In the mountains

 He thought perhaps, somewhere east of Limon, the mountains had been a mistake.

A flatter more consistent landscape might have provided a consistency, the peaks and valleys they had experienced in those two days had been extreme. In his youth she might have brought him to anger or frustration, or anger from his frustration but mostly he felt confused, and while not old he was old enough not to mix his emotions. At seventy miles per hour the rattling, incessant noise of his doubts and worries and fears, and the newly added confusion, merged into a hum that felt like peace- on the highway is the only place that ever happened. The sun went down in his rearview mirror, he pressed back on his steering wheel to restart the song.

He had seen mountains before, and she had even seen these mountains before- yet as the grey premonition of rain snaked through the valley- they stared together at them as if they had not, his arm around her waist, and her comfortably impressed against his torso. The tree line went only so far and then almost uniformly fell back, farther still stretched pristine grass till it too submitted to the stone that carried on. Hidden in cuts and topping the mountain, snow- even in summer. He didn’t know what they were looking at, or for, or even doing. He thought perhaps it was only that they were doing it together. He shivered, she mocked him in an almost loving way. They turned to face each other and looked, as they often did, as if there was something about the other they suspected but could not see.

She was crying, and while he was not so dense as to know who was the cause he could not specifically identify the reason. He tried to bridge or fill or quiet the gulf between them by reaching over to her, pulling her in. For a moment, maybe two, she laid there against his chest and wept and then suddenly, as if she realized where she was, she was a fury. Pushing away with legs and arms and a muddled voice of anger and sadness he could make no sense of. After she finished crying, he rose, turned on the ceiling fan and returned to bed.

The elevation troubled him and the hot tub did not help, and the drink he was so accustomed, the gin burned. Between the trees outside their cabin repose the moon was full and had silenced their conversation. She was bare and silver. She caught him looking at her more than once but she was more interested in the moment. Occasionally she asked him questions, which he answered, and for reasons she couldn’t explain she believed none of. Not that she didn’t believe him, though she didn’t, but that the answers were so foreign to her. ‘How are you not happy right now, here, in this place?’ He heard the question. And answered it, though he knew enough of questions to know the heart of this question was the implied element omitted, ‘I’m not happy anywhere.’

There was no regulating the fire. The living room was either cold or almost unbearable warm. Unrelated their skin steamed and they laid, exhausted apart from each other, but sharing that closeness that can transcend distance, and can bind. The wood popped, hissed, underneath it death, in charring chunks, pulsed with the slightest of sounds, severed limbs born again in warmth. Her voice, oddly sleepy and clear, cut through, unprompted ‘I would have your children.’

On the decent, the trail head was easier, wider and without fear of running out, he drank more from his water pack. She was ahead, at least ten decent strides, and the other couples that passed them probably wouldn’t have known they had been to the apex together. He could not remember the question she asked, but he remember he had not lied, nor been crude or cruel or any of the other things that had in other lives, gotten him into trouble. She stopped, her eyes hard, and he caught up. ‘I don’t understand you, I don’t understand who you are.’ He was tired, his ankles were sore and swollen, his long hair, tied and up, seemed to pull at his being and he longed for some place, if for but a moment where his feet did not make a crushing, horrible sound. ‘You know who I am, you just don't like it'.

Most of the important things aren’t said in epic moments. Years ago when she had told him that she loved him, over the phone, in a fit of exhaustion and fear, he had noticed, remembered and never brought it up again. Standing outsider her townhome, the windows lit and the faint rumbling sound of the lone below tumbling down to the street side, there were so many things he was aware of. Hopes. Frustration. Dreams and fears and beliefs. A story that wasn’t meant to be but was supposed to make sense. The continual manifestation of their inability to communicate, though they almost never stopped speaking. The madness of her ‘this isn’t how i wanted this to go’ which they both heard and knew as ‘I don’t want you to leave.’

Mountains, though massive and omnipresent, are uncertain things. The weather, the look, the unpredictable caps of snow. What she wanted, what everyone wants- he suspected - at some point in life is certainty. Passing through the windmills of Nebraska, perhaps that’s all it was ever all about.

