Letter to A Mechanic on I-295

Tom -

There's a wide divide between the place I come from and the place I'm going, and what spans that divide isn't ambition, really, but the determination of dreams.  When I get to the epicenter of that divide - the place that is equidistant from anywhere else - I get a strange ambivalence about which direction I should be headed in.  It's in that way that I am the most easily lost; the thick soup of what any girl would want, and how each heart's destination starts looking pretty good.

I wish... 

I wish I was at the beach, the long hours unrolling into the sound of the waves.  Things become brighter there, the glow from under the umbrella a bright blue cold enough to raise a chill against the red of the swimsuit I've never owned.  While you don't exactly fit in there, you squint in the sun, pacing the boardwalk, rubbing the grease of your hair with your claw clutching your cigarette, and promise me a tattoo if I'll tell you my name.

I wish I'd run away the time I threatened to, and I stayed in the apartment in the Bronx.  I think the city I choose is the kind people swear they'll get out of someday, and I like it for the finite feeling.  Every lifespan is shortened by it's danger and it's dreamless slumbers, and I would sing about them all.  

Where does anyone really belong?  Where do you?  I think if I possess any more of this earth for myself, I'll have to start declaring myself it's inheritor, or it's master.  Bonnie got it right when she became the light source in any room, and the feeling of forgetting something at the beginning or end of any long trip.  Insubstantial things she can don and discard with the shifting moods of the day, where I'm solidly made ever more real with things like sandstone, and Belarus.  

I wish for a moment there was a clear line from anywhere, to anywhere, the way all maps seem to lie that there is.  

Anyway, I drove around last night looking for you, convinced you'd be in that aimless place.

-Evelyn

Found on a Bathroom Wall in Decatur

It's burned into the tile, there,

Tight-lipped,

Their forgotten I love yous.

She crawls on me 

Looking for things she lost

In my skin, 

The repetition of it all

Making it too late

And too unwanted 

To catch the significance

Running off of me 

"Do you remember the time..."

She blanches,

I turn,

She cries, 

I turn back,

She whispers her protests,

I get it.

"It Ain't Me, Babe..."

Her fists make small hurdles,

Past which I might kiss her.

"I meant it's irresponsible.

A bomb went off here."

Her tears create a slalom,

A dress rehearsal,

A reminder of the children lost

As casualties of all such...

"That doesn't make it a war."

I pet her hair, 

The tiles cold under my shoulder blades.

She sinks to my chest,

Low disappointment

Lobbing her voice

Soft and girlish.

"That's just something else we're not."

There's junkies in Florida.

Rapists in Amsterdam.

Genocide of all rich maneuvers.

Desecration in a boy's heart.

All objects which I could 

With cruel precision 

Slip inside her 

Wanting body.

She chooses for me,

Her lips red stretching

The distances I'm prepared to go.

I knot my fingers hard

Into her curls and grip tight

Because she won't fucking let me.

Her shoulders fall heavy 

Oblique to my thighs.

"There's a way to measure this," 

I whisper, my voice replied by tile,

But she doesn't hear,

Or pretends to.

This could be the end,

The way she flicks her 

Tongue to meet me in my discovery.

This could be the end, 

How I am so beholden to

And idea I surrender to,

But could only brutishly describe.

This could be the end, 

The sunset of my years inside her.

Her eyes beg me not to say it,

And so I am quietly devoured, 

Pride and all.

In the silent dark of her.

In the closed funnel of the wave of her.

I swell up, bee-stung and atrocious.

I wait my turn.

I abhor the gentle pry of her fingers.

She pushes lithe with her small tongue

Pulling any wreckage she pleases from the reeds

And pressing me backward into each pylon,

She forgives,

And forgives,

And forgives.

Happy Christmas from John and Yoko

How Christmas works is...

We get quiet.  Quieter than we will be for the rest of the coming year.  The prospect of possibility looms terrifying and the past nips close behind us, teeth sharpened by ancient grudges.

The camp is silent this morning.  Normally, the PA system Drama put into place would be humming a song - at this point likely a Christmas song - but today, it's quiet but for the rain that falls gentle through the icy branches of the woods and peppers the leaves below.

Nicholas woke early, I know, and has been listening to the rainfall for hours.  The idea vindicates me somehow, lost here in the endless mold of New Jersey.  Good.  Good for him.  I hope it pattered against his thoughts and interrupted every creation of any beautiful idea he had, he fucking wants to live forever, this is what your life becomes.  Months of listening to the rain on leaves, and forgetting what you were going to say.

