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.’

Throwing darts

she was carrying around the double tequila, with the wheels, like a weapon.
somewhere after the 3rd drink she began to open up, still there was something difficult about reading her. she oscillated between a revelry of brashness and a quiet occlusion. he didn't think though that she was feigning, posturing as mysterious, but that she kept both hers inside of her, bottled ghosts - each one that would press against the glass for a period before the other would push its way forward.
in the background some standard dive bar song was playing, he could hear it, vaguely like smoke in the background- but in his head he heard different music.
his throws were poor. she made sure to tell him about it. it was then this turn to lean, into the frame of the darkened window and watch her. he liked those few seconds where she wasn't watching him watch her. standing there eyeing the board she wasn't able to reflect his questions or divert the conversation. she threw as was never advised- every part of her moving. the dart that skidded across the floor went unmentioned when she struck the bullseye, she turned to him immediately- her eyes flashing, each tight curl of her heritage gleaming, every inch of her a victor- dropped her voice low and said only, 'suck a dick.'
beaming in her profanity she was, he thought so definitively, beautiful.
he laughed and there she was again, all contrasts. delicate shoulders that held up a viciously competitive spirit. she took back up her glass and held it with a grace that belied the words that had come out of her mouth.
and that music only he could seem to hear hadn't stopped. and despite all the familiarity of the space and the feeling, he knew he had never exactly been here before. he was supposed to say something, but got lost in the moment, as if he life was occurring somewhere out infront of him just where he might reach it, instead of all around him. she paused, and there- in an unexpected moment, bereft of words- instead build on some strange scaffolding of unsaids he realized she liked him.
the math of time came apart. the dozen of consecutive mondays, and all the monotone moments that had begun to lay upon each other over and over like pieces of discount printer paper seemed to become suddenly unimportant.
everything everywhere was always the same, he knew it in his bones, he had felt it for days and weeks on end. he was right. and he was wrong.
for of all the times he had been in this bar, and all the moments that had run into each other without end, he had simply never been there, or had a moment, with her.

and adeline

there was something so well honed about richard's indifference that it failed to ever seem as such, he appeared more like the conscious dismissive embodiment of some indignant aesthetic. it wasn't just the miskempt hair, or the wildishly out of style purple shirt- buttoned two holes short of what seemed even remotely reasonable-, or the eclectic arrangement of mismatching jewelry. no, it was the way he sat, something in his pose - so disinterested in defending himself- that was the root of the ambivalence that exuded from richard.
And as expected as it all was, they were brothers after all, thomas thought the dark tips of his fingers a bit excessive.
Thomas sat at the small two person table, balanced himself in the chair that was not nearly as stable as it had appeared upon his entering, and opened with that.
'ink stained fingers?'
Richard shrugged, seemed to consider the two or three defeated cigarettes in the ash tray.
'oh, have you defended into apathy? that's new.' thomas admitted.
there was already run and ice thrown into the cups in front of them, not particularly good in quality, but the day was one of those rare ones- the temperature lingering just where the body remained on the cusp of sweating- and perfect for rum, whatever the pedigree. too few these days, thomas thought to himself.
'apathy? no. not apathy, I have simply passed through caring. to what comes next'. answered richard.
'how does that work?' thomas said back, creeking his neck to spot the waitress and signal for two more.
richard leaned forward, elbows to the table and looked at him, ludicrous purple cuffs limping down to the hinge of his arms, in that quiet intense way richard seemed to look at every damn thing.
'its like swimming, or more like swimming while you dive,' he began to explain, the broke his gave to look off at something over thomas's shoulder, ' as you dive'
'and swim' thomas broke in, earning him a glare.
'yes, yes and swim, you know the pressure increases the deeper you go, yes?' the drinks arrived and thomas shook his head in confirmation, 'there comes a point where the pressure increases such that it becomes impractical to describe one's self as diving, ' richard quickly inserted 'or swimming'  in order to prevent thomas's playful contribution, 'because after a particular depth the primary thing are doing at that point can't be accurately described as swimming or diving, even if you are doing those two things, for primarily you are being crushed. that, you see, is where i am. having passed through to the point where i can't be called caring, anymore than the aforementioned diver could be described as swimming, the more accurate description of my state would be that I am being crushed. crushed by all my caring.'
thomas applied his most serious tone. 'I do see. Oh, i was quite mistaken indeed, this isn't apathy at all. its melodrama'.
'well we both know thats not new,' richard responded with a dramatic hand flourish and a conceding retreat, reclining back in his chair. thomas met richard's eyes and richard flashed him one of those rare smiles, sweet and new, like a smile that hadn't seen light in some while. he almost didn't notice what the dust that seemed to break away from it, from its lack of use, he so enjoyed the novelty of its compete genuineness.
'wait. have you ever been diving?' thomas asked without stopping to think.
'no, of course not, the sea- though lovely- terrifies me of course, as it would any sane person. but i find a theoretical knowledge of being crushed in its depths functional enough for my own purposes.'
'of course you do.' thomas hid his bemused smile behind his cup. 'so you're being crushed.' richard grunted 'by the emotions, all of them.'
'yes'
'and adeline?'
richard pulled his hands through his hair and seemed to struggle without how to answer.
'she unwell.' eventually he answered.
'unwell?'
'unhappy.'
'why is that?'
'me'
'oh and what about you is making her unwell?' thomas corrected himself 'unhappy?'
'my lack of caring'
Thomas looked at him, there was no part of richard that seemed at all bothered by the contradiction of his comments. richard was never in a state of hypocrisy or insensibility. and for a moment thomas really did admire him, that ability to live his life moment to moment by a physics and reason all his own. oblivious or disinterred int he rules and standards of normalcy that seemed to force everyone else to live in some manageable way.
'why don't you care?'
'no one knows their own heart less than i know mine,' richard answered to say he didn't know.
'and how much of this do you think she will take?'
'oh she will never give up.'
'why do you think that?' thomas inquired, not at all incredulous at the statement.
'because adeline is an optimist.'
'and you are a pessimist?'
'pessimist? me? god no.' he scoffed, then clarified, ' i am a romantic.'
'what is the difference between a romantic and an optimist? seems to me that being a romantic would necessitate a good bit of optimism.'
richard seemed to stare deeply into thomas, for what felt like a long period of time, but thomas knew intrinsically was but a moment.
'yes, it would seem that way, but at they are core they are different, and so produce very different outlooks. adeline will never give up, because she is an optimist, and she believes that love can last forever. but i am a romantic, and if a romantic knows anything, they know this one thing: that every beautiful thing eventually dies."

