Evelyn,
I had found the diary by coincidence it seemed, walking one day, dirty (it was raining heavily), mud caking to my shoes along the wood-trails of Van Cortlandt Park. Brad had favored Central Park for the duration of our time in New York, as most New Yorkers do, but I had found myself taking the train to Woodlawn Heights at first weekly, and then daily the second winter we were there.
The winter was still, and so I was driven out onto the street. We were alone, also; no more wives or girlfriends for that time until they would return in the new year. It was only the three of us, liberated for the first time, yes, but beginning to feel it's eventual sting of isolation. And so I became acquainted, rather intimately, with the John Muir trail.
As I said, it had been raining. The woods dripped a morose way near the aqueduct, and it was nearby when I spotted it - a flash of red which made my heart stop. I thought at first it was a cardinal, or stray graffiti, but it was somehow smooth and reflective, and therefore artificial. It was coming up out of the ground, as if it could not stay buried where it was (a trait I would come to know is yours in singularity).
You may be curious to know exactly how rain affects the colors around us. In the dimmer lights filtered by clouds, I was told once it allows our eyes to better interpret and differentiate color. In the rain, when senses are heightened thus, my favorite things to examine are soil, and stone.
Under the fluorescent greens, I saw amid the dung brown and vivid mulch of the leaves of the foregone autumn, the plastic bag protecting a corner of the diary. I dug it loose with my hands, mucking it from it's casket. It was the color of all my thoughts, interrupted. The color of my heart stopping.
When I had pulled it loose, I took it with me to the creek and washed the grime from it and my hands before opening it, to examine the contents.
The interior of the bag had no scent but plastic. When I saw the writing within begin at the top of the first page, aching girlish in loops of uncertainty, I closed it without reading the words at all. You see, I realize I had committed a terrible sin.
Tuesday, October 15, 2019
The Red Woods of October
The Red Woods of October
Red Rocking Chair
Life has a steady forward movement, marked in even hours and predictable turns of the sun and moon. Some of this is arbitrary, and some is necessary. My first enemy was time.
I can remember, or I think I remember, moments when time elevated me and everyone around me in a fast wind, and I could feel the adults lift their feet from the ground, pull their hands inside the cab, and let the leaves swirl around us with tornado force while we plummeted off of a cliff and into the blue space of the unknown.
"What's that?" I can remember asking about the sound of the great beast accelerating - the engines of time pushing this Earth delicate as an egg into the black arms of empty space. We have no place to live... We have nothing to eat... They have come for the car... And the strings pull long and then, let go, before resuming so fast I can no longer see his fingers steady on the neck.
When the wind rises, so does my heart, to listen to a call I think most people have forgotten. When the wind comes, it means...
"Are we leaving?"
And my question is met with not only silence, but derision. Because they're trapped here, while I'm not.
Montague Road
But people, with their ribbons, will try. They unspool from the heart, green and blue and yellow, and tie with promises around waists and wrists and too tightly around the neck. The beginnings of my sexual education were dance steps to avoid these being cast by all around me.
When I was stagnated to the ground, and the wind wouldn't carry me away like a dandelion seed to be as light as I felt, I walked to places too far to be found, and I let the ribbons of my heart go, into the trees, or out to the wind, where no one could have them but birds.
While outwardly, I had learned to be a girl, I was living inside the shell of one; a kind of unknowable boy responsive to fear and agony.
There was nowhere on Earth more desolate than this place, we made sure of it. The high desert autumn was dry and bright and the ground bleached white, pocked with browning leaves blowing in a bitter wind. It was the only place I'd ever go, where it's easy to learn things like how easy it is to let love die, or roll forever into nothingness.
Forest On Fire
In isolation, there is nothing left but principle nature. Adam once asked me, did I want to know what he'd learned, being alone for so long, as if I didn't know the answer would be this. Not who he is, but what he is.