In Maine last year, the snow was as wet as it was fitful, the sky coughing down something slick and phlegmy when the temperatures dropped low enough I worried about the animals.  Matthew and I shared the top mattress of a bunk bed, his arms skinny enough it was almost pointless to depend on him for any warmth.  He scoffed at my recitation of "War is over, if you want it," the look in his eyes pained as he focused on objects so distant, I could never hope to see the detail of them.  Old lovers, the house he grew up in, the name of his father, the too-rapid decay of his body all items of proof on the vanishing point of the horizon that he would be chased forever or die fighting.

New Jersey is kinder, softer now in the rain.  As I turn the corner near his cabin, he exits without a shirt to run to the showers, his smirk one of refused defeat.  He defers to me with a soft-spoken greeting of, "Hello, Eve," and it shocks me as it always shocks me how quickly the Devil in him becomes a reticent boy.

Brad raises the flag in the center of camp clutching a cup of coffee, his eyes swollen slits surrounded by raised flesh pale and smooth.  The cord on which he raises it clacks metallic against the pole, the flag catching the breeze at it's apex, gold-capped and streaked by rain.  John stands beside him, his arms crossed to warm himself in the cold, and questions Brad on the Flag Code.

"Isn't it supposed to come down in the rain?" he yawns, and Brad recites the Code, from memory.

"The flag should not be displayed on days when the weather is inclement, except when an all weather flag is displayed."

John nods, his hair a dripping blonde mop.

"Yeah, and it's a brisk raising, it says.  Was that brisk, do you reckon?"

"Oh, fuck you," Brad replies, and they rush back to the cafeteria for breakfast.

Matthew, and now Brad, both leave me alone in the center of camp and wondering about what it is I really think I know anyway, about solitude, and attrition.  I know Bonnie's reply to me before she's even awake: "Well clearly, doctor, you've never been a thirteen-year-old girl."

As the year went on, one by one, we crawled out onto the roof, stood up with our backs straight, and jumped off.  Now, in a jumble of limbs and blame for unspoken apologies, we lay and try to remember which arm belongs to which shoulder.  The point of destruction might always be a sick kind of unity.

"I woke up in pieces," I tell Grady when I see him, hoping this is explanation enough for the silence, and the sarcasm, and the thoughts of an endless war.  I think he's going to say something in Spanish, his skin dark enough in the half-light of his room to make his teeth flash, but he doesn't.

"War is over, if you want it," he sings low, his bare legs stretching from the bed and hitting the wood floor with dull sounds of waking.  The sheets rustle as he stretches.

Yule

Rain got into the Camaro last night.

I guess I didn't remember to roll up the windows the last time I drove up to the city, which was never, or every night.  I can't remember.  I can't remember because the woods are thick here, and Clyde keeps saying that something is going to happen, and then it doesn't.  It's distracting to me and Bev, so I turn her radio on, and I pretend she's playing me all the Journey songs he likes.

It just doesn't happen.  So I go to the city at night and wait for Christmas Eve.

Hello, it's Evelyn.  It's winter again, and we are camped out in the woods this year because a stranger told us to do it.  With us came nightmares and wishes and impossible disappointments.  I never thought I'd miss Maine, but I might.

Christmas Eve was supposed to mean some big revelation for me; some understanding of my place in the world based on this cycle that Clyde and I do.  I thought I'd have more figured out, but as usual with the holiday season, what it promises is never what it delivers.

Yesterday, I got into a fight with Adam and I called him a fucking coward for running off in the middle of it, and he said he was sick of me.  I think that's something we all feel as a result of this endless rain.  We usually don't fight like that, but I went running to Grady and left all the woodland creatures looking out of their burrows like the world was ending.

Bonnie was with Matthew, doing God-only-knows.  I think I feel the logs molding, and swelling when the temperature shifts.  I think it might feel sick here, like the impending feeling of danger before a storm.

It's not that I wish everyone got along during Christmas.  It's that I wish it held some wonder for people in the way I find it wonderful.  I want to know if there's someone who gets lost in the places I get lost, but I stopped looking.  Bonnie and Clyde and Adam would all insist I'm never alone, and they'd be right.  I'll turn and they'll be there.  And I'll turn, and they'll be there.  And I'll turn, and they'll be there.  It's not that I'm alone.  It's that at some point, I stopped checking altogether, because I got secure enough in the knowledge.

I tried to dry Bev out, with towels from the boathouse, but those were also wet, and swirled watermarks onto the leather inside.  I wanted to be a poet here.  I wanted a place of my own.  I always think any change of scenery is going to transform me into Jack London, but it never does.  I just get more and more like my brothers every day.  Liars, and minstrels, and devils.

Last night, late, we salvaged the holy ritual of Yule even though there was a lot of blood behind our eyes.  It was almost 3 when we showed up in the big cabin for counselors.  I always walk into that wanting to shake hands, and end up...

I miss a good hand shake, and all it meant once.  It makes me think if it ever comes back, those will be the times of war, and things like posture and eye-contact will be measured with a kind of malice.