I wanted her to know, from the moment she heard my voice, that I was dying. I delivered a salutation so craven, so wretched, that it fell through language like pebbles. Hello.
I was never good at jumping in, letting go of one element and embracing another.
Then Potato ran by. He was a little brown dog, just like the woman said. He tore past me like he was about to miss a plane. He was gone by the time I even realized it had to be Potato. But he looked joyful, and I thought: Good for him. Live the dream, Potato.
But we couldn’t see to form a chain of doubt between each other’s eyes. And her voice had a vibrant certainty that made believing her feel liberating and obvious.
He pulled away, the teenager pulled away, but his eyes held my eyes like hands.
A teenage Filipino boy walked up to the car and just stood there, the way people do when disaster strikes.
For the first six months I just walked around in a constant state of amazement. I looked at other couple and wondered how they could be so calm about it. They held hands as if they weren’t even holding hands.
But as the sun rose I crested the mountain of my self-pity and remembered I was always going to die at the end of this life anyway.
I wondered how many other things had flown past me into death. Perhaps many. Perhaps I was flying past them, like the grim reaper, signaling the end. This would explain so much.
When I said “a lot of work,” I moved my hands apart to represent all the work. He stared at the space between my palms and asked if I played the accordion. I could feel the accordion between my hands and how impressed he would be if I said yes.
Each day I wondered what would happen next. What happens when you stop wanting, when you are happy.
I wanted to be the kind of teacher who learned from her students.
I felt like I wasn’t living thoroughly enough – I was distracted in ways I wouldn’t be if I’d been born in 1929.
I had written the same word seven thousand times attempting to alchemize time.
Always running and always wanting to go back but always being farther and farther away until finally it was just a scene in a movie where a girl says hello into the cauldron of the world and you are just a woman watching the movie with her husband on the couch and his legs are across your lap and you have to go to the bathroom.
Multidisciplinary is just us applying a fractured mentality onto something that’s actually whole.
And as I crawl, I realize that this one was the Big One. It was the earthquake that shook the whole world, and every single thing was destroyed. But this isn’t the scary part. That part always comes right before I wake up. I am crawling, and then suddenly, I remember: the earthquake happened years ago. This pain, this dying, this is just normal. This is how life is. In fact, I realize, there never was an earthquake. Life is just this way, broken, and I am crazy to hope for something else.
We held each other’s hands and laughed with feigned embarrassment that gradually took hold and became real.
I feel into the eyes of every person I passed on the street.
That’s the problem with men my age, I’m somehow older than them.
Ce n’est pas de votre faute.