The nature of me is exactly this long - this longing feeling to disappear into the smoke of a force destructive enough to blot out the sun - to outlast it until the last ringing sound dies at the end of all things.
Impasse
A girl's power is a coiled fox, dangerous because it is indiscriminate in it's target. They're unwieldy animals who do not consider risk against reward. All pain is necessary, all costs regrettable but not enough. In my nature is an animal who doesn't mind breaking the neck of the thing I love to free it from a trap. It doesn't mind chewing off a limb to simply die elsewhere. God and I have always been at an impasse. As much as I want to be consumed by him or his crushing worlds, the movements I make inside him never fail to alienate us.
Night Terror
The only way I know how to love anything is to dedicate the tooth and claw of this animal to a boy who will never know the difference, and let every other ribbon unroll and vanish in the wind.
Aurora Gone
The girl everyone sees becomes a stand-in for the girl no one sees. The girl no one sees bunkers down to weather this thing, and then this one, suffering them like indignities in a prison, until the voice comes like a suspicion.
The voice is low and hateful, and the hand is hard and flat. My back to a wall, the wall opens, becomes a door, and the hand pulls me into the dark, the voice whispering to me secret things. Things so secret, they defy expression. All the locked closets of my childhood vanish into an unending backstage where the hand and the voice feed the fox in me.
The secrets it speaks take the shape of a salt-field, a fire in the distance, wind bone-sharp on the skin; words like blanch and scar and thresh; the tightening of the glottal muscles before crying.
These shapes become a name in the dark, and the name becomes not a person, but a promise.
Bradley.
Flatlands
I become the tallest point on the smoke-field for miles and miles, knowing I am made of copper, knowing the storm is coming.
I acquaint myself with the dirt with the timid fingers of a virgin. The tree comes out in small movements, which I am motionless to watch. When the dawn comes, it blooms fire, and ticks like a clock.
I think all my prayers are made growing something which will ultimately be used to destroy (like Brad, that was Brad). It has to be that way, so I can bleed, and bleed, and bleed, and bleed.
Red Rocking Chair
Life has a steady forward movement, marked in even hours and predictable turns of the sun and moon. Some of this is arbitrary, and some is necessary. My first enemy was time.
I can remember, or I think I remember, moments when time elevated me and everyone around me in a fast wind, and I could feel the adults lift their feet from the ground, pull their hands inside the cab, and let the leaves swirl around us with tornado force while we plummeted off of a cliff and into the blue space of the unknown.
"What's that?" I can remember asking about the sound of the great beast accelerating - the engines of time pushing this Earth delicate as an egg into the black arms of empty space. We have no place to live... We have nothing to eat... They have come for the car... And the strings pull long and then, let go, before resuming so fast I can no longer see his fingers steady on the neck.
When the wind rises, so does my heart, to listen to a call I think most people have forgotten. When the wind comes, it means...
"Are we leaving?"
And my question is met with not only silence, but derision. Because they're trapped here, while I'm not.
Montague Road
But people, with their ribbons, will try. They unspool from the heart, green and blue and yellow, and tie with promises around waists and wrists and too tightly around the neck. The beginnings of my sexual education were dance steps to avoid these being cast by all around me.
When I was stagnated to the ground, and the wind wouldn't carry me away like a dandelion seed to be as light as I felt, I walked to places too far to be found, and I let the ribbons of my heart go, into the trees, or out to the wind, where no one could have them but birds.
While outwardly, I had learned to be a girl, I was living inside the shell of one; a kind of unknowable boy responsive to fear and agony.
There was nowhere on Earth more desolate than this place, we made sure of it. The high desert autumn was dry and bright and the ground bleached white, pocked with browning leaves blowing in a bitter wind. It was the only place I'd ever go, where it's easy to learn things like how easy it is to let love die, or roll forever into nothingness.
Forest On Fire
In isolation, there is nothing left but principle nature. Adam once asked me, did I want to know what he'd learned, being alone for so long, as if I didn't know the answer would be this. Not who he is, but what he is.
