What I have learned: People who look to you to make them happy, are never happy with themselves.
Doors
It’s early afternoon on Saturday. I can smell your intoxicated breath through the phone. It’s thick with the whiskey I recognize so well, it’s the same smell, the same taste, that rests on my palate when I need to disappear on a late Friday night.
You cannot call me when you are in a state of awakening. You cannot call me when things are clear, when your words fit imperfectly together in a nervous state, a sober state. It’s convenient for you. It’s convenient for me, because I cannot handle the truth of it all.
You tell me about my Great-Grandfather and ask me to write about his opposition to the war. You fumble for the right words and tell me I am the next Capote. All the while I’m thinking about sitting alone in front of my birthday cake when I was ten, and watching how the storm you created made all the candles flicker as you slammed the door. It is a silly thing for a child’s birthday to ruin your afternoon and I was terribly selfish, and for that I’m sorry.
I hadn’t heard your voice in nearly a year. I try to decipher if you had aged. My ears hear the familiarity of the sound, but know nothing of the words, that lack such precise meaning. The words dance and I trip over them. I can’t follow them, I can’t move with them, it’s a beat I cannot recognize.
And I fall back. I’m any age. I’m 30. I’m 16. I’m 4. I’m 11. I’m afraid to speak. Each word that I illicit from my lungs, each syllable from each breath, is reserved, because I know the consequences and I know the motions. It’s a false move. It’s a land mine. It’s me having to filter. You’ll be gone again, if my feet move too quickly.
The implications are unwavering. And I wonder if you ever have thought about what you created, as I wander through this, afraid of each word I spell out, each word I utter. I’m afraid of the doors that close. I’m afraid of the sounds of latches, of my own and of theirs, of his. So I step lightly, speak lightly, and I breathe lightly; and watch as the doors swing hard and shut tightly and I wonder, ever so slightly of your remorse. The non-existent remorse.
I have upgraded my life in every possible way.
Excerpt From My Life
My father took me to see their burial grounds when I was 23. The trees were beginning to change from a dry green to a deep muddled orange. It was warm, the epitome of an Indian summer in mid-September.
The ground was dry as we stomped along the earth, and dust rose up like smolder near a slow burning fire. We made our way through the nearly impenetrable woods until we found three solid mounds that rose up out of the ground. The earth molded to their shapes, a soft dome of solid black dirt; three lonely shrines without patrons to worship them.
You wouldn’t know of their existence, they were subtle, covered in coarse weeds and tender grass. They were amiss and lonely, and I wondered what lie underneath. A child, a mother, a grandfather and what brought them to their permanent home, entrenched in earth for eternity.
It was my father’s secret, as well as theirs. He had known about the grave sites since he was a child and explored the wooded area looking for squirrels and whatever stray animal was in sight to kill with his rifle. He climbed trees and set up camp near the winding stream down below. He was a pioneer in the 20th century.
We moved to the rhythm of the earth, took brief steps in silence, making a circular pattern as we walked around them. I begged to sit upon one of the mounds, but my father cautioned me with a sharp glance. He watched my movements, carefully planning out how to least disrupt the sleeping wonders.
I asked what was inside, as if it was a gift, just waiting to be unwrapped. Nothing, he whispers, but Indian bones. Grave diggers, in the early 1920’s, had come and robbed the graves and left only the skeletons. I begin to imagine an Indian Jones type character and his dunce sidekick, who had come to find riches and sell them to collectors of various oddities. I start to realize that whatever they had hoped to carry with them into the after world is now tucked away in someone’s curio cabinet, or buried in an attic. These pieces still exist; nothing in life can neither be created nor destroyed.
I had hoped that my father would instruct me to follow the path back to our truck and I would return to find three open graves. I would lurk behind a tree and watch as he feverishly dug in the middle of one mound. It would open up like the crust of a pie, and reveal what I had been longing to know. Who are they, these ancient creatures of another realm? Instead he instructed me to move on, and we would follow the ravine further and deeper into the trees set forth before us.
After all the stories had passed, after all the speculations that my father could drum up, we found our way through the broad labyrinth. My body would move with the steady consistent steps my father would take, but my soul was still left behind, ears perched against the earth, waiting for an awakening. Instead, we found our way to the edge of the woods where there was a sudden drop off of a cliff. It opened up to a vast amount of nothing, just farmland that encroaches further and further upon the mysteries hidden in these trees.
Shadow of a Tree
My heart moves with a bewildered beat. It’s unsure of where it’s going as it paces along and cannot decide between what has happened and what will happen. I traced along the edges of where you were and it is scrambled and marred by the imperfect retaliation of my hand. I can’t find you. I can’t locate you among the dust, the scattered ruins that you had left behind. Somewhere in this mess is just me.
You left me near the Fall and I have shed my leaves and the remnants of you. When you scrape away at the base of where I stood you find the things that have remained intact. They are unaltered and perfect, and so I write again and I breathe again and I find this place again.
I would never want you to stumble where you shouldn’t walk, to find me in this place with this pen in my hand. So dangerous a state of being; so imperfect am I. I forgot the beauty and like a thousand leaves that fall and pay homage to the structure of my arms, they have not. They remind me with one small motion, and one delicate caress. I don’t want you to find me here, in this honest place. I don’t want you to get lost.
I am unwavering.
This is my life
I stayed up last night and thought about becoming a writer. Prayers fell like tears on my pillow, but you cannot pray to a God you do not believe exists. So my words fall upon deaf ears.
I picked up your book, after breaking the bond of tightened interlaced fingers that would not let go of eachother. The smell of my breath still lingered upon my skin, and words were tattooed between each pore, each cell. I could not put it down and found myself entrenched in your life for nearly three hours.
It’s the only thing that I can do without my monkey mind leading me astray. I meditate on your sentences and breathe to the cadence of your form. I don’t care about the insecurities of my life, nor the ups and downs and rhythmic pulses of a heart that is too full to carry. I am you for this second.
In between the paragraphs, I pause to pull the blankets up higher to my neck and wish for that life. I’m jealous of you. Your words do not stumble or falter, and I put your book aside to think about my own, not yet written. It’s pounding out in my head. It’s waiting for an experience like yours. It’s another year, under the same purple blankets and I wait longer.
This is my life.
