(via a-room-with-a-view)
We All Lose Something, Sometime
My sister once hid a can of tuna in her sock drawer. When we found it, mummified and frozen in time, we put it on the doorstep and left it for raccoons. They devoured it eagerly, voracious readers of the Bumblebee Book Club. She watched her stash go to woodland guts and felt messy hot tears. We put a nutcracker and some almonds in her drawer to keep her socks company.
***
It gets quiet at night, don’t you think? I am dripping out of my chair, a hostage struck with Stockholm Syndrome. My captor is Facebook. I melt away in glowing squares of information, quartz and lightning connections almost as fast as my brain can travel. Maybe faster now since it’s in a puddle, in a jar under the floorboards.
***
The black dress with lace is put in to wash. It smells of sweat and smoke, of a shared stick of mint gum. The breasts of a seventeen year old turning eighteen in March, the hands of a seventeen year old turning eighteen in June. The black dress with lace smells of techno music, of sticky floors, of lips on his neck and lyrics sung in her ear. Ash and wind and breath and pulsing bodies are wiped away by water and blue liquid from a bright red bottle. The next day she washes it by hand.
***
The man and the woman say goodbye over dinner, a salad dressing salute. She holds her fork like an eagle’s talon. He fiddles with a cuff link. Five years shared, erased over an appetizer, she thinks. Maybe things would have worked out if I hadn’t ordered the calamari.
***
I would be a better writer if I lived in New Hampshire. I would be a better writer if I lived in Brooklyn. States without big cities don’t exist. They are a state of mind. My state of mind is resignation. I have a friend who wants to be an astrophysicist. Elegant lines and gyrating universes are beauty to him. But I see cold clusters of air and chemicals, where breathing hurts. The hollow shell of a building. The dark rusted tree of steel. My esophagus squeezed like a tube of toothpaste. I’ll let that go, for the jagged rock face of your cheek and the stars in your palms.
***
We put our bodies on the clothesline to dry in the sun. We comb the knots out of our hair each morning and cast the nets back out to sea. We eat chocolate and watch Hugh Grant movies and wrap ourselves in last night’s sweater.
But nutcrackers aren’t flesh and blood, she said.
