The Things on Which We Rest Our Weight

The couch in my mother’s house is coming apart from its center. An overstuffed thing, the middle has broken through the frayed lines of color. This is not the couch of my childhood, which was more tattered and had a gray fabric that looked like the kind of cracker that crumbles in your mouth and chokes you with its dryness. This is the couch of the last house in which my parents lived as people married to each other - the house I spent the summer of my 17th year in, stripping, painting, sheetrocking the walls. I learned to hold the long sanding pole in such a way that with one intentional stroke I could level the tiny mountains that bubbled up under the layers. I learned the complexity of white, the silk of dust, and the illusion of perfection. I wore, on the bridge of my nose, the little red indent of a facemask, and I watched the muscles form under the pink skin of my arms. Now, this couch, (pastel colored southwestern print) a floor model purchased at a discount, that vaguely reflects the color scheme of the house, is loosing its inside. I look away, embarrassed.

Water at night easily looks opaque and eternal. That it is not does not comfort me much. My body is held from the unnamed depths by just the rough slimed wood of this dock, a peninsula that moves under me as I shift under moving stars. Everything is a rotation, or more exactly, a vibration. The sound of the redundant lake waves hums under the undulations of your voice. The frequencies: now in, now out, of phase. Every other word ends too soon or slips into the water. You are telling a story about time, and I have fallen out of it, and keep falling for the rest of the night.

It wasn’t that it was any kind of surprise when, in June, they announced the end. He did the talking; she looked strained and irritated and hard. I have since come to know the solidness of her face that day as numbness; when she thawed, it was a messy, soft thing. Looking to the walls on which I had worked and on whose support I relied when I climbed out of the window on the second floor to sunbathe topless on the roof, I said whatever it is you say in that situation when you are grown up enough to no longer live at home, but small enough inside to still need the sureness of your illusions. I said things like “I understand”, and then went into the woods and lay down, feeling the hardness of a ground that, many layers deep, still waited for the warmth of summer.

Deeply tired, we expect some reciprocity in the silence we give as a gift to those we love, and use as a weapon against those we fear. When - after years of layers smoothed over these now immaculately flat and hard walls - this is exactly what we get, we find the doorframe on which we lean, (having just come in, kicking off shoes, taking in the picture of a place we’ve created and called home), is made of water, and we are falling, in or out, or more specifically, through.

We Could Live Beyond This World

We could live beyond this world


I climbed right through the window and slid down the storm doors after I heard the static of the shower running. The night was warm, an embrace I guess you could say, and I felt as if I might vomit. I remember a few things; my white terrycloth pajama pants collecting the moon along its seams, the fear as I approached the heavy black of the playground, and the pulsing question that ticked itself through my veins, would you be there? You moved from the center of dark to the curve of light from a lamppost, a sort of birth. I met you at the spirit gate and found your new arms. After the kissing came the choking. I remember the look in your eyes: glass, a stuffed and mounted head. What a pretty death you were under the albino clouds. When you declared that the world was fucked, fucked in the way that a Parthenon with crumbling columns is, and that innocence was the last wisp of smoke from a dead cigarette, I opened my eyes a little wider to let in more light. It was no coincidence that I was the first to see the fawn shakily approach with long legs and deep, animate, pupils.

The second time, I was driving at night. Newness in every motion of my hands, my right foot, I was pulled tight between my inexperience and my fear of failure - a perfect metaphor for things I didn’t yet know about myself. When the car driving toward me flashed conspiratorially, I slowed by at least 10 mph and crawled through the dark blue of 9:30 pm, searching anxiously every shadow. Around a curve, I slowed suspiciously – they always tuck themselves into curves and pockets - and before me suddenly, no crown vic, but four brown beauties floating across the macadam. Thinking of you and the infinite wisdom of fate, I felt somehow that my driving was not my own, but the smile line on the face of someone whose eye is the moon, whose chin the valley I drive into, whose cheek the curve of road above which four early spring deer hover like smoke from a spark just sprung.

This past January the darkness of night was heavier than usual. Needing, at dusk we went in search of the abandoned highways. You coaxed me over the cold chain link wall after kissing me through the diamond of air. I scrambled up and perched on the top, a huge clumsy cat without animal sense, and fell messily into your tested arms that had left their boyhood somewhere in the world. What we found was forgotten pavement stretching into the pink of receding sun and overpasses with intersecting animal tracks and hints of graffiti pressing through the snow. We followed an entrance ramp to nowhere and stopped short as a movement ahead cracked through the emptiness. Rolling our feet silently against the gray pavement through the overgrown woods, we saw them. A cloud of smoke this time, weaving through the skinny teenage trees, moving over the crystallized snow. We followed them to the fence, where, instead of dissipating, as one might have expected of spirit animals, they knew the one broken place where the fence bowed and met the ground. When I found their eyes, the gaze was dark water. Stillness crumbled as we ran forward, animal joy of body, and first you and then I, we followed them over the broken fence. They scattered, along with the light, the latter a gradual end, the former an abrupt evaporation into the womb of the wood.

The world is only fucked in the way that any finite thing that wants to be forever is. What doesn’t claw at eternity with the urgency of city skylines, knows life.