Category: Love

Love, Relationships, Things I Can

11. Things I Can Tell: The Other Story

smirkpretty

The phone pings. Almost there. Come out and help.

He pushes his bare feet into sneakers and doesn’t bother to tie them. Outside, she pulls past in her father’s SUV, shoots a U in the street, and comes to a stop at the curb. The afternoon is warmer than it should be. The last crusted mounds of snow cling to the shadows under the eaves. Everything else is soft again. Somewhere close, a bird sings and sings.

“Help with what?” He calls. She steps out and goes around back to open the hatch. He squishes across the grass and down the driveway. Smirking a little out of the side of her face, she leans towards him without turning. She is busy shoving something sideways in the cargo area. He kisses the exposed cheek.

Inside the car, blue and brown plaid cushions flop forward. She tugs too hard at a wooden foot and one of the pillows escapes. He grabs it before it hits the damp street. The upholstered monstrosity is jammed up against the ceiling of the car. He stuffs the cushion in by the window and fits his hands around the back. She urges the front feet forward. It twists just enough and slides out in one smooth motion.

They stand there together holding the two ends of the chair and glance at each other. She cracks a grin. He begins walking backward up the driveway and she wobbles along.

“You bought me a chair?”

“No,” she huffs. “Hold on.” She sets down her end, adjusts her grip, and picks it back up. “I bought me a chair.”

“Shouldn’t I be meeting you at your house to do this, then?”

It is too wide for the door when they go through straight. They slow, back up, tilt the top. He guides it at an angle. The bottom corner catches on the door frame. He pulls without realizing it’s caught and she lets out a little yelp. The wooden foot has gashed the molding.

“Oh gosh, I’m sorry.”

He laughs. “You should be.” He steps over a pile of shoes and nudges aside a plastic bin of sports gear. The lid topples off and he almost slips on it. “You’ve comprised the integrity of this meticulously maintained home.” Once inside, they set the chair down in the narrow foyer. Reaching around, he pulls her into to the corner where he’s pinned and then folds her into a hug. Even though the sky has been clear, her hair smells like rain. “I’m on strike until you give me a clue. Am I storing this thing for you? What’s the deal?”

She leans back a little and warms her fingers on his bristled cheeks. She looks at him. “Hi,” she says.

He grins. “Hi.”

“Come here,” she says as she breaks free. She clambers over the chair and up the stairs. At the end of the hall, she clicks on the light to his room. The cat leaps up from a pile of laundry and darts past their legs. “It’s only me, dingbat,” she hollers. She walks around to the far side of his bed and pushes at the mattress. It scoots a few inches closer to the door. The she twists open the blinds on the small window behind her and muddy February light trickles into the room.

The corner breathes wider as she opens her arms into it.

“Here,” she says.

“You bought a chair for my room.”

“Yeah. But also, I bought a chair for my room.”

He shakes his head. Smiling but only halfway.

“This,” she says. She traces the small corner, its emptiness around her, with her hands. “This is my room.”

“And your chair.”

She shrugs and her face slides into and back out of one of its funhouse distortions, quick as a blink. She glances down and touches her fingers to the windowsill. A draft chills the wooden lip. “A place to write,” she says quickly. She hasn’t looked back up. “ReStore had this sort of side table, too. It’s really small and I’d like to sand it down. You wouldn’t believe how good a deal –”

“That’s so presumptuous,” he says. Now she looks up and her eyes register this blow. But he smiles. “I like it. I like that you presume. I want you to.” He starts to step around and stops a few feet short of her. “Can I come in?”

She lifts her hand from the windowsill and laces her fingers together. “Sure,” she says. “But take your shoes off. I just moved in and I want to keep things nice.”

He steps beside her and they stand leaning into each other, gazing out at the room. “It’s cozy in here,” he says.

“Isn’t it the perfect size for me? It took me a long time to find just the right place.”

His hand is on the small of her back. He feels her arch her spine into his touch. “How long do you think you’ll stay?”