The nature of me is exactly this long - this longing feeling to disappear into the smoke of a force destructive enough to blot out the sun - to outlast it until the last ringing sound dies at the end of all things.
Impasse
A girl's power is a coiled fox, dangerous because it is indiscriminate in it's target. They're unwieldy animals who do not consider risk against reward. All pain is necessary, all costs regrettable but not enough. In my nature is an animal who doesn't mind breaking the neck of the thing I love to free it from a trap. It doesn't mind chewing off a limb to simply die elsewhere. God and I have always been at an impasse. As much as I want to be consumed by him or his crushing worlds, the movements I make inside him never fail to alienate us.
Night Terror
The only way I know how to love anything is to dedicate the tooth and claw of this animal to a boy who will never know the difference, and let every other ribbon unroll and vanish in the wind.
Aurora Gone
The girl everyone sees becomes a stand-in for the girl no one sees. The girl no one sees bunkers down to weather this thing, and then this one, suffering them like indignities in a prison, until the voice comes like a suspicion.
The voice is low and hateful, and the hand is hard and flat. My back to a wall, the wall opens, becomes a door, and the hand pulls me into the dark, the voice whispering to me secret things. Things so secret, they defy expression. All the locked closets of my childhood vanish into an unending backstage where the hand and the voice feed the fox in me.
The secrets it speaks take the shape of a salt-field, a fire in the distance, wind bone-sharp on the skin; words like blanch and scar and thresh; the tightening of the glottal muscles before crying.
These shapes become a name in the dark, and the name becomes not a person, but a promise.
Bradley.
Flatlands
I become the tallest point on the smoke-field for miles and miles, knowing I am made of copper, knowing the storm is coming.
I acquaint myself with the dirt with the timid fingers of a virgin. The tree comes out in small movements, which I am motionless to watch. When the dawn comes, it blooms fire, and ticks like a clock.
I think all my prayers are made growing something which will ultimately be used to destroy (like Brad, that was Brad). It has to be that way, so I can bleed, and bleed, and bleed, and bleed.
Wednesday, August 28, 2019
Letters 1
Adam,
Over the amber flame of your eyes, we join hands for this seance where you will explain for the first time, and possibly the last time, this dormancy. As things born without names, inside the other, we began life nebulous and strangely-defined, like shadows. When did you know me and when did I know you? It really wouldn't ever matter, until this moment, when I'm asking you with a certain fierceness to tell me so I can let this run through me, finally.
We would do well to make this a collection of our letters, I know, and have always known. But what I want is
Evelyn,
I can remember as a child, watching the television which was running a nature program narrated by a voice I know you sometimes hear in your head, a man's voice, with infinite patience, iterating to my prepubescent self that it is both natural, and mammalian, for mothers to let the weakest offspring die. If I was aware of you then, it was as a dark force beyond my comprehension; a cabal to which only the most dubious of my acquaintances belonged.
I have a memory of which I've never spoken, of the first instance I watched my mother shield me from the fists of my father. He had been aiming no necessarily for me, but I had been in the way, heedless as any toddler, not understanding that his jibes had become malicious and whatever game we'd been playing had become an entrapment. My mother moved her slight body with a swift motion to stand between us, and if she'd had a fire-poker on hand, I know I would've grown up an only child.
In the ensuing years, I would watch him, or something only hear him, elicit from her throat the meek whimper of her submission, but on this day, she growled low and animal, and I feared - reptilian, possibly, from primordial sections of my developing mind - that if I fell behind, I would be devoured by her, as surely as he would.
Adam,
There could have only ever been the pain. Confusion, humiliation. I can't face what I've done, any more than I can face what I am. I'm methodical in this rage, and always was. Was this surviving? No, you don't understand that the mother leaves her offspring to die, yes, but most especially, when trapped, she will devour her own limbs to escape.
