For Adam, 5/27/17

Adam,

Every drumbeat I hear leeches something from the steadiness of our heart, carry something that might be my conviction to a higher stratospheres of brighter air.  It seems like the bags we stuff into closets in the winter I now suddenly need, and opening them up, I find cats have been sleeping inside them, and moths have been nesting.

In the song Eden, you convince yourself of something resembling peace, and easily talk yourself out of it again.  It seems you are as calm as I've been lately, letting your heart race along in time to something which seems like panic, but might only be the gravity of your true existence.

I can hear the swell of it run itself loose, like a dog running the shoreline of the Pacific.  You run yourself dogged to the same conclusion any of the lonely runs themselves to, and finding the truth waiting, I can hear you reach the understanding that God must exist, and couldn't possibly, at the same moment.

I am reading this to some audience, now, while watching you slip your hands into the pockets of your coal black trousers, sand seeping over your leather shoes as you walk from the boardwalk to the water, your expression hard to read as you squint in the sun:

Eden is...

The place you feel in your heart, that sun shines from, at the back of your mind.  It's a reassurance that God is both real and never was.  It's this beach, and the space inside your pockets, where I know your hands are dry and pawing a gold locket given to you by Nick, full of two faces you don't recognize.

The truth about you is that anywhere you are, and anywhere you go, you're alone.  This beach, which is still cool for the spring, I know is somewhere still covered with morning joggers and families making sandcastles.  But when you arrive to it, all life condenses into this single expression; this dark and heavy outline of humanity, into which every experience of children is poured.  You make the sandcastle, you kick it over, you experience the loss of it, you experience the vindication of it's destruction, and as you walk the grounds of this garden, you're alone.

God existing is the same as him not existing, and you being everyone is the same and there being no one else but you.  The boys I know who run the length of the water with their dog have clean and pale lines along their necks, crew cuts new for the season.  They lined up, I know, in the dim kitchen of their mothers, the clippers buzzing obscene, and they bowed their heads to her small stature so she could shave their heads for them.

You're so quick to accuse me of motherhood, but I wonder if you consider all the mothers you are.  All the mothers who are forced into fatherhood by severance, the small women who raise sons, your mother, and how she was always you, within.  The kitchen, becoming Eden, sliced into segments by the light of day which cuts in around the heavy vinyl blinds.

Eden is where you're always alone, but I can't remember if that means the same thing as being alone with me - the taunts and jibes of that same solitude being ironic.

You walk the streets of Amsterdam, and you're alone.  There are people, but if you looked closely, they'd be some simple variation of you or me, which you do not.  You ignore them except for the vague sense that they might exist, or have existed once, like portraits of long-dead kings.  The streets are silent of bicycle bells, and empty of cars.  You move over the face of the earth regarding it as a part of us, something so similar to our physical structure that it might respond the same way our skin does to your touch.

The brown stones which line the sidewalk in the flower district are cupped gently by your fingers, and released again, at the same time that your legs move strong into the tide of the Pacific.  You inhale sharply and remember there is no God, once again, making love the only thing in your nature as a man to do.

Love,

Evelyn

May 2nd, 2017: To Cave, With Love

Cave,

I don't doubt you've had a great outpouring of grief and support in the last few years. I thought of you often, as an artist I've invited into my life, and I often wished you well. But now that it's been 8 months... now that the iron of my rage and indignation has cooled... I want to tell you...

I want to tell you...

Those words, and that unfinished sentence ring into this hollow place where I am a consumer of your art, and you are an autoclave into which I placed all my infectious glass beakers of emotions to be steamed away, track by track, the morning Skeleton Tree was released in the US. 

It was September, beautiful, bright and golden light dancing through trees unwilling to shed for the year. It was warm. The inside of the car was heated enough to make me sweat as I drove, the flat brown box like grim pornography on my lap. 

The night before, I drove two hours over the Sierras into a pink sunset to see your film, and I watched it stricken, letting it wash over me like a terrible telling of my fortunes. My brother (34, stubborn, childless, engaged, immature, and always looking for the magic under the rocks of this world) was dying of cancer. 

In three months I watched him waste from a stout and thick-armed rifle hunter to something bird-like and deformed, but this isn't about the torture he endured. It's about the gift delivered that morning, right on time. 

