Posts in Category: letter
wild turkey lane
A spare.
My back was turned when the collision occurred, but I was looking at you, and the way your eyes didn’t move told me what mine missed. You weren’t looking down the lane, you were looking at me, grinning, holding out the large Coke I hadn’t wanted.
In the pocket of my jacket on the seat beside you was an unopened pint. In the bin beneath our scoring table was an empty one.
“My turn,” you said; tipsy, cocky.
I had won the coin toss when we arrived, so you were bowling with my left hand. I handed the cup back to you, frosty acid washing down my throat and into my chest, and picked up the fuchsia ball you’d chosen.
“Watch this,” you whispered, “motherfucker.”
I released the ball as awkwardly as expected, but the instant it touched the gleaming hardwood, I spun around, horrified, unable to watch what I knew I’d just done.
Your eyes went wide.
crash.
You laughed so hard that you squeezed the lid off the cup, and half its contents into your lap.
—
On the beach six hours later, the moon was nearly bright enough to write by. It had been quiet all night. You were sitting on the drier side of your folded jeans. I noticed something and turned – your eyes were already on mine and I barely caught the fleeting, struck flash behind them. Then you smiled, and broke into laughter again.
tell me something true
Remember anything.
What does it make you feel? What are the images which comprise the memory? What are the sounds? Is there a flavor? A scent? What is the dominant color? Is the light artificial? Is the scene in motion? Does the memory proceed by your narration to yourself? Is there any ambient sound? Does any part threaten to pull you away to some other memory? Any that you want to forget? Are there recognizable textures? Can you reach out, into your memory, to touch and feel anything?
Does any part of your body flashback with you? Do you resist it? Does it work?
Is there any noticeable weather? Is it relevant?
Do you remember the date? The time?
Were you hungry? Thirsty? Longing? Inebriated? In love? In pain?
What were you doing with your hands?
Was your pulse quick? Was your breath short?
Were you alone?
Who were you?
little miss messiah’s first miracle
The waiting room was practically empty, not that you would have noticed anyone you didn’t trip over. You told me that you walked in slowly and made your way to the reception desk.
“Very slowly. It was hard to focus on where I was going and what I was doing. I did not want to look like I was fucking crazy in the ER.”
“Wow-” I began.
“Shut the fuck up,” you cut back in.
“Oh, you finished my sentence.”
You gave me that look. fuck
“I told the receptionist everything, she was cool about it.”
She tried to give you a clipboard and pen, to which you held up your late left hand. She apologized and gestured to the masses of empty chairs, desperate for company without typhus. A half-dead drunk was their only hope.
“Have a seat, they will call for you.”
You carefully found a chair against the wall, beneath a very large painting.
“I thought maybe I had come there to be crushed by that painting,” you told me. Fucking lunatic.
“It moves” had been the best you could come up with in the moment for what your left eye was apparently watching. “Static” was your attempt at describing what you only became aware of once you were alone with it. You told me that you initially thought the sound was a television “or something” to your left, but you looked and there was nothing. Covering your right ear, you realized that your left was hearing something else.
“Like they were on different frequencies. I do not know for sure when it started, but I did not notice it at all until then.”
You listened for a moment.
“It was not static. It was water. Or some kind of liquid, but it sounded like the ocean to me.”
You told me you turned your head to check whether the sound changed when you moved. Instead, you noticed another new twist.
“The smoke was still moving, but for a few seconds it looked like I was moving through it. Then it stopped. Or I stopped, it kept moving.”
You stood, trying to go in the direction you appeared to have been going before, but it didn’t work. The “smoke” kept twirling around, but not past you. You sat back down.
“How did you feel?”
“Curious, fascinated. But when I moved through it like that..”
You finished your sentence with your eyes accenting the loss at which you’d arrived.
You told me that it felt like you must have sat there for a long time, waiting. At some point you remembered your arm. You looked at your lifeless hand, turning it by the wrist when, to your left, came the sound of a wave.
“An ocean wave,” you specified, insisted.