Sculpture Garden

Caitlin tasted like smoke.

She had reservations, he could tell in her careful demeanor, in the quiet nervous way in which she constantly attended to the task of pushing her read hair behind her ears. So they talked slowly, like two people circling each other. Some questions found answers, others were deftly parried. They sat for some time like that, talking across some seemingly unbreachable gap, on the long bar, the lights dimmed and the rain picked up.

The conversation languished and with his hand on the small of her back, they exited one bar for another. He was a stranger not only to her, but here so she picked. And as they walked in silence, her smoking, and him staring down the street he assumed led to their intended destination he thought on how similar this particular part of broad street was to so many other places he had once lived.

Caitlin tasted like smoke.

The bar she picked was her own. He could tell, he remembered very acutely that wonderful feeling of having a place one felt comfortable. They sat and she order and they played one four twenty four. He feigned dismay as she won nearly every turn, but every dollar he turned over to her he though was well spent, her laughter would tumble out of her.

It was a beautiful flitting thing, a laugh that pirouetted with the joy of little girl. Her eyes were so light they were nearly clear, and the dress she had chosen was dark, over the knee, and the prettiest she owned. He could tell.

Caitlin tasted like smoke.

A band was setting up. She asked him a question and choked down her room temperature shot of gin- rule of the house, the consequence of an errant die. He told her about this boy he had seen in birmingham in a strip mall bar. He wasn't much to look at thin with shaggy blonde hair, and he assended the makeshift stage shirtless he couldn't have been much older than eighteen. But the sound that came from the guitar for the next twenty five minutes he would never forget. The boy played with a frantic youthful energy, building a cathedral of sound moment by moment.

She said that the best things in life were like that, surprises in ordinary places.

Caitlin tasted like smoke.

This bars band began, and he thought while it was not like that night in alabama, it was still quite something. The sound of the four of them and the way the girl wailed filled all the empty spaces.

Instincts take over in small places full of sound. The crowded swayed in their silence, and when a passerby nudged her without thought he braced her.

He thought then he had forgotten, or almost forgotten, how soft girls were. He maneuvered her on to the stool, her skin so pale had taken on a drunken glow. There nose to nose they lingered.

The sound stop and the room gave up the ghost. Unfettered what was once whole drifted apart and the choir of individual conversations rose and their moment dissipated.

Caitlin tasted like smoke.

He walked her to her apartment, a block and a half from the bar. The kiss seemed conceived in e that lingering moment nose to nose even if it was born on her porch. And what followed was mostly the inertia of the alcohol. But there in the yellow haze of the exterior lights, he heard a little lustful gasp. And as only a sound can do he remembered what he had not be able to feel for months.

A timid invitation and his less than graceful decline.

Walking he lost himself again, in a memory. He couldn't remember how many times he done it. Made those sounds on an empty sidewalk. It seemed all great repetition: his footsteps, the blocks, the nights, the particular feeling of walking home alone. The only thing he found that could break that terrible feeling were was clinging to a little truth.

And as all the particular drifted into commonalities he did his best to remember what couldn't be ignored.

Nevada

She thought highway 80 was a dream; sliding through the cool green valley with ease before they ascended. He was comfortable with the quiet, and she paid him little attention in those moments gawking without reservation at the trees, each a defiant spear thrust into the rocks. The engine churned under the weight of his foot, pushing his well traveled pickup truck up the cutbacks. And though at first she started to write in her little notebook of disconnected thoughts, it sat there opened and unmarked for some time. While they had only been in the vehicle for a short time there were things she felt confidence in; that he drove in the lanes closest to the guard rails so that she could enjoy the view, that lack of music was a shared opinion, that his chuckles at her childish excitement at the trains they passed as without judgment.

It was not always complete silence, they would go through spurts where they would talk vigorously, each waiting for the pause that followed the end of a sentence so that the other could begin. And then the conversation would conclude, or collapse, each of them almost having to catch their breath. In the decent down towards Reno, she took some time, discreetly to take him in. Measuring him as he adjusted in his chair, noting the particular way in which he seemed to grip the wheel with disinterest. His hair and beard were a mess, and she suspected that a look that was once of feigned in-deference had tumbled over into actual disinterest.

He was strange to her and at times all too familiar, as if by some particular angle of the fall sun's light some how the boy she had known all those years ago would be illuminated, only to vanish as they slid behind a mountain. She was no novice with boys though, she had known them almost all her life.

'You're pretty you know,' she began while staring out the window, 'but you would be a hard boy to love.'' In the window she saw him raise and eyebrow, throw her a sideways glance, a look that seemed well practiced. Which was fine she thought, girls honed an arsenal of looks by middle school, it seemed only egalitarian that boys should put some effort into such things. Boys, she was sure, were mostly lazy.

'Am I now?'

'Well, under that beard. And maybe with some even halfhearted maintenance to that hair and yes I feel very confident. Pretty.' His laugh that followed made her smile, it was low and rumbling, as if it began somewhere deep within him, and that it couldnt be contained.

'That's not the part I was inquiring about.'

