How beautifully blind are we to ignore the smallest things in us, for it is the smallest parts in us, that give us the power to do the most brilliant of things.
Our fate lies in the hands of the things we love and sometimes the things we love are the things that lead us to the fatal destruction of ourselves.
But every once in a while you will come across someone who will completely rob you from your sleep, and those are the people who are just too beautiful to put into words.
In the middle of a wrist’s suicide slash-line, below the layered skin and above the pulse, there’s an acupuncture point that says, Get back to who you were meant to be. This is the heart spot, the center. Your whole life the skin on that place will stay closest to being a baby’s skin, as close as you can get anymore to the way you started, the way you once thought you’d always be.
Buying kids booze was against the law but hell, it wasn’t the worst thing he’d done. After that, it turned into a thing – they’d see him and wave, and they knew his name and let him be one of theirs, one of them. They cut a small place in the world for him to belong.
I thought I was old, back then. I thought I was grown up. I didn’t know all my big mistakes were up ahead of me, still to come. Always.
This was my language. The house was talking to me. It was telling me about my own mistakes: they don’t go away. The trash goes out, but it seeps back in tiny increments, like the backflow of blood, the rush that causes a heart murmur.
He was hurt. He was a man who needed a country. I was a woman who needed a man. I’d be his country. He’d be my dictator. I saw our future unfold like a history book.
And she thought, Who the hell are you, Mister? But his eyes were blue and his hair was thick, and his arms were strong and sinewy. He had a Nevada tan, desert tan, wherever he’d been living, wherever he sometimes went. He was gorgeous, that hothead. She put an orange segment in her mouth, held it out toward his mouth, leaned in, rolled on top of him, her body over his, and he bit into the orange, gulped it even, made his mouth ready for more, for her, like he’d been starving.
Space is never empty. Emotions have vectors and velocity. You can crush a person from a distance. Sometimes the first weapon is the act or art of pulling away.
I watched the moon through the window. It was a beautiful, floating illusion of a still point in the universe. Dark shadows passed over the plains, mountains and water.
The moon was now paper-thin and fading. That moon was sky-tinged, the way you could see right through it to the blue of the evening light, and it was hung like a damp tissue as though pressed against glass.
When I stand around all day, into the afternoon, I start to feel like a good bike pulled to the curb. I’m every car that’s ever idled, a motorcycle gulping its own exhaust, lurching toward open road. I’m paid to stand, and I get this feeling my body is waiting for my mind to figure out what I’m supposed to do with being alive.
Where we grew up, we didn’t learn how to live. We learned how to bury the land, seal life off. There was an unacknowledged backdrop to being a kid on land that was fast turning into strip malls, when you loved trees and a silent corporate presence kept showing up to knock the trees down. It was the helpless sense that everything you ever loved could be destroyed, without debate.
Come with me, Mack,” I said. “Back to my place.” I tried to pull my hand back. Our fingers were intertwined like those bloody hospital robes. I didn’t mind, even when he scared me a little. The blood that kept us alive was trapped just under our skin, racing through veins. All those cells inside and out were fighting for a way to move closer together, beyond the trap of skin, dependent on breath.
Outside the window, one lone car passed and threw a violent blast of rainwater over the sidewalk. It was a storm, by now. Looking at that rain, I was falling deeply in love with our warm bar. What could you do, with a world like that? I was in love with every minute of being alive even as I floundered.
There is no such thing as a truly single person, only a lonely one. Humans are porous in the borders of our skins, these walking micro cities.
Everything was out in our crowded lawn, really – love, anger and jealousy. History and intimacy. You could breath it in, thick as fog. I wanted to yell, Get out of our yard!
You will be my favorite ex,” I whispered in his ear. “I’ll be your fifth former wife. We’ll mutter crazy dreams together then apart, but you will always be with me.” His breath was warm and so very human, not demonic at all. He said, “Don’t break my nose.” I said, “I won’t even break your heart.
Love is a demon. It would take over, and it would kill us, but first it would keep us all alive.