She turns to to look up at him. His glasses are cocked a little on his nose and she straightens them. “The landlord hasn’t asked for a long-term lease. He’s letting me do this month-to-month.”

“He sounds like an idiot.”

“Oh, he is. But he’s good with a wrench.” She drops her voice. “Also, he’s sexy as shit.”

He groans and bends her back to kiss her once, hard. Then, into her hair, he whispers, “That is one ugly chair.”

She laughs and pulls away. “Well, good thing it’s not yours.”

“You’re crazy.” He takes her hand and leads her towards the hall. “Let’s see if we can make that monster fit.”

 

Choices, Love

Link

smirkpretty

Magic Rings

We belong to the conjurer. Separate and seamless, you in his left hand and me in his right. A twist, a clang, we slam into one. Solid chain, linked, as if made this way. As if always.

It’s jarring when they slip apart again. So smooth they go, and this time, without a sound.

We no longer speak in the dark. Promise has lost its voice. Nevertheless, we lean in as if we still believe. Look here, he says. He gives them a twirl around his wrist. We watch, knowing better. The price of admission includes a pass for enchantment.

Do we want them linked or free? Reasonable people would just get on with it. Decide and be done. If the man unbuttons his cape and hits the house lights, we’d know exactly what we’re working with.

Maybe impotence is a form of power. For a night, a year, for the backlit wish of a lifetime, magic is indulgence. Against better judgment, we hope he’ll never let us see under the hood.

When faith is in peril, keep the theater dim. Whisper the charm. Follow the gesture of the offered hand and pay no mind to his fingers. He may or may not wear a wedding band. Of all people, he knows how tenuous the link. He knows there are always invisible seams.

He’s mastered levitation and the suspension of doubt.

What happens to the discarded ring? Somehow, the story lingers. We refuse the god but ask the pastor to invoke him regardless. He is there still, or maybe it’s just an imprint of an aged spell. Hammered metal, more than an orderly arrangement of molecules in a chunk of deep earth. It is a thicket of notions, a fasting band, a crown of thorns.

You slept for a hundred years, after all, as did I.

Metal, dust, molecule, atom. Inside everything is the smaller fragment. What holds an object steady is just a set of conditions. What holds the intersection in alignment is just the proximity of sets. The stitching is evident if you look closely enough.

Incantation is both source and sustenance: the words, the whisper, the angle of light, and where you choose to place your hands.

We are not fixed by circumference. Every line we draw contains the space between component parts. Anything can escape.

Anything can stay.

Love, Relationships

Don’t Blink

smirkpretty

Maybe when the moving van is idling in the driveway. Or as the plane lifts off. Maybe when the only ones left encircle the bed with whispers of permission. Or when chain link goes up around the place where lovers learned to fox trot long before they could imagine what would be lost.

It’s rarely so clear when we have our last shot.

Endings don’t come with a narrative pause.

When they do, the impulse is to fold like shutters. Pain approaches on horseback. Voiceless momentum, the vibration down low, the faint stink of iron and scorched powder. Get small and douse the lights. Better yet, dash out the side door and don’t look back.

My grandmother told me about the dust coming like night. More than a vision of it choking out the horizon, it was a growling, quickening pulse. Like the collective hackles of every living thing — mule deer, jackrabbit, gnat — bristled to action. Burrow. Batten down the hatches. Take cover.

Run.

It takes an act of will to unclench. That ending is not going to put on rouge or slow its gait. To look it right in the eye means staring down something whose ugly keeps expanding as it shambles into view. No wonder the urge is to cut it off before it can fill the frame. Call it claiming the story. Call it authorship. Call it power.

Call it for the cowardice it is.

Dare instead to turn towards that death. Creak open. Blink clear. See the arrival of the departure.

See it whole.

The architecture. The clay shards. Cracked paint, rusted locks, weathered lips. The polished steel fragment of a fallen bridge.

See the lines in its face. The leathered scar that masks its soft place.