'You weren't specific.'

'Ah.' he shook his head, then quietly laughed to himself, 'I'm out of practice at banter'.

'You'll pick it back up,' She shrugged nonchalantly, one of her practiced looks.

'So?'

Suddenly, she didn't want to tell him. She wasn't sure if it was because she was sure he knew and so there was no point in telling him, or because he didn't know and she was afraid to hurt him. He waited though, without asking again for a few minutes. She considered the flat parade of browns that approached them, sun hammered sand as far as her eyes could see.

'You have this look about you as if you always want to be somewhere else. And I don't know how many women could spend their lives with you always having that look.' He didn't flinch but he didn't respond, at least not at first.

'It's not just a look.'

'I know.' Quietly, and then more quiet. A moment, a pause, the bizarre blur that is speeding through downtown Reno. 'Why do you think that is?'

'Deep down,' he began, then paused, and with a smirk resumed, 'I think I'm a pirate.'

She couldn't contain her smile, but she turned half away to conceal it. “A pirate? Where's your treasure?'

He seemed reflective for but a moment, then admitted, 'No treasure.'

'A pirate with no treasure, seems a curious thing. What do you have?'

He responded without consideration, ' A few scars and a few stories.'

'No treasure. Just scars and stories. Sounds like a pirate's life to me' and without missing a beat he said 'Yo Ho'. She giggled incessantly.

They cut south nevada as the day drew to a close. In those last minutes she watched, not wistfully, at the sunset, concealed behind the mountains they had earlier made their way through. She had hoped for an explosion of orange and pink but was surprised by the indescribable purple she found. It was indescribable, she made many efforts in her notebook from the rock she sat upon. He had stopped, without asking, to let her watch it. He was skipping rocks, poorly, in the salt lake they had found while she watched her failed sunset.

Hours later she stood in a convenience store bathroom, running hot water over her hands. She hadn't thought to bring gloves. In the mirror she saw someone she knew completely, but often didn't recognize. She never felt old. Never. But sometimes in the mirror she would see this person that looked old. Not too old, she wasn't yet even 40. Just older than she remembered being. Boys would marvel at her. The energy of her laugh and the light in her eyes. She had good skin from the old country and good taste from her mother. But sometimes, just sometimes she thought she looked old.

She wondered if anyone every could truly see themselves. He couldn't see him self. He could know himself but she knew he couldn't see himself. Perhaps she too suffered the same plight, perhaps all people did. She thought she might ask him about herself, then decided not to do so. That was silly and perhaps even desperate. She was willing to admit that she could be prone to silliness but she was resolved never to be desperate.

He hadn't even started the car yet when he asked her, turning to face her, what was wrong.

'Sometimes I hate myself.' She said more honestly than she wanted.

He looked at her, then out at something through the buzz of the overheard halogen lights. Shrugged. 'Anyone who doesn't hate themselves a little, doesn't know themselves that well.'

She thought that was probably true. But before she could respond he followed. 'But anyone who doesn't love themselves, doesn't know themselves at all.' She thought on that while he turned the engine over. It was strange collection of seemingly necessary sounds, the engine's rattle, the click of his seat belt, and the hiss of his coca-cola bottle.

'Oh I bought you these.' She felt them land in her lap, two little purple mittens, with yellow and brown stripes.

She held them up, 'They're hideous.'

'I know, I picked them out for that reason.'

'I love them.' she admitted gleefully.

'I know.' He turned left out into the darkness and they drove on.

Overlap

The days were growing longer.  I was standing in my yard, or my parents yard, the grass was coming back to life- slowly, slower than I remembered it doing so when I was younger. But back then my father willed the lawn to life, with the weight of his frustrated brows, as if the only thing that could calm his smouldering winter wrath was the Gregorian mechanical churn of the lawnmower. In his absence the winter lingered, and while my brother’s dog's gingerly steps crunched the brown grass, I pretended I could not hear the voice coming from the upstairs porch, clinging copper strands of her hair were still wound around my fingers.
A pictures comes in the mail, the envelope its corners, bruised and bent. In it Madeline is crowned in chaotic curls of wispy blonde hair. I marvel at how grown she is, two maybe three, and the glean of her dark brown eyes, like lacquered disks. They look just like her mother’s. Somewhere over the border I know they’re curled up in their den, laying amongst seemingly endless wave like layers of blankets, taking in the fire, or perhaps reading a book. In place of memories I imagine, their exchanges, the difference in the size of their hands, and their ever growing bond.
Joe’s hands, wide at the knuckled, the lengths narrow. He’s flexing them over and over as if he could wring out whatever was within them. I’ve got my collar popped, and am leaning against the railing of the dock. Without the sun, the wind is almost nonexistent. Cigars, the warm ends glowing. He is staring off at something in the dark, and while I ask questions that skirt every obvious issue, I try to decide what on the horizon holds him, what horizon he could possibly see.
There is no sense that can be made of these things, these times. Every waking moment is the same, completely doused in an unarrangable assortion of  unique specifics. The overlap of people and places doesn’t help, I can not keep an order to it. Sometimes it feels like I am doing the same things over and over again, but as time goes on I can’t tell if that’s just the feel, or the way it is. The line between those things ceases to be clear.
A memory of Isabel at the door, she’s leaning into the door frame.  A disheveled orange skirt clings to her round hips. Her hair, black like summer pitch, is up, and there’s a look on her face, but what it means, out of context of the things that happened before and will happen after it, I cannot tell . I don’t know if she is coming or leaving. The only consolation I have about the confusion is that in the end it doesn't matter, it’s a memory and it’s always fading a little, bit by bit.
In the brown chair across from me my brother packs a bowl. Underneath the months of his beard I can still see his little boy smile, I can see the shadow of the person who used to cross himself every time he passed road kill. He’s has caught me off guard, having shouldered off the hood of his addiction, his guise shimmers and I know him again, know him not as he is, but as he was. I feel guilty in that moment as he makes a joke, an old reference, and his laughter shakes the walls. I slip, and laugh myself too.
Kim’s back arches, and she shudders. She’s grey, cast in the streetlight that cuts through the horizontal blinds of her bedroom, resting on tops of shoulders and breasts and hips. The undersides of her retain her caramel characters, her eyes are dilated, and her hair pours down around her in heavy streams. She asks something but I’m not listening, I don’t ask her to repeat herself and she lets the question go. She falls down beside me, with my eyes closed I can feel her, buzzing, alive and young.
I go to sleep, I awake. I go to sleep. In their repetition they cease to be book ends for events, I am always doing both, sleeping and awake. The places change inbetween I am on the highway, the interstate, the direction I’m driving becomes as irrelevant as the state I am in. The sun comes up and goes down, and in the noise inbetween those things I am dreaming of Alyse. I am waiting for rain.
Gerrard is dead. I touch his hand, his skin is strange but familiar all the same. His fingers are slightly bent. People are leaving little trinkets in his coffin. Each token, reference to a memory I assume. A slender shiny putter, a Dan Marino rookie card, a ring on a chain both of silver. In my pocket I toy with a pewter figure, I turn it over and over. I hesitate, release it and leave without depositing it. Coffins I think are not places for unfulfilled promises.

