“We peaked on the phone.”
Don’t mind while I post stills from my favorite movies. Elizabethtown (2006)
And with this, I will let you all know that when I get back from Lexington, I will have a good deal to say. Till next week.
Sometimes I think we all wander about, lost, wanting to be lost. Searching for more riddles that might hold some answer to some obscure question we haven’t thought of yet, or just searching for more questions that we have not yet conjured. I know I don’t know what I’m looking for, and sometimes I think that’s okay, sometimes I take comfort in not having a particular direction. I would like to remain lost for now - that way I can find something more.
“Landslide” - Fleetwood Mac
One Year Ago Today
It rained the day after graduation
I waited for my friend in a coffee shop buried under trees and between historic houses
I took off my green robe and put the tassel on my rearview
I had the roads and the rain and the stoplights in my hand and in my head
summer beckoned its warm white finger
lavender marshmallow coffee steamed the window
finally there was some purpose to the places I went
one year ago today.
12/25
Come, spring, breathe life into me again. Wood-paneled living room in my great-aunt’s double-wide, glass owls and wind chimes, cookbooks and spellbooks, feng shui and ancient flower printed couches. TV with no signal, better than no TV at all - reminds me of how useless it can be is. Morning walks on the dirt road, dotted with beige puddles and lakes, sweet life from the grass and white blossoms. The ground is moist, yet firm enough to remind me of my place here. Then comes the traditional cemetery visit. Great-grandmothers, grandfathers, aunts, my grandmother’s family is small yet endless here. My first funeral was here, I wore a white dress and stockings, a pearly butterfly purse that held the carnations I placed gingerly in her hands before the coffin closed. We also share twin stuffed rabbits, though hers is white and mine is brown. She’s in my closet somewhere, buried with my other memories. Age-darkened miniature Washington monuments, no crypts to be found here, only below ground. The wire fences of the neighborhood stare blankly at me in the still air, and my heart sinks. Mildred, I wish I’d known you for all you were. Time to go meet famous cousin Mikey, let’s go. We’re meeting at that little southern place…don’t remember the name. Okay, Dad, coming. I see the road and the sky at night, the sky towering overhead like God’s hand reaching out to bring me along. Endless black hills, rectangles of light from the occasional farmhouse, not a sound. Not one. No wind, no insects, no rustling, just the sound of still. My grandmother said the other day, offhandedly, after a couple glasses of bourbon, “The country was just the most wonderful place, the people and the farms were the best life.” She said it in a whispering murmur, low and quiet. She looked away, still delicately holding her glass as though she didn’t need it, as though in fact it wasn’t necessary, thank you very much. Dazed, the carpet intrigued her, held her in a trance. Painfully serene.
Drove down a dark deserted road near midnight, gaps in the clouds with moonlight behind them, and the moon was the misty eye of the dog racing across the plains, mouth curled in a snarl. No stars tonight, just bitter air that smells cold. Can’t I just curl up in your warmth tonight? Aimless and altogether true, I kept driving, taking a chance to listen to a song I hadn’t heard yet. Empty skies and broken lives, lifeless lips and missing years. Where’d they all go? Where did all our time go? It doesn’t feel like an eternity, or a short time -rather, it feels like a hole in the ground that has yet to open up and swallow me. If I step off the curb, will I fall? If I get into bed and pull the covers over my face, will I fall through the mattress, into the ground? These thoughts don’t keep me from sleeping, rather they don’t have an effect - I’m indifferent, to be honest. The lights turned green for me, every one, and I drove without stopping. The comforting bass of the stereo and the tinted windows made me want to go anywhere without being seen. I could drive to Kansas tonight and eat at a diner, and no one would know me. No one knew me tonight driving down that road - not even the black dog that consumed the entire sky. He was looking westward, not at me. Odd, the comfort of not being seen - the comfort of the lack of effort it took for me to not be seen.
