Endings

When the end is near, and then over, you always think about the beginning. You find yourself losing your train of thought during rush hour doing a steady 75 back to the day you met.

Or, back to the day you fell off your coffee table and onto his lap as he liked to call it. Back to the time you climbed through his window, tripped over his computer and crashed to the floor on the other side. Back to the hot pink-polka dot togas you wore on the lawn of Adams Street, where you made a pact to stay in yours if he stayed in his. Back to 10am, December 14th, 2006 clutching a red plastic cup and munching on a piece of bagel crust he made you eat. Back and back and back… You go back, even if you try not to, you do it. We all do. All these introductions add up until the list is so dizzying it takes you days to get through.

Sometimes, I feel like I am cheating because I know myself so well. Like when you read the last page of a novel before the first; don’t the other 130 pages feel cheap because you know where the author is taking you? - I always know where this is going. Every instance can be pinpointed:

The day my lap stopped being a pillow for his restless head because my need to prove that sitting still was for criminals was overpowering any and every other emotion. I felt it was my was my duty, my right if you will, to denounce people who have taken their ability to be free and squandered it.

The day your chewing made me wince so I placed my fork beside my knife and sat wide eyed watching you spill hot sauce down the front of your shirt. “Do you know how to use a fork properly?” I once asked.

Right now, I’m sitting in traffic on 95 and I’m thinking about the weather. All I can think about is the way he reminded me of the weather. Every year when the wind calms, I am comforted by the grass thawing and stretching back towards the sun because I am thrown back into my past. It was a time best described by the fact that the front door had no lock but I was still uneasy about just walking in. To this day, I am not sure if I loved being with him or just being in that lifestyle full of freedom and lazi-faire planning.

My passenger is telling me to get over it, that as with anything else, I need to make room for the new. She is saying “you need to let go of the past.” I want to say “I love my past.”

When we rear ended that couple on the night before I left, you threw your arm across my chest on impact to hold my body against the seat. Your arm caught the glass from the windshield. I often wonder about people who rear end other people and if the subconscious comes into question when white dust from the air bag is raining down . How did you know to put your arm out so fast?

Live, Alive

There was an ice storm over night and I slept while the city was covered in tiny frozen pellets. I didn't sleep well, but I slept. I haven't felt comfortable in this bed since before I bought it.

Sitting in the mattress store I flopped on mattress after mattress; I climbed on the hard ones, sunk into the soft ones, I sprawled out and curled up but unlike red riding hood, my need was not met. Nothing was right.

At night when I can’t sleep, I look at my ceiling and try to trace the cracks by the light from street lamps. I listen for familiarity in cars passing by my window and I think about that apartment you lived in. The cracks in the ceilings linked the living room and kitchen. I want to bring up the time we laid in bed and I asked about the cracks but you didn’t respond.

I find myself more often than not thinking about the apartments you’ve lived in that I didn't see, or never will see. The ones I’ve been in, the ones you’ve had me in- they don’t interest me. I stay awake at night and want to know you in a way I would never let you know me.

Sometimes, I lie completely still and try to see myself in this bed. I try to be there 100%- but I'm not. I've never been anywhere 100%. Even during my happiest moments I want to be on to the next happiest moment. There will never be enough happiest moments for me.

There are nights when I feel the way I did last August. Now alone, but not then, I focused on trying not to move so not disturb him. The slight sound of his breathing banged against my ears and even though the air conditioner made the weather December I sweat through the sheets.

I’ve tried all the usual remedies to combat this insomnia. I read books, lit candles and even bought bed risers. Now it's just like I'm floating while I lay awake. I tried meditating in the morning, but I’ve found that I like the soothing sound of an anchor’s voice to that of silence.

I find a calmness take over as they tell me of overnight gun shot wounds and car accidents and three alarm fires and missing children. There’s always missing children. As the sunrises I am greeted with traffic back ups on free ways and natural disasters along coastal cities and towns. It comforts me to know that I'm not the only one awake tracing ceiling cracks at 4am.

I’m not afraid of planes crashing out of the sky on to my house from over exposure to the news. I do not have panic attacks when I cross bridges or wear a helmet while I walk down the street.. In fact, I have booked more flights and boarded more train this year than any other. I am certain that I'll find America, even if it exhausts my entire bank account.