vast

they rocked, and the bay's breeze blew in, and into that wind, he asked her though he knew how she would answer, as she always answered. she had been quiet almost all the day, and without intent of continuing that theme, of that he was sure, she pointed to the descending sun. the boat wasnt perfect for the open waters, he preferred the bays and intercoastals, but he spun the nose towards the bridge that arched the bay and pushed forward the throttle. it lunged forward as only smaller boats seemed to do. she swung her head to face him, and there he saw her first real smile of the day- that that he was sure was specifically hers- intimate and fragile, young and wonderful. she scooted up the seat towards the foremost part of the bow- her hair screamed out behind her, a long wail of brown.
he had told her more times than he could count that she was beautiful- but no matter how he assailed her- in earnest or in sincerity- those words never made it inside. he picked a line to follow, there were never any boats heading out this time of day, and in that easy path he swallowed all the things the wind would have kept him from saying anyway. that he thought her chin and neckline were perfect, and that the slim nature of her shoulders elegant even in that peruvian print bikini top. and while he assumed as all thinner girls tended to do, that she found herself lacking in so many ways- there was a long slim balance to her that he had always found so appealing. he considered resolving to try and tell her later but let those words slip from his memory, she had made her point in the score of days with her long silences.
he redirected the craft for a moment, to bounce over the diminishing wake of a retreating boat and threw out a casual wave as nautical courtesy, and then was off and under the bridge. bridges were strange things, at a distance so self evident that they hardly required much consideration. but passing underneath one the size of the sunshine skyway demanded one to wonder at how such things were made, and to marvel at the uncontainable will of men.
the churn of the engine became an endless refrain as they headed west, the individuality of every wave lost beneath the haste of their transit, the only sign of any passing time was the crawling of the sun to the horizon.
this is where he belonged, and he thought her too, chasing the sun in a voiceless joyful howl of wind, the long sunned brown of her limbs stretched out and his hands holding him upright at the center console, forever.
and then they were there, that place she always requested, and he pulled back the throttle, and watched the numbers on the depth finder shrink. he wasnt sure, though time would tell, if it was becoming or ceasing to be a key- and in a sad sudden realization he realized it didnt really matter, either way it would one day not be what it was now.
her feet hit the water, and where he would have trudged she seemed to skim out and away from the boat. a few yards away, where the depth came to the middle of her thighs, she stopped and stood. the water surrounded on all sides by transitioning sands almost ceased to move, laying flat and still like a mirror. almost exactly when she put her hands palms down onto the face of the waters the sun had reached that point where it cast its light over the sea, and the water ignited in oranges and pinks. she stood there as she preferred, silent and lovely, inflamed with the water.
it was quiet enough, that after some time he asked without having to raise his voice.
'why do you love this so much?' he knew already all the reasons he did.
she turned back to him, pushed a few uncooperative strands of hair back behind her ears. then she returned her hands to their resting place upon the sea.
with closed eyes she said, 'you know at night, when youre in a dark place, and you can really see the night sky, when you can see thousands and thousands of stars?'
'yeah'
'you know how small you feel? and maybe its scares you or saddens you or confuses you- or whatever, it just makes you feel really small?'
'yeah of course'
'here' she said, turning back to the sun, 'i feel endless, i feel vast.'

