Memories can be smooth or they can have sharp edges. They can be a worry stone, or they can cut you to the bone. Memory is something you shouldn't fuck with. Memory is your lifeline. Your shield against the world.
We try to categorize memories into good and bad, but they can switch categories. Memory is fickle. Memory has seasons.
The sun will warm you. The sun will melt the cold. The sun won't erase the memory, but it is a momentary solace.
So, bask in it.
There's great wisdom here, brother. Strong opening and closing lines.
ReplyDeleteSO good. I love the last line.
Delete“I’m not ready for this.”
ReplyDelete“No one ever is.”
You want to meet in the high desert? Inhale the heady fragrance of sage? Wrangle rattlers with me? Pick cactus spikes from our boots? Hike up the draw then run the scree slopes serenaded by the coyote chorus. Surf those loose stones. Watched by wary stands of ponderosa pine, bark still blackened from the last time.
Do you think it a kind of charm that porcupines are named thus? That their name means thorn pig?
There are some who wear those thorns on the inside. There are some who warn you first. And some who don’t.
I want to go out like Ignacio. Fierce and doomed and loved and soulful, filled with the citrus-honey surge of vengeance and the final cleanse of loneliness.
“I don’t think I know this Ignacio.”
“Don’t matter. Keep driving.”
“Wait. What kind of trouble am I in?”
***
Something big can grow from the saddest seed. A man approaching his autumn reckoning sitting in a coffee shop watching the strange choreography of cars in the parking lot. His eyes are bruises, flinching even at the light. He could sit all day, drink mediocre coffee all day, bottomless yet somehow depthless, watch without a single feeling the interplay of vehicles outside. He could then go home, sit in a small once-neat apartment as the winter sun departs the cold day, as televisions are turned on in other apartments, as voices fall and rise, and he will eat something that tastes to him like parchment. He is a wasp who lost its nest. A firefly whose flame has been doused. Something that flew too far and forgot to bring a map. Or forgot he didn’t need a map.
And doesn’t even notice he’s unshackled.
***
This world is a heavy burden we have little choice but to shoulder.
But what if it’s not?
***
“How far still? Will we make Culiacán by nightfall?”
Something went wrong, a bad deal involving bad drugs and worse people. A woman was hurt and fastened to a chair, but someone called it in. An officer arrived and traced the perimeter of the darkling house out by the encroachment of hemlock and cedar, but he never entered and only hand-peeked the pane and somehow missed the woman bleeding out in the kitchen, duct-taped to the chair. When they eventually returned, they found her cold and silent and fused to the plastic and metal with her own congealed fluids, like some lost and lonesome colloidal thing from some other, darker world.
***
You’re at the park in August. A late-afternoon rainshower scatters families. The trees drip ravenspeak. All is agility and breath.
You sacrifice yourself to those stones. You open.
“Ignore this. Make room. Take a seat or take a photograph. Do both. And don’t mind me. Think I’ll have me another breakdown.”
Damn. Thank you.
DeleteI especially like the paragraph about the old man in the coffee shop. Such great images.
DeleteThe trips are never easy. But every few years, you feel pulled there, to that small patch of the world where you spent your childhood. Why do you do this to yourself, you often wonder, upon your return, disillusioned and sad that McMansions are now growing in the fields where you used to play, where the marshes had been backfilled to create parking lots for shopping centers and medical groups with names you can’t pronounce.
ReplyDeleteBut it’s like electricity. An energy that pulses in your chest and sparks from your fingertips. A deep soul ache that can only be discharge by returning to the source.
You know from your growing anxiety that it’s time for another download. You’re behind the wheel at sunrise, fortified with coffee and road snacks. Your car knows where to go, where to turn, the shortcuts only a local would navigate. Landmarks, despite the changes, are still familiar. A road sign. An approaching town. A railroad crossing where the boys used to lay pennies and pick them up, flattened, the next afternoon. They were signs of bravery, signs of a kind of counterculture bravado. Like, there, that’s what I think of your fucking legal tender. I will punch a hole in it and wear it around my neck with pride. You still have a few of them at the bottom of your jewelry box. One etched with a boy’s name. The one who pledged himself to you when you got high in the woods behind the junior high school but was with someone else by summer. They’re both dead now.
Your chest tightens as you grow closer to the old neighborhood; you wonder if doing this to yourself is a bad habit that ought to be abandoned. You swear this will be the last time. There’s the sledding hill, left untouched by virtue of being owned by the elementary school next to which it sits. There’s the road that leads into the neighborhood. The midcentury ranch houses are still intact; names removed from the mailboxes because that’s the way of the world right now. Numbers only. But you know the old names. Irish, Italian. Names sanitized of ethnicity to become American. That’s what people did back then; hard to explain to the kids these days.
You see the house. The tree you helped your father plant now towers over everything around it. There’s now a fence in front, and a flag; your family didn’t believe in fences or performative displays of patriotism.
You idle the car in front. Debate whether to knock on the front door. You ready a smile for the possibility. For the door to open and the puzzle of the new owner’s face warming into a smile. Being invited in to see what’s been changed, to sit over coffee and tell them of the history of the place, the bag of plug nickels your grandfather threw into the wet concrete of the foundation. You’d see that they’d taken down the wood paneling in the living room, replaced it with a fresh coat of some bespoke shade of beige. Did you see the graffiti on the wall before you painted? That it marked an era of history when we fought for and won rights that your children may no longer have? The idea embarrasses you. Makes you wonder if you should have done more. Donated more money or got more people to vote.
You can’t change that now. You sigh for the millionth time. You make a bargain with yourself. To go up to that front door, to knock, to at least try.
You park on the street. You haul your body, which feels about fifty pounds heavier than when left earlier that day, out of the car. You take no more than three steps up the driveway when a robotic voice says, “Hi. You are being recorded. Have a nice day.”
Your stomach quivers. The thirteen-year-old girl inside you with the train-flattened penny around her neck would have given the ring camera the finger.
And you do.
And, giggling, you dart back to the car and head off, to your grownup self, in a house you have chosen, in a life you have chosen. And that’s when you know you’re never coming back to this place again.
Such pervasive sadness in this.
Delete