Dare to love completely what you already mourn.

The chance won’t come again.

 

Love, Relationships

Flushed and Fleshed

smirkpretty

Margaret realized the chaotic nature of our daily life, and its difference from the orderly sequence that has been fabricated by historians. Actual life is full of false clues and sign-posts that lead nowhere. With infinite effort we nerve ourselves for a crisis that never comes.

– E.M. Forster, Howard’s End

So we stand in the low sun and try to flush out need with questions. As if need is the fat, slithering shush roiling the fallen leaves. As if words are the stick driving it to face us.

Smelling of mud and green apple candy, we lean against each other and try to flesh out need. As if our voices can give shape to something that may have just been a hiccup in the breeze.

I remember when love was a surging state. It had to rise up and flood the senses and then loving acts followed. Much like confidence. Like hope.

This was truth unexamined.

When does the possibility of bidirectional causation emerge? Is it when you grow up?

Or does seeing the relationship turn back on itself finally make you grow up?

Now I understand this: Act as if the capacity exists and you make it appear. You make it appear to be so, yes, and also to take shape, to arrive. Accumulate enough instances of contrived appreciation or optimism or boldness, and you become enamored. Hopeful. Brave.

Maybe like me, you don’t buy any of it. You’re sure you are fooling yourself and it might all come crashing down. Maybe you sort of wish you believed your choices are good ones and could possess the kind of conviction that clarifies each subsequent decision. Maybe you sort of envy the positive thinkers (upbeat or certain or — worse yet — both).

Like me, maybe you suspect the equanimity that must accompany conviction will never balm your fears. Indeed, doubt may itch at you until the day you die.

Face it. You are too far gone for faith. Or maybe too much here. You would never seal those doors lining the corridors of perception. A mind that knows (knows!) it is always missing something only needs a pinhole to chase light to its source. Your curiosity is the thrumming, silver string. It is one note that strikes at your key. You could no more still it than you could give up sight. Or sex. Or speech.

Like me, you want to move towards something. Like you, I want to stop moving and be.

We pause and hold the map between us. We start to draw along the contours. Instantly, the delineation becomes a perimeter. A boundary.

Even just tracing a route with our voices, we hedge.

Precision is folly. Orderly sequence is illusion.

Because the trail we choose forks. It always does. Yellow blazes then green and then maybe none at all. And here is a river, and here is a burl on a dying oak in the shape of a devil with a broken horn. Here is a sound like a creaking open door. Here is the shush, the movement at the edge of sight, the tunnel out from under the bounds (the bonds) we trusted held us to this place, and this place to the earth.

We lean against each other, word as breath drawing need.

Drawing it out. Filling it in.

We decide it is in fact a snake. With nothing more to go on than a single word from me, you step into the now-still leaves. I sense it. You name it. We add it to a collection that includes a single yellow butterfly and five slender minnows darting from their shade.

Today’s choice is the only one.

To you, I hold.

Like you to me.
 

Love, Relationships

Like the First Kiss

smirkpretty

Eleven likes in the morning. Twenty-four by noon. By dinner, 106,000 people had followed suit. Now close to bedtime, it has been viewed 15 million times.
 
Fine. I’ll watch the damned thing.
 
So I clicked and sat back. If you haven’t already, here’s your chance: Twenty Strangers Kiss for the First Time.
 
Sure, it’s pretty, all those smooth hipsters giggling in their scruffy not-quite imperfection. It’s hard not to feel a flutter. The discomfort is as much a buzz as the moment of contact.
 
Still.
 
So what?
 
Isn’t this the easy part? Thrill and freshness? The zing of discovery?
 
It doesn’t take more than opportunity and impulse to make a new encounter seem. . . well, new. It’s drive-through intimacy. The lasting variety has a much more difficult job. It has to tap deep down into the old to reveal something new.
 
The trick is not getting 20 strangers in a bare room to kiss for the first time. It’s getting a couple 20 years in the same bed to kiss like strangers for the first time.
 