Creatures of the wind

she awoke before he did, stretched her best feline impression and eyed him over. she always was a bit envious of how men seemed to sleep so well in beds that weren't their own. his face was half buried into the crisp white pillow he had claimed, the rest of him lay about uncovered.
she hadn't meant to wake him, with the tracing finger she had run across his shoulders, but she saw him come to life, shudder slightly like the rumble of an old engine. he clawed a hand through his hair and through the hazy morning light of her bedroom she saw him look her over, and greet her good morning. god what must my hair look like, i haven't thought of it at all she thought but she smiled back at him, almost instinctively, there was just something about the rusty voice of a man in the morning she loved.
he rolled back on to his spine, stretched his toes, and didn't think to cover himself until she popped from bed and reached for an explosively colourful silk robe.  she sorted her hair, as only women seem to know how to do, without looking at it and a few brisk movements of her hands. the blonde in it was starting to go, and he thought she looked quite a picture of contrast- a hair coloured as a feign and those eyes so intense authentic and dark.
she fixed her hair and intentionally left her robe open, she fought back a smirk at his gaze and turned to walk to a nearby mirror. god i am sore but that smirk broadened to a full smile, she was sore in all of her favourite places. facing the mirror she made a show of looking  at her face but she was really evaluating her body. does no harm to make sure everything is looking good if you're going to prance around half naked she thought. breasts and stomach looked good, and so did her hips, ive always had nice hips, but she frowned at her thighs. she had always found them too large, but strangely enough boys seemed to always be so fond of them. she would always probably find them too large.
'certainly, not baroque though.' she said out loud without thinking.
in the mirrors reflection she saw a single eye creek open and look at her. she felt in that moment very exposed, with her hands at her face her  thighs and bottom were completely visible. his eye closed. 'no, not baroque. more  an impressionist era. degas perhaps'
he could not see her beam. she turned and looked him over, now covering the important areas.
'mantegna for you i think'. she decided. his eye brows raised though his eyes remained shut.
'without the holes i hope' he answered.
'of course' she responded silly boy.
'well i've better looking company that's for sure'. he finished.
god i should hope so. that didn't say much, the two ladies in that painting were ugly enough to almost ruin it. but it had been meant as a compliment and while there would have been plenty of days when she wouldn't have been able to take it as such, today she did.
it had been an off the cuff remark, not nearly as sweet as it should have been he thought. he propped himself up on his elbows and prepared himself to follow it, if necessary. mornings were delicate periods with women, too much light, too much reality floating around like the dusty particles that are exposed in the intruding morning rays of light. but she walked, danced, skipped in her own particularly joyous way to the kitchen and he concluded that it had been well enough received.
'breakfast?' she asked. with her back to him in the kitchen area- it was a large but single roomed studio flat.
'maybe, what are you in the mood for?'
she turned to him and flashed her most devilish smile 'momo's'
he chuckled and shook his head. he was too worn out from the night before to start again. in sheer volume he was her better but in tenacity she knew few equals.
he thought that she was probably often misunderstood. at first glance she did seem to be completely erratic and random in her movements and in her nature. she pulled out two champagne flutes, then walked to her collection of vinyls, thumbed through about ten and then picked one out but didn't place on the record player,  she crossed the room and across the extravagant thick persain rug of her floor to open the curtains, too wide at first, readjusted them, collected a book off the small chair side table, deposited it on the kitchen counter, paused for a moment to consider herself, and then returned to the glasses. she was a leaf on the breeze, not as some frantic victim of propulsion but as some part of the divine synchronicity of the universe. it was all as rhythmic in its own way as all the heavenly movements just not as easy to discern.
she saw him pull on on his jeans as he said, 'i wish i could, but i cant' and while in some way she had known that he wouldn't leave, the words still made her sad.  socks and shoes, shirt and jacket. the radiators hummed in her apartment but it would be cold outside. she thought for a moment to protest and then did not. it was just what it was.
at the door frame he said 'again some time?'
'of course'
outside the door he had stopped, just to catch the last few sounds of her. he could hear her moving about the small apartment and he though then that she was an elemental temporarily trapped, but he knew too that all too soon she would be released, again a zephyr.
down the stairs and out the two doors. he turned right to walk through the grey towards ibrox station but the wind was blowing fully, and hard, into his face. with the kelvin running through town, it was almost impossible to know which way it would gust. he turned about and headed towards hillhead, popped his collar to cover his neck, and as the wind led him down the cobbled street for the first time all morning he smiled.
when the door had closed she had lingered a moment, then returned to the record she had chosen 'honkey chateau'. she considered for a moment changing the record she'd picked. its going to be a beautiful momrning, with or without the company, no reason to pout. she started the turntable, danced her way back into her kitchen and opened the refrigerator, reached in and pulled out a cheap bottle of champagne.
happily and aloud to herself she said 'ah, breakfast!'

memories of grey rooms

He had seen him come in, recognized him only barely, it had been years and he hoped that he would pass on by. It had been a long time. But like clouds off the coast purple with a promise, a half hour or so later john walked over, a drunken rhythm to his saunter. he thought then that time tended to heal most things, but perhaps not wounded prides.

He didn’t want to do this. He didn’t want to do it here, with these casual acquaintances, ringing him in this position, and publically it was hard to control judgement. But he didn’t want to do it in general. ‘john, do really want to do this now?’ he said before he could start, ‘its been a long time’. After he said it he thought on it, it had been five, maybe six years, ‘half a decade’

‘yes I want to do this now, I don’t care how long its been, you’

He cut him off, ‘why’

The question halted him but a moment, ‘because you fucked my wife.’

He could have sworn the volume of the whole room reduced, probably imagined. But every head in hearing distance turn, involuntary reaction. He could hear the people behind him, his company, their spines straighten. He hadn’t noticed scott, another name and face from a youth that seemed all too far away, behind john, but he could have sworn he heard his teeth set, molars over molars.

He set his drink down and squared his shoulders to him, they weren’t the same height but they were close. ‘if memory serves me, you’d moved out of your house- left your wife and infant daughter- and moved in with some intern from work’. He blocked out the people, he didn’t want this spectacle, but he wasn’t about to go down as the only guilty party, even if he was guilty.

John’s eyes narrowed, that brief moment where to an onlooker it is almost impossible to tell the difference between whether he would scream or cry. The voice that came out was neither, ‘we grew up together, played football together, why would you do it, you knew we were married still’

He couldn’t imagine a universe where any of that shit mattered, or living a life where the temporary comraderie of a playing field lays the chains of some eternal obligation. Then again he couldn’t have imagined this moment, before it happened, and under the haze of some bars buzzing light something that should have receded quietly into nothingness was dredged back.

‘I saw her by chance you know, I wasn’t in atlanta long, a few months, and I saw her in a bar. And we talked for a bit, she was a shell of herself. A ghost man. As any girl would be when left from someone ten years younger. The post partum depression didn’t help, but you being across town in some other girls bed. She was a mess. So I took her out, tried to remind her who she was, still fun. Still sexy. Still a wonder.’