“I got it,” I assured.
You remained still for another long moment out of time, trying to work this out. The “wave” had seemed to be approaching you, but the sound dissolved before it arrived. Trying simultaneously to listen, see, and feel, you found that you couldn’t think. You began breathing hard, you told me, and you suddenly realized that you could feel your heart beating, and things rapidly got out of hand.
“Every beat, the smoke moved, all of it at once. Almost like ink in water, in reverse. It was moving away from me, but was not, um, thinning. There was no empty space it was leaving behind.”
If you were capable of panic, this was the time. But not the place.
“I stood up and started towards the door. But after a couple steps, I felt pressure on my left hand, which I had just dropped when I got up. I took maybe five steps, and the pressure got unbearable. I stopped, and immediately I could hear another wave, louder and closer than before, like it was crashing into my eardrum. The smoke started moving too fast to make it out. And the pain in my hand put me on the floor. I guess I closed my eyes. When I opened them, I was already getting back to my feet and the pain was gone. And so was the smoke, and the sound.”
You got your legs under you again. Your left arm hummed. Your left eye was a little blurry. Your left ear was ringing very slightly – but they had all come back.
“How did you feel?”
“Pretty. Blitzed.”
hemiphiliac
“When did it begin?” I asked.
You told me you weren’t sure how many days it had gone on, but a protracted affair with Absolut finally reached its conclusion on the carpet of your living room, lying beneath your stereo. You were on your left side at the threshold of consciousness and could hear the music playing clearly. Then you heard your name. Then again, and a hand on your shoulder pulled you suddenly back to the waking world.
eden for breakfast
“A memory,” you said.
I was very young, still early in kindergarten. Still figuring out what school was. One very dark, grey morning, a small group of kids, myself included, were taken out of class and into the library, to a small enclosure in its corner where the head librarian was waiting with several boxes of munchkins from dunkin donuts, which I had never seen or heard of. Through the wall behind her rocking chair we could see the road and sidewalk outside the building’s entrance, all dimly lit through thick fog by orange streetlights. Between our host and the wall was a large castelet, built to look like a house with a large window which, when open, was the puppets’ stage. That morning, it was closed. There were four “trees” along the walls, each made with two sheets of wood bisecting one another, cut and painted to resemble trees. On every treetop, paper apples were taped to the branches, each apple with a different student’s name. We all got to color/draw on our apple before it went up.
The two half walls of this little library theater seemed very tall then. The trees were towers. There was a large rug covering most of the carpeted floor, with cushions and pillows scattered about and lining the walls. We brought our own blankets from our cubbies.
You started to speak, so I waited. You paused, looked at me for a long moment, then said that your kindergarten class never took their blankets to school.
“Every single day,” I said, then continued:
The librarian sat beside an end table. On the table stood a small lamp, one of a few around the room, all softly lighting the room in amber. I had no ghost of a notion why we were there.
This, I told you, was where the memory fragments. I could not remember what was said or done. I remembered a new feeling, and the idea of honey and nuts together, and something about “penny muffins” and nickles. I remembered the sense that we were there for something important, and that someone was hiding inside the castelet.
You put your hand on my chest, stopping me. Another long look. Then you sang to me:
“Five little muffins..”
“Oh.”
It all came back in a rush.
As we ate our donuts, the librarian sang the song, teaching us the participatory parts as she went. I felt almost overwhelmed by how nice this all was: the sweet and cute new food, the unfamiliar but appealing idea of honey and nuts on top of a muffin, of all things. At some point, this all became confusion as to why we were eating donuts, but singing about muffins. I thought they must be the same thing, with two names. Thinking about this distracted me from whatever the librarian said after the first time through the song while holding up a picture of something I don’t remember. All I caught was that she mentioned nickles.
But sitting beside me on the floor, I now remembered, was the girl from my class who I thought was the prettiest person or thing I had ever seen in over half a decade of life. I hadn’t talked to her, and I probably hadn’t realized I could talk to her until this moment.
“What did you say?” you asked softly.
