Brad,
We tiptoed around dusty crates at the attraction, perhaps a carnival or hidden market, the light indicative of a secret withheld. Brown bottle glass, antique mirrors. I would have forgotten your name, if it was one you'd ever told me.
There was so much life that happened to me before I realized I could distill this down to the single sentence: we fucked on the couch and it my first time. I, as usual, wish I had saved some of that life so there could be more understanding of the process, but maybe the process doesn't matter, and didn't matter even then.
I knew it was a memory, but at the time I knew that ironically, like growing a new memory over the old ones I was handed by circumstance is a terribly passe thing these days and can be ignored as easily as refusing to acknowledge anymore remixes. Maybe the process is just as easily summed up by saying it's the same song, but different.
This could've been a poem if I was a different part of myself - the part maybe that sees poetry as a weapon instead of the pattering mortar of words which feels like an arsenal but ultimately moves little. If you push me around, I'll move. Justified down to the last pawn on the board; if you push me around, I'll move.
I'm mad because the dream happened, and like anything else, it makes sense only after the fact and maybe 20 years before, but no time in between. And I loved you.
No, that isn't what I was going to say. I was going to say I kept the love I felt for you a secret from everyone, and that's why we were never going to be together. I can never tell when I'm talking about you or thinking about you, if anything I think or feel is real. I don't know how this part of me works, and being close to you at all means I have a whole other half I might use to undermine it in the first place. I think this whole thing could be really funny if I wanted it to be, but I don't.
I don't know what to do with this slice of time anymore, not after I beat it to death to analyze where everything turned from good to bad. Not after I discovered I could never be a princess for you, accepted that forever, donned pair after pair of thigh-high fishnets to spite you, tried to grow up without you, felt like such a fucking disappointment to you, refused to ever trust you, cursed you loudly and often, only to wake up, Brad, to fucking wake up in the ash after the blast because you kissed me and a thousand years had gone by in the blink of your slick red time machine.
I wanted to be angry with you for this distinctly adamic maneuver, tying something up in me with a bow to present it back to myself like what's been in your pocket for the last 20 years was this puzzle piece. I wanted to be angry but at the same time, I was too relieved. Relieved that you had it, and relieved that you had it.
I can't remember really how we got here, except we fell in love the other night, and it felt like something unrelenting colliding with something unwarranted. So I find myself under you again, tangling into your hair, begging you not to stop again and forgetting what the both of us have always known.
I loved fucking you the first time because I could feel how my body belonged to you and no one else. It feels like that every time since.
I can't remember how we got here, but the slide passes from one side of the carousel to the other with a metallic sound, pushing one photograph over in favor of the next. Once, we were at summer camp, once we were orphaned killers, once we were newlyweds absconded from the law, once you took me to see how the world began, and now this. Now this, we lay on the grass in borrowed clothes and wonder what just happened to us.
But we couldn't know all the attendees of the wedding would be vaporized the next day in the power of the blast of the house exiting this atmosphere. We couldn't know it was their graves you picked through to propose. We couldn't know what it would take to marry my heart to yours, being unflaggingly the same.
I have to tell you, I lied to you so much when we were young because I was afraid of meaning the things I said. I promise I'll never lie to you again.
Love always,
Janet
Sunday, July 28, 2019
There's No Earthly Way of Knowing 1
In a way I imagine to be similar to the unwinding of a galaxy from a center point of creation, the house unwinds into things which could never contain it as we drive it onward with the elastic recompenses of our imaginations. The front lawn, the battlefield, the site of the Wilkes' barbecue, the Radley's front porch, Dracula's drawbridge, and I don't give a damn. I passed a hundred bodies on my way up the front drive and into my home tonight, all casualties of these close quarters I share with this pack of bloodthirsty animals, and I didn't see them at all because I choose not to see.
The swamp has absorbed all our bloodshed and lost hopes and dreams, and when it became saturated, it spat them back at us as the water overflowed the first floor and the hurricane raged outside. Maybe every storm has been a result of our unnumbered transgressions against god, order, and creation.