It had started like that, talks and casual drinks and the occasional stories about high school, and sharing songs, or bands or making idle conversation, and then outside that highlands bar through a taxi window it was a kiss, and maybe it had been all the bourbon, or maybe it was the residue of the romance of their youth, or maybe it was just her vicious need to be again, and nights that turned into weeks without thinking it was making out at every red light, and concerts with his fingers strumming against her thighs, and her car, and that alley, and enough dark to keep all the realities at bay and for just a while be, to be again.

‘fuck you man, you don’t know anything about her’.

That wasn’t true. He shrugged. After he suspected it wasn’t about that. John was reasonable enough to understand his complicitness in that moment, drunk and fool, but reasonable, at least he remember him as such. No, he realized this was about something different, this was about January some time later, when the girls in the bar he worked at told him that there was some girl here, and it was about that the near sheer slip under the black crocheted dress, and the fingers that lingered at the stem of the martini glass she had propped herself up on, and the freckles and the curls of her hair, she had worn when she was young. And it was about the silence afterwards, when he never heard from her again.

‘fuck you man,’ john repeated, ‘you had no right’

‘John, you think I didn’t know she was going to go back to you? That you wouldn’t get back together? You’re her husband. You’re a family. She was never going to be with me. I knew that.  Let it go.’

‘Then why’d you do it?’

Without thinking he responded, ‘you might have loved her best, but I loved her first’.

John swung and he batted it away, john was drunker than even his gait had let on, he had him by the front of the shirt, and with a push put him against the wall.

He wasn’t angry, in that moment he felt again the acuteness of that silence. You can’t fill someone up without emptying youself, and that there was going to be a part of him, always in that grey space with her, on top of the sheets, entwined in her quiet breathing and the smooth brown lengths of her skin, caught up in the fragile moment, twittering at the most fragile part, the end, moments before the collapse. He was suddenly tired. And he let john’s shirt go.

‘Go home to your wife john. She loves you, which is more than you deserve, so it needs to be enough.’ For the briefest moments he could taste her again in his mouth ‘it has to be enough.’

mostly defeated

she was sitting under the pergola, knees pulled up and under a long spring bud dress. unadorned, hair falling in long straight sheets of brown. her arms- thin- wrapped around her legs, bared toes poked out from underneath.
he knew he would find her here, adrift the potted plants and the aching afternoon flowers. the grey drone of clouds, and the wind that dashed off the shore now slowed to a comfortable amble by the time it reached his yard- made being outside possible, even pleasant.
he called out her name as he approached, but she didn't turn to see him till he had come closer. her brown eyes were unhemmed and her lips tinged with red, her sleepy slow smile confirmed the bottle that companioned her on the bench, mostly defeated.
he pulled off his silk tie, tossed it casually on the glass end table- christened with yellow pollen- and undid a few of the buttons of his shirt. he then unplugged the glass decanter and poured warm, strong smelling bourbon into a previously abandoned glass. sat down, pulled off his shoes and socks, flexed his toes.
when he inquired how she was, she replied with a shrug of her slight shoulders and so they sat there for some time, saying nothing at all. after awhile though, she stood and walked out into the grass, dragging the wine bottle behind her.
'what did you do today?' he asked.
she was staring into, or through, the blooming hibiscus- their shivering red petals.
'people drive too fast in this neighborhood.' she answered, he threw an arm over the back of the bench and didn't respond. she turned to him, caught him looking at her and carried on, 'did you know sandhill cranes mate for life?'
'no, i didn't know that.'
'i went for a walk this morning...' she trailed off.
'did you take the wine with you?' he knew she had, but the smile she gave him surprised him- implish and young, it belonged to a girl who had not been spending her days in his yard.
he watched it evaporated before his eyes as she continued, ' somebody hit a sandhill crane. i saw it.'
'did they stop?'
'no, i saw it afterwards laying on the asphalt.'
'oh' he winced.
'but that wasn't the worst part.' she paused, and a pop of wind sent all the leaves into a brief crescendo. he didn't ask, just waited for the wind, or whatever had given her pause to subside. 'what was worse  was that i saw its mate standing there beside it. it was just looking down at it. it was just so awful.'
'are you okay?'
she walked around in a small circle, the green blades of the saint augustine grass shooting up through her toes. the wind pulled at her dress, her lithe form revealed- and he remembered all at once how young she was.
'i just sorta stood there and wondered...' trailing off again.
'wondering what?' she turned and faced away from him.
'what it was feeling.'
he drank from his glass and then offered up 'despair i would imagine.'
'no i don't think so.' he only half heard her-he was looking at how the whole yard was in movement- even if only recognizable in the smallest of ways, everything seemed to sway to the beat of some invisible force except for her- amidst it all she seemed so becalmed. 'no i think it was feeling something worse than despair.'
'worse than despair?' he then asked, 'what could be worse than despair?'
she turned back to him and with wine stained lips she answered.
'confusion.'