That’s the video I’d like.
 
Like to witness. Like to live.
 
Like to be so lucky.
 

Love, Relationships

Eclosion

smirkpretty

What they don’t know is his wings come out at night. The leathered edge splits free of the scar zippered white across the burrow where it stays tucked in daylight hours into weeks into years. For longer than he can remember the damp fur has housed germinal flight. Something rests like brood XIX down there where the subtlest shift could mean the difference between incubation and asphyxiation.
 
For some, burial is only dormancy.
 
His need to unfurl is as pressing as that of a coiled spring wound wrong-way past its tensile capacity. The stretch never quiets and the threads never fuse even when forced immobile. They hammered beams criss-cross over hasp and hinge. They forgot what was in there.
 
Just because the creak of need is not discernable to the naked ear does not mean it has been stilled. Bend close enough
 
(I do)
 
and you hear it. The groan is not bone. It is not age. The creases by his eyes cloak hoods over the range. A low flame hisses at the furrowed firebreak delimiting the mouth, his cave. Stalactite teeth. Whiskers of plated beard thrum in the follicle and wait to split the skin from within. At the source the tunnel forks. A tongue thirsty for heat is pressed back waiting helical beneath his flushed neck. Up from the other corridor, fume and the hint of ignition. Somewhere, a fusebox. The plunger is cocked in a shadowed channel of his body where old leaf and stone have hidden it so well.
 
My fingers seek
 
what they claimed fell away like an umbilical stump. Perhaps they had to believe pubescent eruptions would fade into soft craters. Time alone would scour away roughness. Walking upright among the diurnal would grate off any remnant of scale. They imagined him inhabiting the rippled dune just as it poured into him and filled every crevasse. They pictured him, finally, submitting to the inevitability of that boundless desert terrain.
 
Except his fissures were already occupied.
 
Except everything has a boundary and every boundary has another everything it is holding back.
 
This chimera with the vocabulary of inventors (though I suspect he knows only a streak of what he is) finds no relief in sleep. Mind on fire. Minding the fire? Mining? The other half half-wakes. He cannot find comfort stretched on his back, lips falling open. The rumble deep in his lungs and lower still is too much like the first roil of contraction.
 
He knew what to expect. He knew their intent. He was fully two wholes when only one could live. He saw the glint of the knife before they had even divined their own actions, before they had even closed hands around hilt. They would. He prepared.
 
Second sight is not just the blessing of an intuitive but the birthright of a pterosaur. Like echolocation, that sister faculty of his mammal kin, it is not magic at all. It is not even a marvel, not to anyone who can conceive of the hum of momentum when its source never shows itself to sight.
 
Here now.
 
The slender strip of stars skulking at the edges of the blinds is enough for distance but not intent. I know by feel he has turned on his side. Breath and hunger. I reach. The webbing noses out against the sheet at his back. An inch then two. He lets his guard down though I would never tell him and he’d deny it if I did. The teeth of his scars unclench. As hungry as they are to tap the marrow of whatever they’ve been gripping all this time, their appetite for night’s promise is greater. He stays awake, or perhaps returns again and again to wakefulness. He watches. He keeps watch. Not with eyes and maybe not with any sense I can name though I surely recognize the tattoo of its clang against the etched walls of my own forgotten cave.
 
What they don’t know is that it is never too soon to knit the tears nor too late to tear back the stitches.
 
The creak of wing, the scratch of pteroid against the base of my skull draws my head to his shoulder and I am creeping finally into the hollows of my own eyes at the moment his tongue pushes free. Longer than any, a thickly sown field of buds seeking heat now whets itself against my jaw, my throat. Its length alone bespeaks a palate for furred flesh. It is a nocturnal thing hinting at blood and strike but this close I can tell it is as translucent as the membrane between the digits pulsing now from the trench beneath his scapulae. They hold me but reach past. At any moment, he will sense the expanse beyond the ceiling and vault up and out. Will I have a place in that ascent?
 
