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. 

Not knowing

‘What are you doing here?’

‘I….’  ‘I’m sorry.’

‘I know.’

‘Can you forgive me?’

‘No.’ ‘I have nothing to forgive you for.’  ‘How could I blame you for not knowing you loved me?’

‘I didn’t know.’   ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘Some things you just have to know.’  ‘and you didn’t.’   ‘or you did, and you were scared by what you knew.’  ‘Which would be worse actually’

‘Why would that be worse?’

‘Because if you didn’t know that you’re supposed to be scared. That there is always fear…’ ‘If you didn’t know that then you didn’t know anything about love’   ‘maybe not anything, but definitely you would not know enough.’

She blinked, hard and slow. Her hair worn as it had always been. Center-parted and unbraided, long sheets of brown. Her hands too as always they had had been – long and slender, nervously held in front. She’s holding a letter in an envelope. One of them is trying not to cry.

The balcony and the sound of pattering flip-flopped feet. A sun dress and his half drank tumbler. There music in the background. Fleming street is alive but they're imagining other places. Like a rising tide the people gather at Mallory Square but they’re staying alone together in the hammock.

The door is locked and she is sobbing in the bathroom. He is banging on the door. He doesn’t want in, its all just dramatic gestures at this point. He can’t remember if he realized in real time that loss can only be understood in terms of other loss and that he hadn’t lost enough yet to understand what she knows or if he projected that realization later into the memory. Some part of the self always wants to make sense of scenes.

He makes her dance. And she does. These moments she thinks are ever too fleeting. Three minutes and eleven seconds, it doesn’t help to try and move the needle back. The record rolls on and the joy recedes as suddenly as it came crashing in. There’s footsteps in the snow and its always darker sooner than she’d like. After she flexes her unsocked feet on the cold floor and he sits back down.

He hadn’t seen her approach. If it wasn’t the first day of spring, it was no more than the second. All the same people who had spent the previous months huddled inside behind the thick glass doors and walls of the bar had replicated their positions, their stances, their company on the patio. He was there with strangers, familiar but not friends, leaning in the strange comfort of half a hundred unrelated conversations.

It was not the experience he had envisioned. It was not a bound, a racing heart, an embrace.

Fall was always my Spring

Between two cold buildings- knees to her chest with her back propped against the cool of the bricks, she was sitting in the sliver of the sunlight.
There was the lighthearted chorus of foot traffic some where off on the sidewalk. The sound of it she found soothing, and there in the light when she should have been at her desk, she felt like a thief and was happy.

‘hey’, said some newly arrived boy, hands in pockets and with an untucked shirt and hair more raked than combed. She echoed his greeting, trying to hide her annoyance. Even when she wanted to be she couldn’t make herself be rude.

‘you want a cigarette?’ he stuck a hand forward and a box and she noticed the sleeves of his shirt were too short for his arms. She was not prone to pettiness but unwilling to criticize herself for simply being attentive, and after all it was he who interjected himself into her late afternoon burglary.

She showed him the one she had in her left hand. She smoked it less than she held it, it was more than her excuse to be out there, it was a tether that connected her to a world beyond the incessant clattering of keys and the unbearable droning on of the feigned drama of the office space. He awkwardly chuckled. She wanted to close her eyes but she had learned not to close her eyes in front of strangers.

‘Was your dad in the army or something?’ he was leaning now, upright, he looked like an upturned raked set against a wall. She thought of her father, his careless hair and his rumbling laughter, the stains on his fingers. She imagined him sitting in a room littered with books. This wasn’t a memory, it was the projection of the idea of him. She did not know the room, or even him in that scene. It was less of what was and more of what should of have been. She smiled to herself when she thought that in a way he had been a soldier, fighting the most important of wars. That that war might have even consumed him in time but had not prevented him from spending that afternoon on the floor of her bedroom listening to ‘August and Everything After’.

Looking somewhere off into the sunlight, ever narrowing, she answer through her smile with a soft head shake, ‘no’.

‘oh, well I really dig your look’. He stammered out, ‘the combat boots and the sundress is cool.’ She decided that this was either his first attempt to talk to a girl ever or the most awkward approach she’d ever seen. She peered at him, dressed as he was she wouldn’t have been able to tell if he was 18 or 30. His face told the story, and made the whole scene rather unforgivable.

She wished she could have told him to shut up. To sit down. That he could share her sunlight if he’d just be quiet. She wasn’t here after all for the building of cathedrals, she was here to steal for herself that thing that is never given only taken.

She could hear the gears in his head churning towards another approach. She killed the back half of her cigarette and drew herself up. There was a stiffness in her hips and she allowed herself to let her frustration to slide away, they told the truth that she had been sitting there longer than she thought.

