nervousness or excitement at reacting so quickly to help.
You should, I added and then resigned
be more careful.
Don’t correct yourself.
Talking was pointless at first, our “mouths” busy with the scattered demographics, pie charts, and spreadsheets. It looked very important, so I was glad that it hadn’t rained in six days and the sidewalk wasn’t all that dirty, considering, though one of the blue, purple, and red charts played dangerously at a puddle of spilled coffee. I stopped it from being blown into it with my foot, for which, when I picked it up, I immediately felt guilty. We stared at the back of the sheet of paper, sporting a fresh grey toe-print. I’m really sorry.
No hands, but just a big, beautiful smile.
Do you remember songs?
I have only been deaf for three years. I remember favourite songs. I lose parts of them sometimes, but I’ll remember them later, maybe weeks. I still feel sound. That helps.
It was our first date. I felt stupid asking deaf questions, but I was nervous. We were nervous. We didn’t know we’d be deaf together for three years.
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12.01.09
in fiction at 10:54 pm
He sat on his ankles all winter. This was different from how he sat on his ankles in the summer. In the summer, he sat on one at a time, but the floor got cold the second December arrived.
He sat on his ankles in front of the computer, only getting up when hunger or the bathroom twisted his arm. She was there, on the other side. Throughout his childhood, he ran to this place, this place where an edit box and text and a cursor would bring him friends since moving from town-to-town too much made it impossible. It was a place he could always return to, even if his connections changed, all wires lead to his digital home, which was a on small server in a small channel; a white box with black text where friends came and went.
She was there, on the other side. It was when he was fifteen when he first saw her. He sent his photo over. He was nervous. His breath behaved as if he had been running, which was something he never really did, but he knew it felt like that. She used a smiley. It was a good sign. She never used them. She sent hers. She was a beautiful redhead, freckles from cheekbone to cheekbone, building a bridge over the bridge of her nose. She had a model’s smile. She was sixteen. Her name was Claire. She loved to read and bake.
In a sense, they grew up together. They had been talking two years previous until he got a camera and the guts to open the door to their mutual attractions. They had a history without ever having met. His adolescent feelings swelled just like his ankles, until he had difficulty walking on them. The doctor said they were sprained and he wore braces. What to do with his heart was the bigger, seemingly impossible question.
She was there, on the other side. She was somewhere in the midwest or Canada. He knew because of her time zone. It was all a blur to him at that age, just like what someone else’s human body looks like. At night, he thought about what it might be like to put his hands on such a foreign thing. Sometimes, he would fall asleep with a hand in the air or arms caressing or embracing nothing. He tried doing the pillow thing a couple times, too. You know, that pillow kissing that supposedly teenage girls do while kicking their heels in the air. He mapped the space about his bed with tender kisses and his warm, soft fingerprints. Somewhere in the midwest or Canada, she was waiting, hoping he would take a road-trip or get a summer job and save up for a plane ticket to the vague area where she lived. He knew she got snow sometimes.
As they aged a bit, their personalities started blossoming. They weren’t really shy adolescents anymore, at least not with each other. He still stayed inside, waiting for her at the computer. The times in between were merciless to his viscera. Waiting was like death, he thought. No, death was waiting. Sometimes, he’d take a break and wash the dishes so his parents wouldn’t yell. He’d find himself looking out the window above the sink. He’d see his reflection there and he’d imagine her hands on him. He’d imagine her saying, “You wash, I’ll dry,” and even as he scrubbed burnt food from the pans, he would smile as he worked the steel wool with his fingers. Even with the slivers, he’d smile.
Were they dating? Could they date? Could they live together? Would they? It could seem so real and surreal at the same time. Sometimes, he’d find himself standing somewhere and swear that she was there. She was a ghost in his life without being gone.
He started working in a warehouse. He liked the cold of the winters there and, as he’d come to learn, the open bay doors in the summer, letting the breezes in. He moved groceries around on palettes. Some other workers took apart these palettes and reassembled them for better shipping. Sometimes, he took offence that they’d scrutinise something he touched, as if he’d hand it over in an unacceptable way, but since most of the things he moved were jars and cans, he learned that they were just being careful.
The week he moved out of his parents’ home, he reconnected and found her. He was elated in his new freedom, but she seemed distant. He finally typed his question, prodding at what was wrong. “Oh, nothing,” she typed, “I’m just on the phone with someone.” It didn’t just feel like hours, but it was. He waited, still, for her to come back. At 3AM, she logged off without a word. Her quit message was blank, which struck him as particularly unusual. She usually quit with a message for him, or at least with a relevant quote. It was their secret language, but she wasn’t speaking to him.