Debridement

Flaxen. The light through the horizontal blinds, casting out and over the hardwood floors not recently loved. The emptiness of the new apartment, did not feel so and in fact the she left the living room in that state for some handful of days, it did not compel, as it ought, her to adorn. She filled it, the apartment, not the aborted living room, in the only way she knew how, with the pattering of unshoed feet and clicks and pops of the vinyls she circled through.

Argentate. Somewhere beyond the dune, behind the collapse of twilight, there were waves crashing. It was not as she would have had it, backwards even. But it was summer rockaway, and as always she felt she took what fate or circumstance gave her. So it was his heavy head and the wild locks of his brown hair in her lap. They had seem so glamorous to her, those strands and his sleepy disinterested eyes, before she had left and then returned. His and her twenty years. He batted slow drunken eyes and asked her for answers he didn’t listen to. She consoled her disappointed, another in the long train of such, with the pleasure of hearing another voice and the half finished short necked bottle of white wine gone warm too long ago.

Titian. The hazy, buzzing, croon of the Edison bulbs. There was music running amuck, around the ankles of the party. Under the voices, popping up between the breaks in laughter, lingering in the skunkish lingering fog. Like so many others, peoples-times-places, she had kicked off her sandals and drifted over the terrain, enjoying the surprising unexpected experience of her sole when it drifted from one thing to the next, brick - plank - crunching grass. It was wednesday and she felt, in some resonating secretive place underneath her heart and between her lungs that they might just live forever.

Aegean. The juniper scraped at her legs, even through the length of her dress. Her hands trailed, caressed and loved the trunks of each passed by tree, that shot like defiant monoliths towards the cold misty sky. The forrest broke. The detritus of the californian beach, despite the crashing waves in that hidden little bay, the whole space was so quiet. That person, as she walked towards the sea, ‘i don’t know if you know, but it is so cold’. She pulled the lengths of her dress to her thighs like some suicidal victorian valiant and strode out into the water. The clawing was real and welcomed, the sky and sea became one and the noise of the emptiness overtook her and in that space to herself she said, ‘i know, god do I know.’

infinite you, infinite me

 There has been clamoring amongst the scientists of the world that this universe is not the only universe, that there are as few as eleven but most likely an infinite amount of universes. This is not unlike the doors to the Borges' House of Asterion which number exactly seven and are also infinite. 

The wind was blowing yesterday and pulled, almost plucked, the flowers from the trees and in the afternoon light I was thinking of the infinite yous. And then of course, as I will always do, the infinite mes.

There is a universe where we do not meet. There is a universe where you do not leave the other boy from that other school. There is a universe where you do leave him but i lose the bet at the bowling alley. And another where you do, and i do, and we do, and it doesn't matter.  There are universes where our myriad of youthful conflicts result in a silence that follows us the rest of our lives. The universes of our pasts are mostly amusing and do not vex me. Like waves on the ocean the incongruent moments like vanishing white crests succumb to the totality of the sea, so to do all the possible not yous and not mes seem overwhelmed and insignificant in the face the inevitable us.

The universes of the now, or recently now, and those universes of the future are more perplexing to me. For they are not universes of just you and me. They are universes also of him. There are universes where you leave him and that conversation we had on the phone in the parking lot in Denver goes a very different way. There are universes where he knows everything. There are universes where he and i are friends. There are universes where he understands and others where he endures. There are endless universes where we fight, and die at each other's hands. There must be at least one universe where he and I share you, not begrudgingly but in a manner so contented that it is almost impossible to imagine.

These universes, wild as they would be to say aloud, are still universes grounded in fundamental realities of time and space. But i am sure there are universes where all the rules are different- some wonderous and some horrific. i believe there is a universe where there are no colours and our grey scale interactions unfold without end, we tumble from bed to floor, to tiled floor, through doors unto new beds, and again unto new floors, forever. It is an endless process of dragging finger nails and teeth markings and pulled hair. It is a universe made only of the singular memory of one specific hotel room that goes on and on forever. 

There are infinite universes where the baby lives. And i can't think of those universes for the sadness of knowing the babies that you won't have because of it.

Sometimes the universes of you calm me and other times they wreck me to the core. i do not know if i am happy or sad that it is this universe that I live in, the one where You are always to the west, forever on the horizon like the nearly setted sun.