It took all day for his heart to stop, and I left after dark, the streets bathed in cool winds. In my apartment, I examined your album. A blank screen, the words a fresh splash of comfort after a machine fails, and then recovers itself. 

A hard reboot, my brother called them. The expectant green shade of a return to sanity; a hope that your work was saved after all. And is it? I found myself questioning that optimism. Is it safe, for when I return, this massive body of my own work, my own unfinished art? Will it be here, when I come back? There's nothing a writer fears more than amnesia, or death.  Will anything be waiting for me, when I come back to this earth?

I listened with some trepidation. I know you too well to think you'd be placating and maybe I wanted that. But what I could expect was for you to look straight out, over the vast terrains of the earth, and tell me what you see of magic that is tucked beneath the rocks. 

-Evelyn

Equinox - 3/21/17

William,

The bare plate of the ground shivers when I break through it, fingers reddened and swollen from the effort of clawing through the frozen ground.  I rise in pieces, my hair catching in between the roots and sticks of my grave, turning my head sharply.  I cough wet and maroon mud onto the glittering frost clung to the ground in the late dawn.  My fingernails break, and my knees free themselves scraped and haggard, two bones forcing their way out of the cocoon in which I've been buried.

Naked, I tremble on the cold ground, holding what's left of my intestines, the shells of dead insects tumbling from their hollow tubes.  Each painful gasp of freezing air causes a wheezing sound in the cavity of my chest, which steams gaping breath into the gray morning, like the breath of a dragon.

My shins are gnawed to sharp splinters which gouge the ground as I try to move, dragging myself on one stumped arm to the river.

It is the first day of spring.

In the undergrowth, which is warming as the sun rises to melt the hoarfrost, I turn to vomit more heavy mineral earth onto the foot of a tree, and with it comes teeth and fur, in chunks oddly dry and wizened, like the last bites of apple in a princess' throat.  The same mixture presses along my wreck of intestine, squeezing with the contraction of muscles I might've had torn away.

The long drag to the river is marked with the repetition of your name, and the hollow feeling visited on those trying only to survive.

The river is a sluggish vein, darkened from the lack of oxygen, and crusted at it's edge with ice and the cherry slush of blood clotting and crystallizing.  As my cavern of a belly crosses it, I think I might hiss, as if boiling.  I think I might make a sound like I'm being dissolved, finally, in a corrosive acid.  

The first thing that happens, however, is the insects coming back to life.  

Their bodies are simple, and the structure of them knits quicker than mine, so once I'm in the cruel ice of the river, A flight of insects escapes me, from the parts of my body beginning to dry and turn gray.  Larvae mature, grow wings, and escape through my protesting, screaming mouth.  

The screaming happens as the nerves begin to reconnect along the ridges of bone, where they've been pulverized in dull and yellow teeth, and along my spine, where the skin has nearly worn away.

A blind or missing eye is replaced, a jaw reconnected, and suddenly, the river... rushes.

I can feel the rush of it along dead skin, as though I'm trapped inside a plastic bag being battered by the wind.  The blood pours in, cold and warming as it passes through my ever-beating heart.  I get wet again, full of bacteria, river water, and silt from it's basin which heats and separates into bile, into saliva, into tears.  

I begin to be able to say your name, and have it make a rasping noise over the exposed tendons of my neck.  It begins in a kiss.  W.  W.  W.

I kiss the water, again and again, gulping it down, the sun reflecting off of glossy muscle rebuilding parts of my body.  I have legs I can begin finally to kick against the current.  I try to relax my legs, thinking I must let the river all the way in, all the way in to the parts of me which feel sexless, and must feel that way because along with my guts, the wolf would have surely gnawed away my womb, my vagina, everything, everything.

When I let it inside me, I can make the second half of your name, which becomes my own for all it means to me anymore, but a single place in the universe at which to direct all my wishes to live and be loved.  Will.  Will.  The kiss becomes a smile.  My name is William, when I want most, to live.

My skin slips off of me like a silent glove, and drifts thicker than I remember and lazy in the dips of the river, pulling over rocks as it passes, and the new skin which grows in it's place is pinkish-white, and glistening.

The riverbank is still cold, where I sit and wait for you.

Love always,

Evelyn