I’ve always had dark circles underneath my eyes. My parents say it’s hereditary, but personally, I think I was just born exhausted from the world. I’ve never been more exhausted more than now, though. No small things to look forward to anymore - I dread the phone calls, I dread that they’ve become silences filled with intervals of menial topics. It’s the hardest thing to communicate with you anymore. I hang up not even being able to immediately list things I should have or could have said, like most people normally do. And I’m exhausted. I’ve stayed up nights trying to reason this out with myself so that I can rest easy and be talkative again, but instead I’d rather not sleep; I’d rather stay awake and ponder these things, without any success of finding topics that interest even me. I don’t want any charitable gestures from you, I don’t want any pity. That may be my worst fear - a fool’s fear, perhaps, but nevertheless true. I’m seeking the comfort of a soft place, where I can hide. A soft place, no one knows exactly where I am, and I’m warm and asleep. Sleep is the safest place for me - though I may dream terrible dreams, I can’t be harmed when I wake. Though I can be wrenched from position to position, I can be jerked all around the bed and catch myself from falling, and wake up immediately only to remain so the rest of the night. Jerked from dream to seamless dream, fluid in unusual sequence. Familiarly unusual, unusually familiar. I could go into detail about how my night went during our next talk: “I chose a green pen and Simon and Garfunkel over sleep. I don’t want you to be here to see me like this, and any charitable gesture would shame me. I’m too afraid to tell you any of this, anything of what I’m feeling anymore. What I fear most is your pity, and the last thing I’m able to do is come up with the words to describe this, or even summon the will to consider it.” Any love songs I’ve listened to, I’ve done so bitterly. Any sweet words said to a lover, I’ve read bitterly. I wish I could come back now, I don’t want to be alone in this world anymore. But it seems like you’re the one person I can’t come to.
I’m tired. I want to sleep, but nowhere feels like home anymore.
I walked out into the morning, and it was pure gold. It danced in the peripherals on stands of wood and floated across the ground. Then there was a blind man with a cane, holding fast to two labs on short leashes, one black and the other a light caramel. They pulled him into a tree and he stood there for a moment, stunned, but in a way that told me he was used to such things. His shoulders shook from quick, helpless sobs, but they ended as quickly as they began. He felt along the ground for their waste, gave up, and walked past my door into his own home. I retreated quickly off the threshold, closed the door, and stood firmly against it, as if blindness were contagious. I briefly remembered the stack of books that had just arrived for me in the mail, and for a moment I smiled at the day ahead. Reading in front of the golden window. But then I remembered that the blind man hadn’t seen the golden day.
November (an excerpt)
When she met him again his tongue had been cut out. She had already forgotten what his voice sounded like, and now she would never again know how it sounded to hear him tell her he was moving on. But maybe it was better that way. He had found her after a long stint overseas. She knew he’d been gone, had known for awhile now, and had figured that he would never speak to her again. And she had grown enough to know that maybe acceptance was the best next to fate – what was fate anyway? Fate was nothing but an idea that lets people sleep at night, or at least keeps them awake with hope, with a purpose. Max had long since stopped believing in fate. Stephen wasn’t about to come back for her. He had before – several times – but she didn’t expect him to again. She had never expected him to come back to her, though it was always a pleasant surprise when he did. When he did, he aroused in her the love she remembered from the previous summer, the previous winter – winters were always the worst. Darkness pervaded every corner of her life. The frozen rain and the blanketed white grounds of her home left imprints in her vision that she couldn’t get rid of. Max grew up with green, sheltered by tall pines. She would pick the bark off the pines, break it in her porcelain doll hands. Even as a child, she knew how to feel the world around her. Perhaps that was the point of being a child – to feel the world until you had to feel the people. The first person she had felt was her mother, of course – the comfort of her mother’s breast when nightmares wouldn’t cease. She then felt her father, his strong hands as he led her across the streets of the neighborhood. The person she had felt fully for the first time was Stephen, at thirteen. She was but thirteen herself – completely unversed in the ways of the world. She could read emotions, but not altogether well yet. What she knew above all else, immediately, was that she loved him, and that that feeling would come back to visit her every once in awhile.
She was in Kentucky now, on a horse farm similar to the ones she drew and showed her friends as a little girl. A traveling vet, with years of bartending experience in college. She felt well-versed now, having married the man she thought was best for her. And she felt she was good for him, too. Granted, he had told her as much – but what was most important was that she felt it. Max inherited the farm from her aunt Lillian – a kindly, spindly old woman with a voice soft as the bluegrass. She had died in her favorite chair, next to the window.