the cerulean dress

they were at, and of, the beach. she with her tanned skin in shades of wet sand, and he with his heavy lidded sleepy blue eyes of seaside rainstorm skies. they had been hiding together, away, and apart for a tumbling collection of days. everything in this temporary place felt like the linen curtains that were pulled out of the window by forces that seemed more pressing than wind, they flailed there white and sweet.
she hadn't know that she had been saving the cerulean dress until she realized he was leaving - it then occurred to her, laying out on the bed that she had. she pulled it on, in a movement without thought - that she would have believed bereft of grace- except without her expecting it he had informed her of quite the opposite a day or two before- and suddenly felt like a silent spectacle of femininity.
'everything you do,' he had said, 'motion and movement, is beautiful...'
she had not blushed, they had been too exposed these last few days for that. but she felt some part of her, inanimate recoil from his words. hours later she finally recognized it, it had been disbelief. no words could shake her conscious critique that her arms, reaching back and behind to work the three buttons, could be anything other than awkward and clumsy, but the look she received to the shake of her head, the messy toss of her long hair - several shades darker than sepia - left her startled, it was confident and unargumentative, and suddenly she was sure no matter how much she felt the opposite, that she was wrong.
the last button done. out through the door, left ever open, a few steps to the sand, then to the berm where everyday but one she had waited for him. she knew he would be in the water, to the waist of his green shorts, or drifting off between the sand bars nearly swallowed by the waters. it was not because she could not swim, or had no love for the sea- for she had, that she waited. and she had been part of the sea long before the morning after the third night when she had awoken and found that she was now part of him.
but because he had only asked her to come once.
only a few days old, the memory of their brief tryst in the sea was already bleeding. she didn't know if it had been the sensory confusion of the rain and the water, or the bizarre sensation of being in the water in her ankle length skirt that had rendered the memory so difficult. she hadn't really swum though, or even clung to him really, rather she had let him just hold her- a rarity- his hands holding her steady at the waist as around her the waves had pushed past to collapse, while the sky surrendered, like an eclipse, its liturgy of air. she couldn't say now how long they had been there in the seastorm, or why then he had pulled her out with him on that day. but without being able to understand or explain it she knew that it would not happen again.
he was out there alone now as he seemed to prefer it. the wind moved as if to say something through the rattling of the surrounding sea oats. she thought then that the sea was his, and would now always be. she did not know what was hers, she would find it some day- though not with him. the only thing she would ever share with him was that day, and all these other days, and that room, and the cerulean dress she had saved to wear as she said goodbye.

mark kozelek

there is a space in my heart for mark kozelek from which he will never be dethroned. he does not deserve it, but that is because no one ever really deserves our love. there can be too many reasons one does not deserve our love though. the counter intuitive mathematics of deserving and love should not perplex anyone, there's no sense to love at all.
to see someone perform who has always been a spectre, the present unpresent to use a theological turn of phrase, is difficult. people can not live up to our ideas about them- because ideas are bound to nothing, where as people are bound completely to their limitations, person and/or circumstantial.
no concert by mark kozelek could eve be good enough, for he can only be himself, and he can only be himself for the time allotted. he could never be the mark kozelek that I loved, for that mark kozelek is not real- and he could never be himself, or as I wanted him to be, long enough, for he is a part of the life I have lived and will live- I want him to play forever.
this is not even to speak of the issue of song choices. some of my favourite songs of his are more than 20 years old- he could not play his catalogue, time would never permit. and to demand that he play older stuff as opposed to his newer work is to reject him as a person all together, it makes me no different than the drunken heckler who screams at the besieged rundown bar piano man "play it again!" which would be a disservice to him as the adored and me as the adorer. how many hundred times has he played 'katy song' or 'japanese to english'? it seems only reasonable that he is sick of playing those songs - I can only listen to them still because my affection for them is entirely unreasonable.
the out come of a concert like the on I saw on Saturday seems to be predestined to be disappointment. frustrating since it never could have been avoided, not even by that figure around which the experience of the concert fixates. (I will admit that I am left in a complete state of doubt as to who that figure is: mark kozelek or myself)
mark kozelek has received some praise, and a great deal more criticism in these last days. his style has long since drifted away from the crushing, over-dramatic, yet inexplicably lovely, 'slowcore' style that brought him his early, relative, success. his lyrics no longer seem like pages of some manic journal shared with the listener because mark kozelek is compelled through/by guilt or love or madness to disclose. no his lyrics now read more like clippings from newspapers or writings from napkins composed on a porch. the guitar work is more artistic in his new work, and the lyrics are more mundane.
in one of his many rambling, entertaining talks between songs he explains to the crowd that the reason he does not have a fancy new smart phone is because he wanted to 'be able to do this'. it is his segue in his song 'alesund'- which is beautiful and haunting and so difficult to perform that one can see him have to focus the whole of his will and ability to perform it. it is more than enjoyable, and would leave me stunned except every song is performed in the space that the song he did not perform could have occupied. if I am not shaken and fulfilled, it is not fault of his. and while my inclinations are to self incriminate - I can not quite say that it is mine either.
going to see a concert is a strange thing in conception, especially if the musician or band one goes to see is not the type to put on a spectacle/ why go? the best the musician can hope to accomplish is to sound like they did on their album, perfect, and I am not trying to belittle the ability to replicate one's album caliber music - anyone who fancies concerts will confirm it is no small or common feat.
so why did I go? knowing I would be disappointed, knowing he would play few if any of my favourite songs, knowing I would not get a spectacle. was it enough to have some fragile temporary experience with mark kozelek for myself? is the concert experience so selfish in its roots as that?
though his music has changed over the years, mark kozelek music has always spoken to me. he words seemed, insanely or childishly, to be expression of things I felt. (I will admit there is a confusing element to that idea, seeing that I almost always discover mark kozeleks music after its heyday, and due to the fact that he is 14 years my senior) he seemed always to be saying what I could not, or perhaps closer to the truth dared not.
maybe in that is a little truth, that I went to see mark kozelek so that I could hear him sing about the things I did not know I already knew.
he was halfway into a strikingly different version of 'richard ramirez', carrying the emotion of the song entirely with his voice; which I sometimes wonder if he has forgotten has always been his best instrument- when I found myself crying. not loudly, or in the guiltless way I often cry at the end of good movies- but in the revelationary way. for reasons  I can not finger I realized something in the midst of that song.
mark kozelek has no idea what it is all about.
his lyrics and music have change not as some artistic response to changing cultural stimuli but because that part of him that used to write lines like 'we walked down the hill/I feel the coming on/ of fading sun/ and I know for sure/ that you'll never be the one/ its the forbidden moment that we live/ that fires our sad escape/ and holds passion more than words can say'. he doesn't see the world that way anymore - pushed by mystic and unimaginable forces. now he writes lines such as 'We didn't have very much to say/ she said that she'd come from some other place/ a town called Troyskirt, maybe Troysworth/ i was pretty distracted packing my stuff/ but I did make a point to ask her to stay/ but she said she had friends that she had to go see'. he is not struggling to make sense of the failed relationships and the fading loves, the seemingly unavoidable movement from love to pain, and back again. now he sees relationships as failed because that's the way the world is- there is no mystery to the 'why'- there only is. love fades because everything fades. and the lines or transitions between love and pain are so temporary on the larger scale and so subjective that differentiating between them at all is not some great human endeavor but a silly statement on one's current location.
mark kozelek has let it go. he's living and writing about the mundanity of experience - and if it sounds magical as it does at the end of 'I know its pathetic by that was the greatest night of my life' - its just coincidental.
I cried, because I missed my mark kozelek, and because I missed myself that could sing in off key affirmation of shared emotion and desperation about such things. I cant want him to be who he was anymore than I can hope to retain those things  no one seems to retain. and while I cant be indignant about it, I suppose I don't either have to be happy about it either.
So I cried because mark kozelek has no idea what life is about.
and neither do it.

