Caffeine

The door to McNulty's Teas and Coffees opened. The distinct smell of mold, musty tea, and coffee beans hit the mix of fresh air flowing in from behind me. I looked around at the boxes and boxes of teas and large glass containers with labels reading LAPSONG OOLONG and GREEN GUNPOWDER in old typeset. Diced, dried fruit in a large glass canister, and saw the strange reflection in red of a tea box behind it. Minutes passed. Lots of minutes as I stared at that glass with its colour. The strange manipulation of the light and the colour made me realize how much love made me miss out.

Because

I'm still in love with you.


Harvest Moon by Cassandra Wilson

Come a little bit closer
Hear what I have to say
Just like children sleepin
We could dream this night away.

But theres a full moon risin
Lets go dancin in the light
We know where the musics playin
Lets go out and feel the night.

Because Im still in love with you
I want to see you dance again
Because Im still in love with you
On this harvest moon.

When we were strangers
I watched you from afar
When we were lovers
I loved you with all my heart.

But now its gettin late
And the moon is climbin high
I want to celebrate
See it shinin in your eye.

Because Im still in love with you
I want to see you dance again
Because Im still in love with you
On this harvest moon.

Merry Fucking Christmas.

I laid awake on the small, cramped couch, my feet sticking out of the three blankets I piled on top of my shaking figure, almost kicking the fake Christmas tree. I watched the digital numbers click steadily onward and as the weather threw Christmas rain drops at the windows. Face halfway between my pillow and a couch cushion. Each time I blocked out the semi-dark with the permanent black of my eyelids, there they were: having mountain-men sex in my head, all over the pine needle covered forest, all pumping to songs that I loved and have scribbled everywhere in my notebooks, on top of my favorite blanket. It was blasphemous and beautiful, crude and it is everything that I and he ever wanted except it was here it was them, naked, not: me.

Most confusing thing about my heartbreak,

really, is that it isn’t like anyone else’s I’ve seen. It doesn’t come in waves and it sure plays an obvious game of hide and seek. There he is right in front of me. All photographed, smiling and happy, lips upturned in his permanent smile, his early crows feet locked in his hopeful squint. My head took that still shot, its still up there developing behind my forehead. Only life has taken the largest pair of scissors created and meticulously cut out his shape. Only his dim outline, the lake, and his canoe exist beyond the metal cutting away at his memory. His lack of a presence now becoming a dull throbbing just under my eighth layer of skin cells. All at once I want to write him a thousand letters explaining other people aren’t meant for each other, but we! We were crafted from the same tree, you see, carved with the same knife, and sewn with the same thread. I am the bristly bark, he is the soft chamber of collected rings. And there is the genius of the thing: you think we are nothing alike, but really, we are just different sides of the same sapling. Then I want to take those same letters all made of our tree and burn them all, so I could keep them from being true.
Because they aren’t true.
Just as you and I are not two sides of the same coin, missing you and wanting to forget you at the same time, is.

December, Something

The snow engulfed the street ahead. Lynn and I walked in silence, both too tired. Things weren't going our way and things wouldn't be going our way for a while yet. Not until this blizzard outside my window is a memory. Not until the sparkle and shine fade down New York City street drains. Until the streets reduce to slush.But right then, our feet were a foot deep in snow. The white covered everything we didn't want to see. All the ugly parts. The flowing white kept everything quiet, kept our feet numb, and the miles forever stretching, even if the West Side Highway kept from letting us from cross rivers. The wind mixed with our hair and the snow and icicles hung from our faces. We trudged on, laughing at the fact that our only job was to dirty the snow before us with our feet.
“Let’s make snow angels,” Lynn said.
“Right there?” I pointed at untouched snow. It must have covered a sidewalk and part of the street.
“Okay. You have to let me know if cars come too close.”
“You’re fine. Plenty of space,” I said.

She pulled the faux fur hood over her head, snow sticking to her eyelashes. Difficulties with blinking. She slumped into the snow, her head just below tire marks left by cabs and trucks. It was silent. I took out my camera, the quiet click documenting her print, her wings. A truck rushed through a stop sign and plowed through the foot or so of snow. A few inches were left between her head and the tires.

“You should probably get up," I said.

She stood up and looked at the tracks.
“It definitely would have changed the course of the evening if I got run over by a truck,” she said.
“Yeah.”
“Let’s walk around and just lay on things.”
“Okay.”

We found a good spot under some Christmas trees on a brownstone stoop. I lay in the snow thinking about my size and shape as Lynn snapped photos. I thought about St. John’s church and how I liked it, but didn’t know where exactly it was in Harlem, or where exactly God is. I thought about myself as the church: large and all masonry. My corners reaching across quiet avenues: an empty cathedral, hoping for piety. No religion of her own to fill all her guts. Only some lonesome noise echoing around in my cavern. If I could be that church, maybe some sort of ancestral, guiding songs could with some strange metaphysical being and could comfort me buried under my dusting of snow.

I sat up and looked at my print in the snow. It looked as if someone had been lying next to me, curled up into my right arm. Something made noises in my chest.

Lynn must have noticed me looking at it. "I think I stepped there before I took your picture," she said.

I stuck my mitten into the spot in agreement, though I saw no footprints.