‘Thanks, I gotta go back to work.’

‘Oh, okay. See you around.’ They were two feet apart and he waved. But did not realize that she walked towards the light not back to the door with the rock between it and the jam.

The right she took out of the alley put her onto the side walk, bathed in sun, and heading away. It was almost five anyway. The last half hour of work was only ever two groups of people forecasting their weekends – children soccer games or black outs- trying to convince the other party of the wonders of the lives the lead. She knew more times than not, each desperately wanted the others’.

She walked a few blocks, she didn’t have a destination. But when she passed the little pub with the two boys playing guitars she stopped. Through the open street side windows she could hear them, they weren’t any good but there was something about how they threw themselves into the music that made her so happy. She sat a table for two, ordered a beer, listened to them try to win over the five other patrons by virtue of their unabashed enthusiasm.

They played through two beers. When they announced they were taking a break she and some sixty year old drunk clapped. She thought the other patrons looked relieved. Without the music she lost focus and found herself staring at the golden light prisming through her half empty pint glass.

She didn’t see him approach, the left half of the duo. She looked up and his face was fixed with a pirate’s smile, and his unruly dark brown hair hung to his shoulders. There was an outlined black sparrow on his forearm and under it some tattooed words she couldn’t make out.

‘What did you think?’ he asked.

‘I’m not really sure how to describe it,’ she grinned and he took the bait.

‘Just give it a shot.’

‘Sisyphus learning guitar?’ she suggested and the laugh that came out of him could have warmed a whole home. His beer showed up, and he asked, ‘Mind if I stay?’

‘Only if you leave me alone.’ She didn’t know how that came out, or from where the inflection in her voice came, or how she knew he would understand.

‘I promise.’

And the sat the in inexplicable happiness that is the October sunlight, silent drinking their beers, while the bar slowly began to fill.  

The Last Great Washington State

I sat in my car and considered memories of her.

Maybe it was something in the way the clouds came in. Quiet looming, grey with no hint of ominousness, or the starkness of the bare branches. Or maybe it was the words. Or maybe it had just been enough time.

It was possible still to pull a few back, those spring scenes. But there did not seem to be a story left in them, just fragmented stand still frames. Standing naked in the kitchen passing the glass of water back and forth. Kissing at the capitol heights metro station gates, stealing seconds before bolting through the turnstiles to catch the last silver line. Somewhere drifting between those memories, through space not in some sort of chronological configuring she is sitting in the grass with a baby. The baby is real, the patchwork red and white blanket may or may not be. I can see you there -happy- you look up and catch me looking. We both smile. What day that was or even who the child was I can’t access. That memory is bookended by the smack of a thrown baseball against leather and us cursing at each other through an open passenger side window.

There are illuminated caves and cold hands and those inexplicable western Virginia towns, rotting away faster than the wood that held them up. Orangutans behind the glass, your half-finished paintings, a bed that wasn’t large enough, fever, and hand prints on the glass of the sliding glass doors. Sprinkled in between them are little echoing insults, thrown like darts-stinging like tacks, honed and purposeful that still prick- real as they might feel, I’m completely unsure when they existed or if they existed at all.

I can slide into those fabrications with ease, though the details always evade me. I never can remember why we are fighting. I wonder if that is self-preservation or if perhaps, by some sort of divine grace, in the end -only the things that really matter are remembered. After the tears and the yelling, the swelling brown warm feeling of righteous indignation, the only thing I remember with certainty of that day or days or that spring or of the assortion of grey shirts you wore, is that smile when you caught me looking at you with the baby, and knew what I knew in that moment.

I have to pluck at those memories, pull them like single threads, and each time I do they’re fainter.
They won’t last, they never do, they are being pulled back into dark waters- shell by shell.

The individuality of each one of those memories was collapsing, falling into, their final phase – where all that was or was not was only a single scene. Less factual and more true than any real memory, the room is grey scale- but that isn’t fabrication, that was the streetlight and the vertical blinds and the cool three am air and the exhaustion. There is the song. The one I asked you to listen to with me. The realness of any other thing would be impossible to tell, where was my head, against the flat of her stomach, or buried into back of her neck. Perhaps the holding of my own hands was surely real, clasped some way around her, and too the lonely ironing board. I can see those long legs and I can recall each evoked gasp and to the shimmering sound of her laughing. Where that spring day smile will one day fit I cannot yet guess. I suspect like everything else the acute features of your smile will fade and what will remain instead will be intangible and resolute, how the shared thing felt.