In the coming weeks, with her absence, he finally asked the soap opera question, “Are you seeing someone else?” There was a minute’s pause. “I met this guy a couple weeks ago. His name is Kyle. He’s a really sweet guy. He likes to take me out.” He froze. His left ankle was asleep. He used to like that feeling because he imagined it would feel like Claire tickling him. It just added to his growing fury. He had a million questions and most of them featured the word ‘us’. When he got thinking about it, she didn’t even acknowledge the use of “else” in his question. This time, in mid-conversation, in which she was describing her new beau, he dropped their secret language.
They didn’t speak for six months. He got on with his life. His co-workers had asked him to go out for drinks a few times, but he declined, believing — no, knowing — that going home to see Claire was the only choice. He did shots of Jameson instead, though it would’ve been so unnatural for him to stop thinking of her. He wasn’t drunk on whiskey, but drunk on the ghost of her that used to dry the dishes. Instead of going home after, he drove. While he was out in the full-moon light among the silhouetted trees, he made the mistake of imagining her in the passenger seat while he sang along to the radio. This happened every night after work. She’d just smile and enjoy the music herself, dancing a little beneath the seat belt.
It snowed. It was a beautiful snow. It was the only time he liked to go outside. He checked his phone before going to bed, as if anyone would call, and he realised he was looking for her still, even after all this time. It would be the first winter without them exchanging words or photos or music or even phone calls. They only spoke a few times. Her reception was patchy, but he liked knowing that she was there at least trying to listen.
She was still there, in his address book. He started to call her, but hung up. It had been too long. She was happy with Kyle, whomever he was. She had forgotten about him. It was that simple.
But she called back.
“David?”
“I’m sorry. It’s late.”
“No, it’s not. It’s only nine. Are you okay? I haven’t heard from you in so long.”
“It snowed here. Did it snow there?”
“… Yes.”
Hearing her voice woke his fifteen-year-old self up. He was energised for the first time in a long time. He was tingling all over, like she was tickling him. “Let’s go out in it.”
“Wh — ooo-kay. You’re being weird, David.”
“No, it’ll be fun. Just dress warmly.”
They both dressed in their warmest. It was strange that they just fell back into things. He remembered a night when they stared up at the starry sky together, trying to find the exact same star. He was on his back near a lake. She was on top of a mountain in a park. They were lying together in a very loose sense.
“My sister and I used to get into snowball fights when we were younger, when it snowed like this,” she admitted in an almost palpable nostalgia, “I really miss those times. Everything was simple.” Maybe she felt the pulling, too. Maybe he was haunting her while still being alive and accessible. Maybe he could win her back, away from him. All Kyle had over him was reality, after all.
“Let’s have one.”
“David, we can’t.”
“Who says? We’ve already done so much with words.”
The pervading silence blanketed heavier than the snow.
“Okay, I’ll start.” He put his mobile between his head and his shoulder and balled some snow together, or at least tried. It was incredibly powdery, making a ball impossible. He threw it anyway. “There. I hit you with one. Did you feel it?”
“Yeah,” she paused, but then she put some remote excitement into it, “Yeah, I did. I turned away, though. I didn’t want it in my face.”
“What did it feel like?”
“It felt like … joy bursting into a thousand down feathers. You throw so softly.”
“I don’t want to hurt you. You throw one.”
“I don’t want to hurt you either.”
“C’mon,” he said, like any instigating ten-year-old. He threw another at the winter dark. “Did you feel that? I gave you three that time.”
“Be careful. One had ice in it. It … stung.”
“Sorry. I’m sorry, I’ll be more careful.” Something was happening to their voices. They were either children again or on the verge of tears. “What about you? It’s your turn.”
“I like being the target.”
They started running around in their patches of pristine snow, David in his big backyard, and Claire, he imagined, in a front lawn somewhere with small pines that she tended to year-round carefully placed to make the front of the house, with its big porch, look its best. They tore around in the snow together, powder flying, sneaking into every available crevice in clothing. Skin stung, but it was a good sting. Throwing more and more failed snowballs, David was out of breath. He was stumbling. Finally, she threw one back. He overreacted, but loved doing so. He even made “I’m hit” sounds and landed on his back in the snow. The old feelings were stealing the air from him. Trying to catch his breath, all that came from his lungs was the simple sentence, “I love you so much, Claire.”