Gray House has a garage. I say that limply, to explain why all our cars are sitting on the lawn, or convince myself of some last vestige of humanity we've delayed in shedding out of sentimentality. We have a garage, and there are tools in it, and old boxes of things we've been meaning to throw out or tried to keep for too long.
The garage is large and unfinished with any drywall. The wood beams are home to spiders and the corpses of insects. Grady has three or four motorcycles in various stages of rebuilding housed there, and it looks, no matter how long it takes him to get back to it, like he's only just left the room. I think when he dies, this will be where we go to mourn him.
Adam, having completed the restoration of his own car 4 years ago, has begun work on the repair of John's rust-colored truck, which has refused to turn over since the day he came home. Adam and Grady have eyed the thing with suspicious glares, like it's alive and purposely defying them. The cement floor is generally grimy, generally cool, and growing moss in the corner closest the door.
But if I go to it now - if I cross the threshold of the place from the laundry room off the library on the first floor - and open the heavy steel door and expect to see this dim workshop before me, I know I won't. What will meet me is something a hundred times less expected and a thousand times more heartbreaking. Gray House will betray me, and become Joshua's garage if I look there.
I know from the moment I open the door, the smell of the air which greets me is no longer bayou damp and summer stale. It's winter in the Midwest. The smell of American misery, like piles of wet chaff left to freeze. It's the winter of 1973, and somehow, that is also on the edges of the air, as part of the misery; that which we despise and cannot yet change about our world and ourselves, and perhaps wouldn't, even given the chance.
Joshua's smell slaps me just beyond that - first of his hair and the soap he uses to shampoo it's twelve or so inches, and then the sweat he drips in working on the Plymouth he has on the lift. In this place, Joshua is the biggest creature in existence to me, and my world is comprised of this garage, flavored with his beer and smoke breaks with the garage boys, and blanketed in his vast checkered shirts. From this doorway, it's a hundred miles up to his shoulders where he carries me, to see the secret world above our ceiling fans in our apartment upstairs.
"Bug?" his voice calls, from this somewhere else. "You find it?"
I don't know what he wants me to find, there, or even if I'm allowed in the garage now that's it's night and we've closed. Maybe the sink is leaking and I just can't remember. Maybe I'm about to get in trouble for sneaking around for the first time. Here in the doorway, I can see with some kind of diamond clarity this one thought which dooms me always in that world: It would take a man even bigger than Joshua to...
I close the door.
The swamp has absorbed all our bloodshed and lost hopes and dreams, and when it became saturated, it spat them back at us as the water overflowed the first floor and the hurricane raged outside. Maybe every storm has been a result of our unnumbered transgressions against god, order, and creation.
Gray House has a garage. I say that limply, to explain why all our cars are sitting on the lawn, or convince myself of some last vestige of humanity we've delayed in shedding out of sentimentality. We have a garage, and there are tools in it, and old boxes of things we've been meaning to throw out or tried to keep for too long.
The garage is large and unfinished with any drywall. The wood beams are home to spiders and the corpses of insects. Grady has three or four motorcycles in various stages of rebuilding housed there, and it looks, no matter how long it takes him to get back to it, like he's only just left the room. I think when he dies, this will be where we go to mourn him.
Adam, having completed the restoration of his own car 4 years ago, has begun work on the repair of John's rust-colored truck, which has refused to turn over since the day he came home. Adam and Grady have eyed the thing with suspicious glares, like it's alive and purposely defying them. The cement floor is generally grimy, generally cool, and growing moss in the corner closest the door.
But if I go to it now - if I cross the threshold of the place from the laundry room off the library on the first floor - and open the heavy steel door and expect to see this dim workshop before me, I know I won't. What will meet me is something a hundred times less expected and a thousand times more heartbreaking. Gray House will betray me, and become Joshua's garage if I look there.
I know from the moment I open the door, the smell of the air which greets me is no longer bayou damp and summer stale. It's winter in the Midwest. The smell of American misery, like piles of wet chaff left to freeze. It's the winter of 1973, and somehow, that is also on the edges of the air, as part of the misery; that which we despise and cannot yet change about our world and ourselves, and perhaps wouldn't, even given the chance.
