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.