This right here is the entirety of what is promised. And even this is not guaranteed.
 
I release the damper and let in whole the chord of his appetite so tuned like the lost lower fifth of mine. Glossa streaks of ink and string, he sculpts the notes of a long dead language into the spells that bind my breastbone to his rib. The current he strains to catch with the first beat of his awakened reach is the one we trace onto our shared night.
 
It might slip. It might lift.
 
We fuse halves to fractions and produce a vibration to fit this tilted air.
 
Surfing into my own thawing dawn, I search for the stiffness in my neck, the ache, the thud of resistance I have carried for decades. It has become as familiar as the shape of my voice. Yet it is nowhere here. It has blurred into memory and even the electric pulse of recollection has skipped from its gutter and seeks a new route. All that remains of the body I suddenly inhabit is just softness upon softness. Feathers of ash rise free. The rest is burned clean.
 
Maybe the scars on tears on years were never there at all. The shape of those wounds was just the last generation’s abandoned husk. All this time they have been thinning. They have been giving way. They have been waiting to let me through as raw as newborn tissue unmarred and falling like water into him.
 

Love, Poetry

Take your Place

smirkpretty

Pick my nits and I will return
you to a place
in my nest
you may have to share

The breath of those who left
clings to dried silk, swathes
the mouths of half-born
twins curled and still
waiting
but not for anything we’ve given
the correct name

Eyes graze you through night
dropping
its curtain of sleep
snagged halfway between
up and under
as you enter the crowded
hearth I claim
is simply straw and bone

They stir awake and scowl
at the intrusion but do not
turn back
please
make yourself at home. They are in love
only with the illusion of peace.
Disquieted
by silence they
like me
prefer the throated
inconvenience
of your company.
 

Love, Relationships

Raise the Roof

smirkpretty

Be in it. Don’t overthink it. Savor the moment. Ride the wave.
 
All make perfect sense. We build together the shape of what we are becoming, like a barn-raising for two. I stagger a little under the rightness of right now. It is no small thing to meander through streets and chores and frost and night with a person who sees what you don’t and is thrilled to taste what he hasn’t before.
 
Kira the Fabulous says in Traveling Light,

You realize that they are choosing to show up in your life every day and create a relationship with you. That, my amazing friends, is the most incredible gift we can give another person. That shit is beautiful.

Then the stagger becomes a stumble. Because I am a mom with a bright and crackling boy and a shiny new mortgage. I scale a heap of bills only to look down on a career that might have plateaued. In a far-off canyon, I hear echoes of a story itching to be written. I haul my strong and aging body forward through this unexpected civilization. I find myself in a neighborhood with family and friends and an HOA in the village square begging for a new Communications Coordinator.
 
How does love fit into all this?
 
I crack my teeth on the stone in the middle of Kira’s admonition. “. . . create a relationship with you.”
 
Create?
 
What is this structure we are building?
 
Because it’s good every day with my Mister. Even when it’s hard, it’s good. Yet I still don’t know if I’ve taken enough responsibility for my own life to really draft a vision of a future and commit myself to the path. I spent so many years floating through things and just “riding the wave” that when I washed up on dry land, I found I was far from any chosen shore.
 
I am caught between competing imperatives. How does welcoming the rightness of what is here relate to being mindful of goals? We fashion the future with each step we take, don’t we? While shedding attachment to ideals and playing with the soil and sand of this moment, we are also molding the home we will inhabit tomorrow.
 
So I have to ask: Would I like Bug and me to be part of a new family someday? Do I want us to welcome a greater intimacy with a wider circle of people?
 
I balk.
 
Maybe I am not ready to choose that. Maybe I want my son and me to cobble together our own modest dwelling, our mini-team of boy and mama and pooch. Or maybe I am working on some assumption that my Mister and I can love as two, independent from our children, and that what we are together gives us all that is necessary for an epic love story.
 