Joshua's smell slaps me just beyond that - first of his hair and the soap he uses to shampoo it's twelve or so inches, and then the sweat he drips in working on the Plymouth he has on the lift. In this place, Joshua is the biggest creature in existence to me, and my world is comprised of this garage, flavored with his beer and smoke breaks with the garage boys, and blanketed in his vast checkered shirts. From this doorway, it's a hundred miles up to his shoulders where he carries me, to see the secret world above our ceiling fans in our apartment upstairs.
"Bug?" his voice calls, from this somewhere else. "You find it?"
I don't know what he wants me to find, there, or even if I'm allowed in the garage now that's it's night and we've closed. Maybe the sink is leaking and I just can't remember. Maybe I'm about to get in trouble for sneaking around for the first time. Here in the doorway, I can see with some kind of diamond clarity this one thought which dooms me always in that world: It would take a man even bigger than Joshua to...
I close the door.
Wednesday, July 24, 2019
Welcome Home
Rosie,
There is no sound quite like the sound of the two of us crashing our house into the side of a world we don't understand. It makes a ripple in a flat pond, breaking hot the glass of our globe, smashing the fruit stall to wooden pulp, pushing little mountains up where the tension became to great.
Clyde split his lip, and threw Punkinbucket into reverse hard enough to ruin the gearbox and decimate the transmission because he likes to be part of the choir. That must've been why he peeled out of the parking lot of our apartment the other day - so we'd know the smell of him ejecting from a reality. Burning, summery, black, dragon.
He does all these stupid things for love.
I don't know how many times we've made this sound, and I don't know how many times Clyde's ruined that fucking car. I don't know, and have never known, where the beginning of our lives ought to be, or when to stop, or the point enough becomes enough. I don't know those things, and I've had occasion over the last year to turn that distinctly dragon trait into an angelic one.
See, I used to be afraid of the ash that falls in place of a belief in magic when you've given excuse after excuse after excuse (and by you in this example, I obviously mean me). Where things run out. Where hearts give out. Where my hypocrisy bends over backward to your isolation. Scars run the length of the Wasteland we built, moved into, celebrated, inhabited, and ultimately mapped by finding the edges which border it lined with living fur and the sound of Adam's laugh.
You know, the things which are the same as pigs flying.
I can feel you right now, even though this is hours or possibly days before you'll set your eyes on this letter, wondering who I am talking to you, and writing these expressions that you find boyish and possibly even a fumbling attempt to be charming or anticipate your reaction.
We got good at doing those things, while we were at war in the Wasteland. Reading our facets of self that prism rapid and unstoppable, as good as we got at freezing them to non-existence. Traversing places of lost time and meaning, fast as a Rolodex and just as obsolete, we flipped past that which we didn't want to see as if we were skipping whole sections of a book we've already read or a movie we've already seen to find out if we could push the tape just a little bit further this time, and let the pages fill in themselves again.
I used to be afraid of those scars, coated light with the falling snow of a detonated bomb that was Brad's handiwork; his final and cynical contribution when his eyes cloud the same as Matthew's. I'm not now because I can see there is no difference in this place or any other. We're together, where the magic is collecting like rocks in water, and our perseverance in beliefs doesn't matter.
It's easy n
Hey.
It's easy now, Mercy. I can move my shoulder upward in an idle stretch and stare down the giddy prom-night couple across from us on the M. It's easy and it's fast and I can shed this shit I don't care about and we can understand one another again. It would've scared me once, but it doesn't now.
We can touch a hundred ways, and it's easy now, as much as it was easy for you to turn to waterfall into Tinkerbell and wait with your arms crossed for my fucking applause.
When I give it to you, it's with the sole intention of wiping out all which came before this moment, in an attempt to give you everything I have within me. You, and just you. I have a war name for you. I have a cold rag for you. I have an idea to make this better. I have a stick of gum in my pocket. I have a way out. I have a way in. I have nothing. I have something.
Somewhere, an old war is being waged between right and wrong. Dylan and Brenda are breaking up again. Angels dance on pinheads, and little girls get ripped from nightmares with vicious claws.
