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?
between gray and grey
Before the beginning is the tricky part, I guess. But when you’re writing the beginning, how do you differentiate it from what came before? How do you start anything? How could anyone end anything?
With nothing. That’s the entire continuum; the words and the nothing between. That wasn’t obvious to me, of course, for years. How many thousands of notebook pages can you fill before the beginning and end are ultimately almost meaningless? I am not a musician or a mystic, so this stuff has to turn up arranged just the right way on a page, or I’ll never get it. Well I got it; like a fucking bullet:
slashing cinnamon
The envy never stops.
I’m watching a livestream and the only thing I can think about is how I don’t belong there. I don’t know any of them, and they all know each other. There’s some kind of shared culture, like a sprawling inside joke, that I’ll never understand. My impulse is to force my name in front of them by donating to the stream, and enjoy the attention for a moment. But I’ve already spent time talking to these people. I know who they are, and I can’t stand them.
This idea I’ve had. I know that it’s going to work, and most of the work on it is done. I thought I would feel something because of it, but I don’t. It’s the minutes I can’t tolerate, and every distraction I find leads me some other place I’ll never be welcome.
There’s a new surface scratch on my monitor which I don’t remember making and I’ve lost nine pounds in the past five days.
light conversation
the saline city received your signal on the thirtieth
and the accidental audience held its breath
the new may dawned in silence
with one insomniac avoiding two backwards calls to sleep
I still see you there, a remnant on the southern horizon
where ali and abbey first saw you
standing over venus, her face a ruin
a club in your left hand, her rib in your right like a knife
she had chosen the wrong soft chest to strike
Beltane
An uphill walk with a cigarette in each hand, both lit with sunlight from a looking glass. A miserable year of good luck, however many and whatever it takes.
Solace
It happens every year, one way or another. When the cold air begins to warm, I begin slipping into a kind of frenzy. Every year I tell myself it will be the last one, and when it becomes clear that it won’t be, I have trouble coming to terms with it.
Two years ago, I handled it by spending so many consecutive hours awake that I would end up passing out from exhaustion. That happened once or twice while I was standing. It’s a small miracle that I didn’t break my neck or crack my skull open. But when I did finally wake back up, I went right back to it: reading and rereading, filling up notebooks with mostly illegible nonsense, staying awake by whatever means necessary and trying to force an epiphany.
Last year, I found myself less ignorant than I had been in 2018, though not much better at facing failure. I had a decent enough understanding of how the method began, but not how it could be completed. When Spring began to settle in, so did the panic. I wanted to decide that I could just figure out the future on the fly. That I could start going out and meeting new people while I was still living out of hotel rooms, never mind that I was in no condition to be around anyone, or that I would be in some other town within weeks or days. But after I realized it just wasn’t realistic, I spent most of March and April 2019 too drunk to walk or write in a straight line. My reading comprehension isn’t exactly stellar when I’m shitfaced either, and I probably didn’t achieve much but costing myself more time.
I came pretty close to another pathetic encore this year. At the start of January, knowing exactly what it was going to take to make the future worth living for, I had to admit to myself that it was unlikely to happen before May had arrived once again. At first I think I handled it well enough, focusing on being better off tomorrow than I was today, and so on. But once the pandemic began, all kinds of illogical concerns began taking over; along with the idea that things were about to irreversibly change to an extent that I couldn’t keep up with, panic attacks and binges returned and became routine again.
Then a few weeks ago, Grace and Henry got back in touch for the first time since the night we met, and sent me the things I referenced in the last entry. It did help me to sort of stop the spiral, but the entertainment from the self-help cassette only went so far, and I was perplexed by a couple of their other gifts. Then Grace called me again. I’ll probably never detail much of my interaction with those two, especially in light of my last conversation with Henry, but some of what Grace said has become burned into my brain.
“For one more year, you can survive your ‘happiness’ just being anything but a breakdown. Or a ‘laughing fit’ being any break from the crying you’ve done that day.”
Five years is a long time. But unfulfilled and broken are not the same thing. A promise is a promise.