It’s frightening to ask these questions outright especially when I’m already in a loving, healthy relationship with a man who pours rum all over the already rich cake of our lives. Do I risk losing him by digging? By overthinking? Looking too directly into the glare must be foolish because when I do, I find I can hardly speak. The notions and narratives I carry about a post-divorce future with anyone all end in disaster.
 
These are some of the phantom ideas twining around my throat: Stepfamilies are fraught with trouble and conflict. Second marriages are more likely to end in divorce. Kids of divorce have more emotional and behavioral troubles. Children in blended families are pulled in too many directions for stability.
 
If my Mister and I are both showing up to “create a relationship,” we are inevitably weaving our families together. Two of us, three kids, four homes. Are we just blindly laying the foundation for a world of trouble?
 
It’s not that I don’t want to build a new, big, healthy family again someday. It’s that I don’t want to rush forward and erect some kind of particle-board-and-asbestos relationship that will fall down around Bug and me and anyone else who shares this journey with us.
 
To gain a bit of perspective, I dug around. Dipping into a few resources (some of this is covered nicely in a Psychology Today article, Lessons from Stepfamilies), here is what I found:
 
1. Yes, kids from divorce generally do have slightly higher rates of depression and behavioral problems than kids whose parents stay together. The key words here are “generally” and “slightly.” When you get down to specifics, you find the toughest issues occur in the first few years after divorce. This is when financial resources are strained, parents’ attention is distracted, schedules are disrupted by shuttling between homes, and conflict between parents is high. When those issues settle down (and if they are managed well in the early years), children of divorce fare as well as others.
 
2. Yes, second marriages do have a higher chance of failing. Again, however, the majority of second divorces occur during the early innings. Divorce is more likely when a couple tries to cook up Instant Family by blending everyone together too soon and forcing unexamined romantic ideals onto the new configuration. If folks in second marriages set up good systems for handling the communication and conflict unique to blended families, they often have stronger family relationships than first marriages. This may be the simple outgrowth of the reflection and adaptation that are necessarily woven into the fabric of their relationships.
 
3. As in point 1, children in stepfamilies have a measurably harder time than others. However, it is becoming apparent that a few (unfortunately common) conditions set the stage for trouble. Depression and other emotional and behaviorial issues occur in children of stepfamilies when:

  • Conflict between the biological parents is high and persistent.
  • The new couple is focused too much on each other. Parents do not put enough attention on communicating with their kids and creating systems for helping everyone thrive in the new family setup.
  • Step-parents stray too far into their partners’ domain by taking on discipline and other sacrosanct aspects of the parenting relationship.
  • Discord between various exes and spouses pulls children’s loyalty in too many directions.

Now, I breathe.
 
Three years have loped on by since my son’s dad and I separated. It’s been two years since our divorce. This long stretch is just a blink. I am still upended — not daily, but maybe bi-weekly? — by the challenges up there in point #1.
 
My financial situation is shaky which both stresses me out and limits Bug’s opportunities. Also, with the marriage behind me, I fling myself all too eagerly into the consuming swirl of new romance. I let it carry my attention off. Towards. . .? Or away from. . .? Maybe a little of both? My son, health, and work sometimes shudder and bend as waves from a booming intimate relationship reverberate past.  And finally, while I have a blessedly cooperative relationship with Bug’s father, we have a tendency to wing past each other when tricky conversations are called for. This leaves us with holes in plans and schedules that can lead to overcharged interactions.
 
Yes, I have some work to do.
 
While I long to raise this barn with my Mister, we are only just now assembling our materials. Many of the choices rest in my hands alone. Yes, I do want a someday-family. It would be lovely to build that with this man who strikes my brightest chord. Nevertheless, laying the strong foundation for such a future paradoxically requires me to square my shoulders and widen my gaze. Beyond the silvery dance as we twine ourselves around each other, I have to nourish my bond with my ex-husband. Frame out a more stable career for sound financial footing. Keep Bug’s development at the dead center of my gaze. Seed my beds with lush friendships, juicy activites, and expansive commitments.
 