At first, nothing. I turned and looked at her, and she looked at me. We both smiled. Then, I spoke:
“Are munchkins muffins?”
You put your hand to your smile, a thin veil across a phantom laugh. I didn’t need to tell you that your reaction was hers, or that we never spoke again.
We never spoke of her again. There is no such thing as an untold story.
anniversary
I remember waking up on a gym mat disguised as a mattress, atop a crumbling composite frame. The sun was hours away and actual sleep was much further. The room was dimly lit by my roommate’s small bedside lamp, which he’d had brought in from home, as he couldn’t sleep without it. Most people on that floor had taken advantage of the supposed rule-bending which the staff was willing to commit in order to ensure compliance. I hadn’t. But I didn’t mind the lamp. One night as we sat up talking quietly after lights out, I told him that I actually quite liked it. He held up both hands, lowered his eyes, and said “I’m not accusing you of patronizing me, but I am feeling a little patronized right now.” It sounded very practiced, almost bored, but he was being sincere when he said things like that. He was often a stream of coping mechanisms and exercises, but it apparently helped him keep whatever demons put him there, elsewhere. I never saw his flipped switch and his contributions to group were muddy on the bloody details, but the long, straight lines and deep grooves in his head, neck, arms, and hands, were rather clear.
He was there that day, so I remember him in vivid detail. He was sleeping quietly with his pillow over his head when I reached for my phone and saw that you had texted me.
I cannot wait to see you.
Even at the very beginning, the idea of being near you was a speedball. I slept until sunrise.
An hour later I was walking towards the dining room, still four doors away when I realized that I could feel you walking beside me. Visiting hours were from breakfast to lunch, and visitors were invited to both catered meals, and I knew you were four doors away, waiting for me. But that didn’t change the fact that I knew you were walking beside me and I could feel you there, looking at me. I felt you there until the moment I crossed the fourth threshold and found you waiting, with your eyes still on me. Immediately, I forgot the four doors and your ghost haunting them.
You. And you were looking at me. The look which can’t be said. In the time it took me to cross the room and reach you, your posture, your expression, your gaze, never changed. Until I reached you and asked,
“Do I know you?”
and you held out your hand.
A few minutes later, while most of the floor wept and ate biscuits with loved ones, we sat on a bench in the courtyard just outside, a cigarette in your right hand and my left, your left hand in my right. We didn’t speak through the first two cigarettes. Some time later on the same bench, as the third round was being lit, you looked at me.
What did you say?
ultraviridian
Give me your best impression of the light behind your eyes. When it burns out, what are you to do? A candle in the window will draw strays and runaways to the door, but best friends to the glass. Will you blink back to me through the black?
I’ve got longing down to shorthand – practiced, perfected, really quite pitiful. But there is a task for every talent, just wait until you get a load of mine.
Let’s blow this sad and sleepy party, light a fire beneath an eclipse that never says “good morning.” On paper, do you feel the smoke settling in layers across your body? Feel the faint and fucked up echos of things you have simply forgotten? If you don’t, don’t be alarmed. I remember.
What do you get for the girl who loses everything? Patience? A plot? A mind? A temper?
You should know that I went back there, after. She came along a few times and got drunk while I looked around and got drunk. When she was there, I started noticing that I felt some kind of rush, like guilt. I only became sure of it one night after she left, then briefly returned. I said something which caused her to leave again, and the feeling eased.
I had not immediately processed the fact that the rush hit before I knew she had come back. There was something there with me. I went home, and she was there waiting.
Love, let me see you greenshift. I’ll make you famous in all the empty places and they’ll say “welcome, do not be alarmed.”
It isn’t home, but it’s closer than you remember. Do you remember what to do?
Tell me how your day has been
What do you think of all the things the universe feels?
If our bodies come from the world, then our emotions do, too. So who does it grieve for? Who does it love? What is it afraid of? Why is it angry? Why does it want to destroy itself? Why doesn’t it go through with it?
What is it capable of? Wouldn’t you like to find out?