Adam descends the basement stairs, Brad resumes his work on a song, Clyde examines the metal contraption he's built in the backyard, Dean executes a pirouette in the dance studio, Drama hits his teeth with the butt of a ballpoint pen, Grady dips his hands into black water near the swamp, John rolls over and covers his ears, Joshua responds to a text, Matthew pours his coffee onto the tracks, Nick throws his shoes into the corner.
Nothing preceded this moment. Nothing.
Hello, I love you, welcome home.
There is no sound quite like the sound of the two of us crashing our house into the side of a world we don't understand. It makes a ripple in a flat pond, breaking hot the glass of our globe, smashing the fruit stall to wooden pulp, pushing little mountains up where the tension became to great.
Clyde split his lip, and threw Punkinbucket into reverse hard enough to ruin the gearbox and decimate the transmission because he likes to be part of the choir. That must've been why he peeled out of the parking lot of our apartment the other day - so we'd know the smell of him ejecting from a reality. Burning, summery, black, dragon.
He does all these stupid things for love.
I don't know how many times we've made this sound, and I don't know how many times Clyde's ruined that fucking car. I don't know, and have never known, where the beginning of our lives ought to be, or when to stop, or the point enough becomes enough. I don't know those things, and I've had occasion over the last year to turn that distinctly dragon trait into an angelic one.
See, I used to be afraid of the ash that falls in place of a belief in magic when you've given excuse after excuse after excuse (and by you in this example, I obviously mean me). Where things run out. Where hearts give out. Where my hypocrisy bends over backward to your isolation. Scars run the length of the Wasteland we built, moved into, celebrated, inhabited, and ultimately mapped by finding the edges which border it lined with living fur and the sound of Adam's laugh.
You know, the things which are the same as pigs flying.
I can feel you right now, even though this is hours or possibly days before you'll set your eyes on this letter, wondering who I am talking to you, and writing these expressions that you find boyish and possibly even a fumbling attempt to be charming or anticipate your reaction.
We got good at doing those things, while we were at war in the Wasteland. Reading our facets of self that prism rapid and unstoppable, as good as we got at freezing them to non-existence. Traversing places of lost time and meaning, fast as a Rolodex and just as obsolete, we flipped past that which we didn't want to see as if we were skipping whole sections of a book we've already read or a movie we've already seen to find out if we could push the tape just a little bit further this time, and let the pages fill in themselves again.
I used to be afraid of those scars, coated light with the falling snow of a detonated bomb that was Brad's handiwork; his final and cynical contribution when his eyes cloud the same as Matthew's. I'm not now because I can see there is no difference in this place or any other. We're together, where the magic is collecting like rocks in water, and our perseverance in beliefs doesn't matter.
It's easy n
Hey.
It's easy now, Mercy. I can move my shoulder upward in an idle stretch and stare down the giddy prom-night couple across from us on the M. It's easy and it's fast and I can shed this shit I don't care about and we can understand one another again. It would've scared me once, but it doesn't now.
We can touch a hundred ways, and it's easy now, as much as it was easy for you to turn to waterfall into Tinkerbell and wait with your arms crossed for my fucking applause.
When I give it to you, it's with the sole intention of wiping out all which came before this moment, in an attempt to give you everything I have within me. You, and just you. I have a war name for you. I have a cold rag for you. I have an idea to make this better. I have a stick of gum in my pocket. I have a way out. I have a way in. I have nothing. I have something.
Somewhere, an old war is being waged between right and wrong. Dylan and Brenda are breaking up again. Angels dance on pinheads, and little girls get ripped from nightmares with vicious claws.
Adam descends the basement stairs, Brad resumes his work on a song, Clyde examines the metal contraption he's built in the backyard, Dean executes a pirouette in the dance studio, Drama hits his teeth with the butt of a ballpoint pen, Grady dips his hands into black water near the swamp, John rolls over and covers his ears, Joshua responds to a text, Matthew pours his coffee onto the tracks, Nick throws his shoes into the corner.
Nothing preceded this moment. Nothing.
Hello, I love you, welcome home.
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