I imagine one day I will see her again and hope that she will greet me with a different smile- that sweet nostalgic one that we all carry, the one that escapes from us without reservation despite all the reasons we might have to keep it fettered. By then there will likely only be the grey room and her skin and those sounds and the feeling. I wonder if we will speak, briefly, and marvel at all of it all- strum the connecting fiber between us and listen to its particular sound. Perhaps we do or don’t but either way I know I will ask her- out of a need for clarity or perhaps out of longing or confusion or desire, ‘How long did it even last?’

And you will answer, ‘Six minutes and twenty seconds’

Plouc

Rain stopped to make sure her mother was not floating face first in the above ground pool located between her family’s catty-corner single wide trailers. She was not. She was safely passed out on her back, sunglasses askew, head lodged against the mildly rusting metal step stairs. Even unconscious somehow her hand, like a claw, managed to hold onto the mostly vanquished vodka bottle, its label adrift somewhere in the water. Rain would have been disgusted if she hadn’t been so hot. ‘Plouc’ she spat at her and stomped her way across the sunbeaten grass.

She cut her way through the backyard, a broken section in the chain link fence would allow her to slip through towards mainstreet without walking all the way around the block. Her step father was setting up his cock fighting ring, standing room only and she could hear her step mother reciting her scenes from her favourite movie ‘Miss Congeniality’. The pool, her menagerie of parental figures, her seven degenerate siblings, the ferrets- Muffins and Puffins, the whole damned thing made her sick.

She kicked over two plastic flamingos.

She wished she had socks. Her feet were slick inside of her brother’s combat boots. She’d managed to render them wearable by tying the laces around her calves constrictively tight- otherwise the size or two difference would have made them impossible to wear. Still her feet sounded strange on the cement of the sidewalk but it would have been impossible to go barefoot, a common approach for all of the Ban Jekk clan.

She wanted to go to the library- sit in the air conditioning and thumb through the books. She wished she had remembered how hot it could get before she had gone and got herself excommunicated from the premises. She said the word ‘excommunicated’ out loud to herself. She hadn’t know what the word had meant when Beverly, the dumpy elderly lady who ran the library, had said it to her. But Rain was no fool, she knew when someone was being smug with her. She hadn’t known what the word meant then but she understood it well enough to give old Beverly the bird. Rain didn’t see what the big deal was. So what if she had taken to writing alternate endings in all the romance novels she checked out. She thought all the stories improved by her additions- though admittedly there was never much variation- she always made sure everyone died in the end.

The next most temperate place to sit was the Cone of Cool. A mysteriously resilient ice cream parlor shop in a dilapidated building at the far end of the very short main street. The stupid bells on the door rang as Rain opened it. Four faces turned to her. Rain smiled sweetly. Her heart was black with death. Being the only person in her family who hadn’t broken their nose Rain was, according to most people, rather pretty and she, having almost always had nothing, had learned that often enough a smile would get her what she needed. She found there to be no paradox or hypocrisy in her winning smile and the pulsating knot of wrath and loathing she felt for basically everyone she met. It seemed so natural to greet people and casually imagine their demise in a horrific inexplicable train accident or being struck by a part of falling airplane debris while walking the street talking about the weather.

And then, as if the heavens had opened up and all the shit in the history of eternity had just poured out of the opening, she saw Mary Thompson.
Mary with her perfect blue eyes.
Mary with the gold chain that had her name ‘Mary’ on it as if everyone in the stupid one stop light town did not know who she was.
Mary with her ridiculous flitting bird laugh.
Mary with that unforgivable yellow sundress.

Rain’s eyes narrowed. By the time she snapped to Mary was yelling. The ice cream boy attempting to console her. Mr. Jenkins, the town drunk- which in this town was saying something- was restraining Rain. Rain had a plastic spoon in her hand. Mary Thompson had a red dot, a bruise of the skin on the side of her neck. Rain realized she had just stabbed Mary with the back end of a plastic spoon.

Rain knew then in a flash of divine revelation unlike anything she had read in the stupid books in the library what she wanted to do with her life. Previously she had been convinced that she would become a world-famous cupcake chef but she knew beyond a doubt in that moment that she was meant to be an assassin, murder for hire. She admitted to herself that her first attempted murder had not been performed well, but then again it was only her first attempt.

Rain relaxed, went slack. She was suddenly sad about the idea of having to give up her cupcake dreams but it then occurred to her if she applied her self she might be able to do both, she was certain all for pay murderers needed a cover story. She had been ignoring the rabble of noise, when Mr. Jenkins’ question- the one he had asked for the third consecutive time- got through to her, ‘Jesus girl, why did you stab her with a plastic spoon?’ His voice was all confusion and incredulity.

Rain shrugged.
‘ ‘Cause it was all I had.’