She’d never admit to anyone that Jeff or Kentucky was a mistake. Not even to herself. She didn’t believe it to be in the slightest. Max thought that Stephen had made the whole mistake, of course.
“Mom,” she said into the phone. “I’m getting on the next flight to see you.”
Silence. A happy one. “That’s so good, honey,” she beamed through the phone.
“And I’m coming without Jeff. It’ll do us both some good to get away from each other. Since we’ve gotten here we haven’t had a vacation of any kind.”
“All right, honey.”
But Max had decided to drive instead. An oil change, big deal – just her and music. James Taylor, she made sure. Childhood music that reminded her of home.
“Be careful, Max,” Jeff implored when she tossed her duffel into the backseat. She drew out her iPod and went about hooking it up to the stereo.
“I will. I’ll call you when it gets dark, so I can stay awake. I’ll try to make it a straight-through drive, but I dunno.” He drew her out of the car by her hips and kissed her softly. She savored it, and when he was through she licked him playfully on the cheek.
“I love you, babe,” he said, smiling.
“I love you, too.”
The woman looked at the girl typing fervently on her laptop, and she was envious. She had gone to the coffee shop to wind down from the PTA meeting, but the rush was so intense she went out to her car. She found no meaning in the eyes of others; she wished she could, for then there would be meaning in something in the world. She could find none anywhere. It was troubling, the lack of meaning she found in everything. Every corner of the world was now occupied, there seemed to be nothing left to discover. No new feeling. What she felt in love others had felt too. She wanted to be unique, but if everyone were unique, then no one would be. No one would be unique in their uniqueness, because then everyone else would be unique as well.
“Mama,” her daughter whined, “I’m cold. I wanna go home.”
“Hang on, sweetie. Mama needs to make a stop at that store over there. I’ll be right back. Remember? That’s the store that doesn’t let little girls like you in.”
The cashier looked up with a flicker of dulled recognition – the all-too familiar look of someone who is fed up with seeing you in his establishment.
Kira walked out with the brown paper bag. “Old BITCH!”
The local high school kids – her eldest was friends with some of them; she recognized – taunted her as her daughter did. An alcoholic, a mean bitch of a mother. Ungrateful little whore.
“You can kiss my white ass,” she told them, and started her engine. Molly whimpered, the beginning of a sob. “Quiet, sweetie,” Kira said. “Mama has to concentrate.”
She drove home, occasionally eyeing the bag. She and the Captain were going to have a good night. It began to mist, and she was glad.
“When love flies it is remembered not as love but as something else. Blessed are the uneducated, who forget it entirely, and are never conscious of folly or pruriency in the past, of long aimless conversations.”
— from Maurice, by E.M. Forester
“Maurice walked to and fro on the hallowed grass, himself noiseless, his heart glowing. The rest of him fell asleep, bit by bit, and first of all his brain, his weakest organ. His body followed, then his feet carried him upstairs to escape the dawn. But his heart had lit never to be quenched again, and one thing in him at last was real.”
— from Maurice, by E.M. Forester
I cannot say
how much a change of scenery will help me. No matter how close or how far away I’ll end up from where I don’t want to be, at least the scenery will be different. Of course I think of the inside of my father’s Wrangler, its hard, masculine comfort. I think of my great-grandmother’s house with the cellar doors’ white chipped paint and the wild yellow tulips that grew around it. Of course I think of the inside of my great-aunt’s trailer, colored with glass birds and books about feng shui, witchcraft, and lowfat cooking, and waking up on the floral print couch to a fine rain so fresh it cleanses my very cells. I think about the insides of things, about being sheltered from all that I had not known when I was last there, from all the defeat I never knew could exist in one person. And there was that statue, the “face of an angel,” as my cousin called it, sculpted to take the form of his daughter, and I think about how loving hands can caress a face so young and innocent. I wait for the sweet release of sleep in a safe place, with more anticipation than I want to allow.
“There are only two ways to be a god: through creation or murder.”
— from I Have the Right to Destroy Myself, by Young-Ha Kim
“It was distressing, it was bewildering, it was humiliating. Truth had run through my fingers. Every drop had escaped.”
— from Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own