Through my trials with the night I have found one full proof method- pack a suitcase before bed. Leave an itinerary stuck up on my fridge and I wake up fully rested with no urge to stay up until sunrise picking at vowels and periods like paint chips on my wall.

Us

You tried to move me to Connecticut; you painted a life of colonial woodwork and dinner parties. You said that this was what I always wanted, to hang up my pencil skirts and let the emperors build the empire while I rested my tired feet.

I said cashmere makes me itch.

I said the feathers in down comforters make me sneeze.

I said that my days have become weeks and I don’t know if it’s dawn or midnight.

I said I wake up and go right back to sleep.

You hired a trainer and a pastry chef, you had a bachelor party and I drove to the 1,000 islands. I drove to the Canadian side of Niagara Falls. I drove to Orange County, NY and sat at the train station and let the wind pull at my salon perfected curls. I rode to Hoboken, walked through the crowds and allowed claustrophobia to swallow me. I clutched my purse to my right side, opened a pack of Newports with my left hand and made my way back to what could have been the beginning.

I circled blocks I’d walked down before and traced steps back to where I could have lived. I stopped in front of the 3 story apartment building with a bay window that cocooned the living room and broke into the bedroom. The rooms were separated only by linen curtains and there was no oven, only a microwave.

I never carried boxes up to the 2nd floor; I never forwarded my mail or put the electric in my name. I never dealt with the leaky faucet in the bathroom or neighbor who played bass in a band on the floor above me. I never signed the lease. You never saw it. I never lived there.

I stopped in Secaucus and waited on the platform for a late train, the clink of metal against metal calmed me in a way I had almost forgotten. The constant motion soothed my nerves and I was calm. I did not sleep on the train, but I felt the car rocking back and forth like a baby in a bassinet, or what I assume would be a baby in a bassinet. I drove on 84 west.

You planned a welcome home barbecue for me as a surprise. You invited all the neighbors whom I’d met but didn’t know the names of. I smiled. I felt exhausted. You planned a honeymoon down to Miami where we would take a cruise and sail for 7 days in luxury. You laid your clothes out on the bed for me to pack while I slept on the love seat in my closet.

I said the choppy water makes me sea sick.

I said I couldn’t find the right SPF for the differing climates.

I said I saw a 20/20 special on the lack of cleanliness on major cruise lines.

I said I don't know where you keep your suitcase.

Untitled

My memories were once based on gas stations and shin splints, choosing calorie memorization over Chemistry 101. And in those times between the laps around my neighborhood I learned that commitment was a crime. And the sort of punishment they handed out was for not being brave, for giving in to certainty, for choosing comfort and stability over the open road.

So that’s why it was no surprise when she said she’d write you and didn’t; why you text her and she received all but did not reply to any; why when you finally couldn’t stand the silence and took the pen in your hand as a last resort, the letter you sent went unanswered. The sympathy you looked for was never returned.

And you waited for a forwarding address or P.O. Box because you knew she had turned off her phone and let the bill on her electric lapse so there was so no email address she checked. But nothing came. I tried to warn you. They all tried to warn you. But hearing the words and listening to the meaning always confused you.

"Read one hundred books. Write one"

After awhile life gets in the way, and you’re living not writing. You’re out, you’re in, you’re doing things. And these things have no description because you can't remember day to day. You find there is no suitable spot for a period so you can catch your breath, just conjunctions flowing into run on sentences, turning into pages upon pages of continuous movement. Not being, just moving.

The plot that you search for is weak and at times you can't justify why you're feet move so fast but you don't stop. You keep moving.

She said, "I want to be a writer."

And so she was. She filled up notebooks with sonnets and prose on the graying of cumulus clouds and how diet coke would fizzle and stale in the same way the smell of perfume fades overtime. She covered the backs of envelopes when the books were filled and moved to the white spaces on bills and magazines when the envelopes were covered. She took markers to her cayenne walls, crushing commas and exclamation points against the woodwork he had sanded down the summer before. She pulled out old receipts and photographs with tired people smiling with tired eyes, flipped them over and dug her pen against the backs of heads she couldn't see. Writing about people she knew and people she never met, or only met once.