It’s strange to consider that the success of my most intimate relationship might mean attending to it less.
 
Forgive me if I need a minute or seven to wrap my mind around this.
 
I can hear his pulse just there on the other side of the door. I can taste on the air his eagerness to bite into the meat of this moment and feel for the stone with me. Yet somehow I have to temper my appetite. I have to trust that he will remain, as I will, within reach. Being good to him and to us means also staying true to a future self and to a someday-family because this is who we are now. It is probably who any of us has always been even though we didn’t know it. We are far more than two.
 
For tonight, I choose to feel us as sanctuary and polestar even as we stand outside, hammers in hand, affixing walls to the beams that may someday shelter all of us.
 

Love, Relationships

Then as Now

smirkpretty

When it all falls away (pretense, fantasy). When we run out of words. When he is just a hunched figure in cotton underwear standing at the sliding door talking to the dog. When we are rumbling bellies and sore feet. When the teasing from hungry lips gives way to dishes and air leaking from tires.
 
Then. Only then. Not even now. Not yet.
 
Here is what is then: He looks up at the path, nothing but bare trunk and brown leaf, and sees a single white light hovering there. He stops and stoops, gazing. A tiny spaceship dips, indecisive, at the skin of our alien planet. This one light arcs sideways now, streaking there all wrong across the early winter path.
 
Mesmerized. Our breath, caught like mothwings. Light on a strand of spider thread plunges into some impossible distance then reappears an inch from our noses.
 
This is what he sees. Then as now.
 
I trust this. He finds filament hidden among knob and stone. He plucks the string and calls up the first note. The chord, an atonal twisting of this day, this everyday day, into its converse.
 
This will be then. On our most trodden route, I am lost in what he finds.
 
Now, he asks why we are busier. Are we busier? This second asking, the shift in emphasis. What is truth? Not only what do we make of it, but what do we choose it to be made of?
 
Summer came. I bought a home. He coached and then didn’t. We lost one weekend then another. We are more purple. Less driven. More painted. Less rested. Better fed. Steadier. Scruffier. Here.
 
We lay together far too late into nights, those fleeting nights forever becoming mornings.
 
The dog panted when the rain began. I thought the roof had opened and the sky had found us at last. No. It was just ice on the skylight. The clouds tumbled in when we weren’t looking. They shed their weight.
 
Winter edges closer.
 
In the window of the train is the reflection of the opposite window and then the reflection of this window in the bus kiosk wall. This I see now.
 
This commute like every other. Unlike anything ever. He does not ride with me except he does.
 
I think of the woman in the prairie who fell asleep on a winter night and rose three times, restless in the pitch black. She lay awake for hours until finally giving up the fight. She tried to step outside. The door would not budge. Snow piled in drifts to the roof had trapped her. Digging up through a window, she found the sun was setting on the following afternoon, which was, in fact, the day now behind her.
 
We are so frightened when we hear of those who fall alone and lay dying, hours into days with no one coming. I wonder how terrible this would be. To finally, finally know yourself as you are: solitary, and maybe not a you at all. To suffer there with your absent god, the songs your mother sang, the terror, the surrender. All of it, your own and not yours at all, because you are not yours. Not really. The illusion finally bends. In the polished glass, a reflection of self and the door opposite. The glow you thought was distant and sacred is simply spider floss. A trick of light. So very near.
 
Blood and lung. Salt and water. It is all just evolution’s clever twist, the story arc in the leather-bound volume you’ve become. You never owned it. It is on loan. When the reaper arrives, he is not a hooded wraith or a thief after all. Just a librarian with an overdue slip and an open hand. Then the cover closes on your meager pages, your handful of lines. Threads slip loose as they always do. Some maybe even still drifting from the spine.
 
When we are bent to bones. If he stays and maybe even otherwise. This is then: He catches those filaments between fingers fine and silvered. No knots. No binding them to or into. He holds the strands up before me just long enough then blows them to sky like lashes. Like a wish.