When I was in New York I watched a girl carry sunflowers down a subway platform. That was enough.
Sometimes people even played along. In high school I lay not-touching under a table with a boy I didn’t know. He was a dancer. How I wanted to be a dancer. Or a runner or a diver. To turn my body as runners divers dancers do, which is to say: with some knowing. I have no bodily intelligence. My only sport is pericardial. Is red-skinned and blushing and yes, quite often sad. It was a game I played throughout my teenage years, this pretending to be somewhere else. We stared up at the underside of the table. Where are we? he asked. I didn’t return his gaze. Antarctica.
I used to drive out to a spillway to read and think and mostly to be alone. I didn’t get out of my car. I didn’t think about jumping. I thought about people who think about jumping.
Then there was the day that nothing happened. I wanted to grab a girl’s hand and lead her into the woods behind my high school and kiss her. I had the girl. She had the hands. Besides, there were wildflowers, fucking wildflowers. But I didn’t make the move. I was used to aching over lovely objects that weren’t mine. We just sat in her boyfriend’s car, overheating, waiting for something else to happen. There was really nothing to say so I mumbled, There are animals in that forest.
Open letter to my mother, who sits in jail for the second time in twelve days: Today was bad. Tomorrow will be better. But you have to be better. Sometimes you have to sit very still.
Late night talk with H. She told me about the night she spent lying in the snow and I of the year I spoke in code. But I said too much. I said, Do you ever feel like you're someone things just don't happen to? And she said, Yes. All the time.
She drove me to the greyhound station at dawn. We passed under a bridge where someone had graffitied You Are Beautiful on the side. The city had only whitewashed the word beautiful. No room for sentimental vandals. Paring everything irrelevant, just the wanhope reminder You Are.
Took a bus to Arkansas, to fields full of sitting blackbirds, to a girl I'd assumed lost. Saw her for the first time in five years. She is thinner and softer around the edges than we were at fifteen. In a heart-colored room I did not know what to say to her. We slept with the window open, the curtains billowing, the dust illuminated. Once and twice she told me I smelled like rain.
Dreamt that A. and I were walking through a megalithic graveyard. All ornate crosses and crenellated trees. In the distance I saw something that looked like Stonehenge. Once we stood in the shadow of it, I realized it was a colossal ivy-covered printing press. I asked if giants were near. She did not know.
In waking life I watch her make paper. I like the physicality of it, the beating and pulling. With the roaring I don't have to worry at my quietness, though she navigates it calmly as a tightrope walker. Those same hands pressing into my back. Let go, she insists. Let go.
J. was talking of bodhisattvas as I raced down the interstate. I am a good listener but my silence can’t be called serene. Tough gig, I said, referring to those half-lightened limners. They have to empty themselves out, which doesn’t interest me. Even if I knew where solace could be found, no one would believe it. I’ve got that shifty look. I’m a horrible driver. Fearful with forty miles to go and no secrets to tell. The sky doing funny things with my head again. Is turning, going long. Is gone.
Out of all these tales I only know what I know. I can write about the light and what was said. But I can't know how these stories linger or mutate in the other players. Time has pulled some tricky maneuvers in the new year. Forwards and backwards. A gift of compasses, to be worn in the hair.
The world is still mysterious because there are people in it.
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