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.
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.
We’re mourning and celebrating at the same time, so drink.
The day Travis met Lu he was in his best suit – dark blue, pinstripes, a necktie. Women his age would see right through his sweat and pretense. Any woman his age, she’d say, “What, you work at Men’s Warehouse now?” Yeah, a woman would know a cheap suit was like an easy costume, but the girls didn’t catch on.
She didn’t call. That was good. If she called, she’d have a chance to cancel.
Playing Frisbee gave Sean permission to look at Lu, across a short distance. He didn’t have to feel stupid for staring.
What I feel in that kitchen is the way humans are so flawed and so perfect, and I want to share bodies. You know your old dog? That’s how I feel – I want to climb on people, breathe their breath, lick the inside of stranger’s mouths. I don’t know these two, but who do we ever know, really, past the skin? How do we get there?
The Arboretum’s overgrown grass rustled. The branches of an apple tree shook as though an animal had jumped from one to the next. A wind slid up my thighs, in the night, under my short nightgown. Crickets and cicadas made a sound like distant laughing children, the laugh track to a sitcom that didn’t end. It was like the grass was full of tiny giggling babies. So beautiful, and creepy.
My head was so light. Wind sang through the field grass. The same wind brushed hair off my face, soft as my mother’s hand, and when the falling snow started to clump into flakes, each thick flake came down with the love of a frozen kiss, like somebody was saving up, freezing their warm love for later.
I, American in body and spirit, healthy, debauched and dedicated to travel, had no date. I felt a simmering discontent. What good was freedom when I wasn’t free to hand it over, what use was the currency of my body if I couldn’t spend it?
He said, “Only you.” I was alone and he was alone and we had nothing in common short of being human at night.