Evelyn,
Terrariums are an interesting concept, much like ant farms: a habitat designed to sustain itself, in an isolated microcosm. I believe the knowledge it can work in science is partially the reason I tried to enact it in life.
Art, it is wondered, can imitate life and vice versa, but I wonder if the same could be said for science. Does science (the pure experiment) somehow capture the pure experience?
Adam,
I want to be taken away, is the problem. You don't understand, or couldn't, that I want to be taken on the wave of something which matters and makes the rest of the world dim. I want there to be a diminishment of sound, to a dark place where the mechanics of things are understood in a simplistic way.
All this might be attributable to a desire I have to get back to the garden.
Eve,
I've begun to arrange my thoughts, by color. Softest is where I find you, hiding beneath a green both secret and muted. Let me find it for you.
#5F956E
Adam,
Every time I feel like I'm onto something, a stray wind comes to shatter the cobwebs and I wonder if perhaps nothing is gentle enough, or soft enough, to contribute to the perfect den in which I can touch old parts of me which have retreated far below the surface. I was going to ask you to do it, but the song changed, and
Over the amber flame of your eyes, we join hands for this seance where you will explain for the first time, and possibly the last time, this dormancy. As things born without names, inside the other, we began life nebulous and strangely-defined, like shadows. When did you know me and when did I know you? It really wouldn't ever matter, until this moment, when I'm asking you with a certain fierceness to tell me so I can let this run through me, finally.
We would do well to make this a collection of our letters, I know, and have always known. But what I want is
Evelyn,
I can remember as a child, watching the television which was running a nature program narrated by a voice I know you sometimes hear in your head, a man's voice, with infinite patience, iterating to my prepubescent self that it is both natural, and mammalian, for mothers to let the weakest offspring die. If I was aware of you then, it was as a dark force beyond my comprehension; a cabal to which only the most dubious of my acquaintances belonged.
I have a memory of which I've never spoken, of the first instance I watched my mother shield me from the fists of my father. He had been aiming no necessarily for me, but I had been in the way, heedless as any toddler, not understanding that his jibes had become malicious and whatever game we'd been playing had become an entrapment. My mother moved her slight body with a swift motion to stand between us, and if she'd had a fire-poker on hand, I know I would've grown up an only child.
In the ensuing years, I would watch him, or something only hear him, elicit from her throat the meek whimper of her submission, but on this day, she growled low and animal, and I feared - reptilian, possibly, from primordial sections of my developing mind - that if I fell behind, I would be devoured by her, as surely as he would.
Adam,
There could have only ever been the pain. Confusion, humiliation. I can't face what I've done, any more than I can face what I am. I'm methodical in this rage, and always was. Was this surviving? No, you don't understand that the mother leaves her offspring to die, yes, but most especially, when trapped, she will devour her own limbs to escape.
Evelyn,
Terrariums are an interesting concept, much like ant farms: a habitat designed to sustain itself, in an isolated microcosm. I believe the knowledge it can work in science is partially the reason I tried to enact it in life.
Art, it is wondered, can imitate life and vice versa, but I wonder if the same could be said for science. Does science (the pure experiment) somehow capture the pure experience?
Adam,
I want to be taken away, is the problem. You don't understand, or couldn't, that I want to be taken on the wave of something which matters and makes the rest of the world dim. I want there to be a diminishment of sound, to a dark place where the mechanics of things are understood in a simplistic way.
All this might be attributable to a desire I have to get back to the garden.
Eve,
I've begun to arrange my thoughts, by color. Softest is where I find you, hiding beneath a green both secret and muted. Let me find it for you.
#5F956E
Adam,
Every time I feel like I'm onto something, a stray wind comes to shatter the cobwebs and I wonder if perhaps nothing is gentle enough, or soft enough, to contribute to the perfect den in which I can touch old parts of me which have retreated far below the surface. I was going to ask you to do it, but the song changed, and
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