The Story

It was a one summer back that I dug my fingers into the thick blades of grass in your backyard, when that rabbit hopped by. The rabbit that I always told you wasn’t wild. His ears were too long, and his comfort around people was too strong for any sort of natural tendencies. You rolled on your back, adorned with your headlamp and raincoat for no reason and claimed that you were ready for jungle exploration. I looked at the grass and asked you why domestic rabbits weren’t enough, do you really have to go to a jungle, but you laughed instead of answering. A summer. It was a summer ago when I had no job, and you had too many, so that when I came to visit, I would spend hours out on your back lawn, reading books until I fell asleep on the warm concrete, or waiting around on your living room with the thick carpet in-between my toes.
Your house. We were in love, back then, in your house. I never told you, but in the beginning, your house scared the shit out of me. I watched it from the corner of my eye. Filled with family photographs and other normal things like sewing rooms and toys from when you were six. Boxes of car magazines and assurance that one day you would amount to something.

Sometime after we began snapping photographs on the boardwalk of southern New Jersey, I started to love your house. The way your mother’s rocking chair still swung minutes after she got up to cook dinner. The way the house’s floors muffled the sound of a hard walker’s feet. Your room was where I felt I fit into one of the only niches I could find in your life. In the room where the grey walls showed off photographs of bikers, trucks, trains speeding to this country or that. Boxes upon boxes piled up to the sides of your bed, filled with vintage tinker toys; that particular box of old keys you kept on your bedside dresser. Right over the drawer you used to keep our scrapbook, my letters, and my picture inside of. To the right of the corkboard you kept magazine cutouts and photographs of family and friends.I never made it to your cork board. Your clothes spewed forth from your closet that was never cleaned, and your bureau vomited t-shirts and dirty shorts from hiking trips. Bike chains and gear parts covered the floor, tripping me every time I walked in the room.

In that room, one night, you pulled out your box of keys and I asked you to tell me which one would be the key to your heart, if it existed. You pulled out the smallest, most ornate one. This one, you said. I put it on the chain around my neck. You liked the idea of keys and locks representing cold, hard feelings, and you had always wanted to close two locks around one another, to show the rest of the town we were in love, closed and set. We used padlocks, but combinations for its release were always there. “You attach it to the side of a bridge”, you would tell me, and then we’d be “just as romantic and hopeful as young couples are in Florence”, where that mass of locks, all huddled around and among one another, keep people holding hands forever.

It was ironic, I told you that summer, that we had both visited Florence, with different people, different years, before we knew each other. But I wanted a way to show off our feelings in a less iron way, in a more organic way. We both decided we should be vintage and carve our initials into tree trunks, but you wanted to on our college campus and I thought that juvenile. I wanted to carve hearts all over Keene Valley, but you feared for the opinion of others. Hikers crave unmarked trails, you would tell me, so in a huff I let it be. Now, our initials exist only on a bridge in Connecticut somewhere. It seemed as if we could only do things on the run. Even serious conversations were held on the sides of roads, our stomping grounds for things amiss. Blinking caution lights reflecting tearful conversations, and serious misunderstandings.

One especially hot day, that summer, we peeled our bodies from the dirty seats of your unwashed Jeep and sprawled across old towels on Wildwood’s beach. The boardwalk attracted few people that day and the water even fewer. The sun gently warmed my shoulders, made you wipe the sweat from your eyebrows and made the seaweed sweetly stink. The water was still that day: even the surfers noticed. I pushed my hands into the sand and inspected every grain that stuck under my fingernails. You played with a shell between your palms and without looking at me told me I was everything you wanted in a lady. I smiled, and pushed my hair aside. How so, I wondered. You just are, no reason really. I laughed and said I was glad he thought so. I will always remember how that made me feel: wanted. I was wanted by you, I was enough for you, and in turn, that was enough for me.

Phonecall?

I finally take the time out of my day to write to read, and what do I get? My phone vibrating with the words "DON'T ANSWER. NO REALLY." flashing up on the screen. I felt a rush of hot horror flash through my body starting somewhere in my skull and landing in my toes, taking all my strength with it into the bottoms of my shoes. I was convinced for a second I peed myself. Luckily, the phone just kept flashing until the call went to voicemail and no emergency bathroom breaks were needed. But hold on, let's be serious: the hell does he want? Really? Calling at two in the afternoon? What could possibly have happened at two in the afternoon that he would feel the need to call me? If it was at night that would be one thing. Then at least he could have been drunk and needed to tell me sorry he called, he can't remember why he called in the first place, and was I doing okay? At least then he would have had to call the following day and apologize for the annoyance. But unless he took up a hardcore drinking problem, it's still 2PM and it is still too early to get saucy off a single beer like he normally sips. Maybe someone kicked the bucket; did someone important die? I checked BBC, CNN and Google, but no one of any importance. Tom Waits and Mick Jagger are still alive and kicking. Did he forget a sweatshirt at my house? Did the new girl make him cry? Did I leave more CDs than I had thought in his truck's glovebox? I'm pretty sure I cleared them all out but there are still quite a few empty pockets in my CD case. Maybe he missed being able to tell me how work was or how his Dad never stopped bothering him about getting a real job and medical insurance. He left a voicemail; I had to go through 5 unchecked messages from my mother until I got to the one he left and: it was the sound of him hanging up.

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.