The silence was back. It seemed to last hours. His child-like smile was closing, fading out. He was ageing rapidly right past fifteen to somewhere in the region of twenty-two. He only had a few years to go before she would eclipse the youth she returned to him with her absence.
“… Claire?” He felt his voice eaten by the snow that, yes, was all over him, even in his mouth and left ear. He thought that, maybe, all the snow affected his mobile. Electronics were so susceptible to water. How could he have been so stupid? But the backlight shined back at him, battery down to three-quarters only. He called her name again, “Are you there?”
“David? Sorry, you cut out really badly there. What did you say?”
“I said …” He’d never say it again, even though it felt so good to have the truth out there. It felt so good to imagine her face lighting up at the phrase. Mourning his almost orgiastic bravery, he swallowed the repetition. “I said … I was just telling you …”
“Oh, but I said I threw two back at you. So, I guess I’ll let you duck.” And he did. “But I have to go now. Kyle just came home.”
She hung up without saying good-bye. He imagined her dusting herself off and trying to be as presentable as she could. Dusting him off. He imagined her trying to explain what she was doing, hiding the phone, trying to mask her out-of-breath breathing. It was their dirty secret, their secret language. They didn’t need to catch up to feel young again, to be good again. But he’d never say it again. He’d never call again. The haunting would continue. He would work at the warehouse, climbing higher and higher into the corners of an office, managing operations. He’d retire somewhat happy with what he’d done. He’d never find love. He’d never really live. He never really let himself live, somehow convinced that she’d come looking for him one day in the channel he kept open after decades on the same server. He would wait until he slipped into a coma, wherein he dreamed only of washing and drying dishes beneath the overhead light in the kitchen.
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11.01.09
in poetry at 11:27 am
more longing,
even more, just when I thought I was filled with it,
made of it;
a torn sweater, an unpaired glove.
in open fields
covered in snow,
moonlight pouring over everything,
is the face I seek
encased in ice, like everything.
to touch it means danger,
adding danger to the shape of things;
eye colour, warm fingertips, tone of whisper
always adding danger.
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13.12.08
in thoughts at 10:01 pm
The depths of isolation are teaching me well, but I fear that, too much, I’m being shown the way back into my head. While I am the most outside of myself that I’ve been, I managed to remain my quiet self just the same, which I like. It seems well-suited that this should happen during winter as thinking has always felt as a winter’s walk alone. White in darkness, wind on empty streets …
Sometimes, it strikes me that I will lose my sense of self in pushing my boundaries, in making all of these human discoveries. There are times when I wish for a radical reversion to my quiet, almost afraid self, but that’s when I remember that these boundaries were made through all of the pains I came to know.
And that no matter how fantastical, how misunderstood, or how lost what I discover might be, no matter how thoroughly known, I want to share it. I want all of you to know it. I don’t want to stop on this road that I’m taking. There’s something so wonderfully infectious and beautiful in each ineffable moment we have. This must be the sensation that allows people to have any sort of faith. This must be the rush that makes people cheer.
I’ve been seized by life.
My only regrets in this are that I’ve been less able to handle tricky emotional situations. My approach, once typical, has been thwarted by interest, which is, of course, an inhibitor to keeping balance and rational. If I care too much or if I want that person safe and happy, it can no longer be neutral. I first noticed that change when I became less indecisive as well as sharing things that I valued without prompts or excusing them by disarming the possible failures with statements like, “It’s not all that special,” or “You might not even like me.” I’m not only allowing myself to experience, enjoy, and be open, but I’m allowing the possibility for others to do this as well.
My second regret is more of an elaboration of the second and it’s that I haven’t figured out how to prioritise the little time that I do have. Some friends have become resentful at my absence. Mostly, the faces I do see are the ones who are where I am and that is regrettably dominated by where I’m currently working. I wish they wouldn’t. There’s never a time when I forget about them. All of this would be solved by calling at least to say ‘hello,’ but sometimes, when it’s reached a certain point, calling is no longer enough. I hate, in fact, when I do catch friends and it takes time to get past the point of, “Wow, you’ve been so busy,” and we need to try so hard to warm up again. I also hate even more that spending an hour, an evening, or a day never feels like enough for me. I always feel that the time is truncated, regardless of the time spent.
There’s never enough time and I’m sorry for that.
But I never forgot about you. Yes, you.
I love you and miss you very much.