It didn't matter how, it was a manic decision they said of hers, created out of desperation, the only thing that mattered was getting it, the things out.

Because once she thought it, but then said it- the sentence left her mouth and days no longer ended with darkness or began with the sun, food didn't matter, salon appointments were canceled and her legs shrunk in her jeans.

Somewhere around July it's Clear

The things I carried with me five years ago continue to follow me as I pack for another weekend toward the west. I'm stuffing sweaters on top of journals and tubes of extra thick mascara, copper eye shadow and bronzer on top of a print out of Amy Hempel's "The Harvest" because nothing is ever quite as bad as it could be. I stop myself there- even I know can sense a limit.

Whenever I travel, I always feel a sense of permanence- there's the unnerving threat that when I leave I may never return or what I return to may be gone. I have nightmares about tragedies I’ve never endured- pictures of my childhood in flames so hot and bright I can smell the chemicals burning as I sleep. I wake up and am left agonizing over what the greater heart break truly is: to abandon or to be the abandoned.

Which leaves me where I am now- standing with my calves squeezed against the sides of this overnight bag, cramming in Merle Norman Rose Sorbet nail polish in a desperate effort to leave nothing behind.

He asks me what it is all this time that keeps me coming back. Or I guess- what keeps me wanting to leave. And my answers are meek or non existent. Something must attract me to the five hour drive he reasons; the landscape is dull. And I do not disagree; as I drive the long stretches of nothing suffocate me. But I've come to appreciate the flatness of Erie, PA and the two lane road that carries me through it as a steady 35 miles per hour. What I'm telling him is, the capacity of the east coast is not lost on this girl.

I caution that alone on the road, you are never really alone. There are always other cars headed down the same highway or waiting at intersections to join the journey. You learn where to stop for gas based on where others stop, what road side dives serve the best food and which motels are the least roach-friendly.

Life behind the wheel is what I think prison would feel like- just a thin pane of glass separates confinement and community. Isn't a prison its own community the same way rest stops are during dangerous weather? Do I not long for eye contact when I’m waiting in line for an iced coffee or bathroom break after 200 miles without stopping like an inmate pleas for conversation and physical contact after being in confinement? We share same dry throat from the silence. It's as if you’ve forgotten how to speak. My lips stick together when I try to shape my mouth into a polite smile and I know I'll miss the opportunity to make contact with my own community if I don’t look up fast enough.

People say long trips become a blur after some time, but if you're whole life is one stretch of highway to another long stretch of highway- then how could I not feel insulted?

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At the end of the day its words you are left with.
Words that keep you whole- vowels knit your bones to your skin, semi colons & exclamation points weave nerves with veins so blood doesn't pool at your feet so that your heart isn't floating next to your liver, soaking up digested skin milk and Kahlua.

On a Monday night in late October you find yourself with not a word to speak, not a person to turn to, just the swoosh of deep breathing, a steadying calm that has reached out for a synonym, but your mouth feels dry. The words you cherished are stuck.

It's so hard to find peace when the muscles in your throat stretch your skin and all you can think is "who will love me now with this turkey neck.”

You think you are asking for help, but your consonants come out as giggles, your tears are from laughing not crying- sitting in front of a cup of black coffee, stealing French toast off the plate across from you- it’s the happiest of moments where you find yourself welling up.

You wonder why this thickness has clogged your esophagus. The uncertainty you feel turns out to be apostrophes that built up in your lymph notes, the doctor prescribes The Elements of Style by E.B. White. It will teach you that everything has its place. A period belongs at the end of a sentence; a sentence is a complete thought- but what about conjunctions and run on sentences and phrases- where do semicolons come into play?

I once knew a boy, now a young man, who tried desperately to correctly use the semi-colon. Days were spent considering the placement of commas and parentheses, looking for the perfect adjective to describe yellow. But he never said “this is yellow”.

A winter with no snow is upon us. Dead leaves greet me each morning, crunching at the weight of my feet. I walk in silence from home to work, and in reserve. The phone rings and the movement of my lips produce nothing but gasps.