termini

i went down, as i often did on tuesdays, to stare at the straight lines of the loading and unloading trains. i liked the structure of it- those metal almost cylinders, static and silent and the cables of human movement that morphed from constrained pulsing order to chaotic absurd throngs in a moment, then back again. i had been in rome for months, languished in the august heat in sync with the whole city that seemed to capitulate to the weight of the weather and the oppressive invasion of tourists. but the cobblestones, and the baroque facades had become common place, just the week before i had been walking down via napoleone III turned left unto via gioberti cut through a heard of hissing and wailing stagnated cars and passed as disinterested as a spring stream right past the santa maria maggiore. termini was my wistful port, a cliff from which i could stare out at leaving made manifest.

the suddenly peeling away from a view of disembarking I saw a woman who looked like, exactly, a girl i had once known. i remembered that moment we shared, as she unwound her ḥijāb, how her the pristine cream neck revealed itself like one of solomon’s towers. it was a frozen moment for me, that never seemed to fray with the passing of time, the act of her unwinding the surprising lengths of her dark curly hair. and all the skin and the shed sanctity less revealing than her eyes, and the tremble in her voice as she asked me a question.  it was her, i was sure of it, though i knew it was not. the heart shape of her face, and the fierce aura that exuded from her seemed exact. and so my mind and heart could not reconcile, and as i called out her name, in a choked voice, she didn’t bother to turn to it. it wasn’t her name, it was august in rome and I was imagining things.

mem or ee

the fall is for brooding, open highways, and the ghosts of the ever lingering lovers so far gone the memory cant recall, cant conjure them on command, like the known sign no longer visible in his for reflecting rearview mirror. beyond the hills infront, just like those heinous empty nebraska plains, recently passed through, what exists i can not know or remember only imagine. i sat on my front bumper at an all too familiar gas station - as he had so many times been - between my past and the unpossessed future. only the past is mine.
'how can you do that - walk backwards through life?'
he, or i, the subjects - life or story? the direction you view, i look, everything is twisted fact or fiction, twisted and ravelled and ravelling around each other, around themselves. 'theres nothing back there for you,'  he thinks she is disgusted, she hides it well, but i could see it, coiling behind the veil of her eyes.
in his head or out loud i say, 'theres nothing back there at all.'
'what?'
'things imply substance, and theres not, theres no past beyond the stories and the corner crouching ghosts,' she has been sick of this, is and was, and will be even later when they, we, have stopped talking. i know she isnt here, thats just a memastory, this is just the haunt, the milemarker. 357 where the light swung left to right no matter which direction one faces, for the light was always just remembered even when he was living in it. i thought it looked like silent blonde streamers, fragile and resolved.
white washed blue eyes and her fingers at his wrist, checking for his resting pulse. 'i cant feel it' from beneaht the shest she says, '.....
he remembered it as a confused sleepy wandering question, childish but then i remembered it differently something about the sound of the highway- maybe more a mocking tone. and it all seems to blur, the bedroom or a gas station in limon, colorado. was it her voice or the old mans that mocked me like pearl mocked dimsdale, 'thou wast not bold, thou wast not....'
it was a carved grey beard and the frayed cowboy hat then he recalled asking him
'where you headed?'
and before i could answer he rambled on about some place in texas, about a job or a girl or whatever it is spectres on the great american highway always find themselves crawling towards. the old man was headed some where, for there was nothing the old man told him, for him or i or he or them in this place. there was and is nothing ever here, something is always elsewhere, over there beyond the ridge, beyond the hills, the horizon until there are no more horizons - for that is what death is, the end of horizons. and living the movement through the nothings of this place, ever real, and not, he or i thought, to be confused with the nothings of the past which were not even real, to the place where one no longer look into, and through what was not towards what might be.
i think i grunted, i am sure i didn't speak.
'what about you? you headed home?' the old man couldnt have seen my licence plate.
i said no, or i dont know, or 'i dont know where home is'
most places are like most other places, from the over hang of a gas station florida isnt much different from east colorado, or alabama from virgina. go to enough places, see enough of the spectrum and the gaps between the majesty of st marks and the mundanity of your average road side diner falls away, or into itself, a place is everyplace, is no place. and like all the memories of summer days become one day of bright summer, or one bar of golden light so do all places become a, or any, gas station.
and too the voices and the people and the old man and the girl are there, saying in both voices, unique and uniform, choral and monotone the words, the question
'... where is your heart?'