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01.10.08
in fiction at 3:57 am
“Everything seems so alive. My skin even seems sensitive.”
“It’s summer. Everything’s alive. The trees. The birds. The wind. We are.”
“Yes, we’re alive.”
“That’s why summer is here. It’s to remind us that we’re alive, that life is right now. It’s happening to us. It’s why winter comes, too, to remind us that it ends eventually, but right now, this is celebration. This is all that we could ever hope for is a prime time.”
“And the spring? We are in our spring together. We might be in summer, in our season and our age. We’re celebrating, but our spring together is concurrent.”
“Spring is to remind us of the new, of possibilities, of youth. When they went searching for the Fountain of Youth, they didn’t want to live forever. They wanted possibilities. They found it in the form of a new country.”
“What do you think will become of us?”
“I think we have a lot of potential. Our autumn will show us a bountiful harvest. Maybe we’ll start a family. Maybe we’ll outlast the winter and stand up against all sorts of terrible weather.”
“But there’s joy in winter, too. There are holidays and fireplaces and baked goods. St. Valentine’s holiday is in the thick of it.”
“There’s always joy. It doesn’t matter what season it is. Sometimes, it’s just harder to find it. But that’s why I love summer. Everyone is alive and abuzz and celebrating. I’m glad that you are, too.”
He turned to look at me.
“Whatever walls you built to keep the seasons out, wherever you were hiding when I met you … it’s safe now. I hope you see them all. I hope we see them all.”
Twilight was closing in on the bridge. The yellow lights and the bold blue sky played wonderfully together. Everything was magical.
So do I, I thought to myself.
So do I.
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09.08.08
in fiction at 12:17 am
Desperately, he opened his mouth and took a drink. This was the course of his life.
His stomach filled quickly. He would drink his way out of this. The East River is filled with the lives of those around it, from the year’s pollutants, the plastic bags, pieces of this and of that, to the territorial marking with the ashes of relatives citing that their spirit lives here and the ashes of buildings that burn so thoroughly, but even gutted buildings are still buildings until someone knocks them down, even gutted buildings have memories. When he took a drink, he took in bits and pieces of all of these things, as years have rendered them wet dust. Everything is eventually just brown. His stomach filled quickly, and it would, with all of the lost and found, all of the sons and daughters and best friends and pets and parents and whole neighbourhoods caught by flames. All of the leaves from the tops of strawberries that I’ve eaten there over the years and threw into the docile waves, thinking, “It’s harmless.”
His stomach filled quickly, so he filled the lower part of his throat. If he hadn’t eaten, he might be able to survive this, he thought. But a river is a river is a river is not drinkable, and he was trapped in his million spitfire thoughts at the murky bottom, which I’m not sure has ever been seen. So, he just stood there. And you would, too, if you had a million thoughts, but in his cement shoes, he didn’t have a choice. He just stood there at the bottom and drank. And he drank, and he drank, and he drank, until his lungs were wet. He stopped mid-gulp, and if you’ve ever done that, you know how hard that is to do.
He tasted last December, and he knew it was December because of the burning aftertaste of road salt. All he could think about was Isadora, her long, pin-straight black hair, and the way it sounded when she laughed while running on their morning run through the streets. He swore he could see her pale, perfect skin even in the washed over darkness, here at the bottom.
How he wanted to say ‘I love you’ with strawberries and flowers. How he wanted to restore burned buildings with their life together. How he wanted to spread her mother’s ashes when cancer took her, or her father’s when he finally fell for the last time. How he wanted to have her looking down on him as he did as she wished, and kept on living happily. How he wanted to, how he wanted, and if he didn’t borrow a hundred dollars, he would’ve done it all.
How terrible, the things that we throw away.
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02.07.08
in milestones, poetry at 2:33 pm
It was in everything that I heard you
the first time
stepping into what looked like
the deepest cave,
where you stood
and cried,
hoping that the echoes
would become blankets to comfort you.
As the sound travelled back, the blankets found me,
and I carried their shining covers to you,
bringing only my motives to make you warm.
It was in the stars behind those tears
that I found you, and I shined the
ones in my eyes, too.
Only the blankets were sheets,
and we tangoed beneath them,
searching for ourselves all the while.
And when it came to pass
that I lost my legs and
we found no answers,
you and I, we suffered all the while.
No matter the softness of sheets,
the billowing pillows,
it was not I that could patch your holes.
We would neither sink, nor swim,
nor grow together
as I learned to walk again,
walk again.
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