I write to find and to free. I write to define, I write to say what is left unsaid, and I write to be. Because I believe in words and being bigger than them.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
I want you, she told him one evening after the smoke from candles blown out cradled the nighttime air in its wafting arms. And I want you, he told her as soon as the breath of her words dissipated through his ears and filtered through the canals of his neck through his lips and back toward hers.
She used his illness as an excuse to not see him although coughing and congestion were less of a worry than losing her sense of herself in him, pieces of her life fragmented by the light of his.
I’ll come back when the sun rises over the hill that holds the winds that carry our names, she told him, and she told herself she would listen because the wind carries words only for those listening, and the bell only rings for those who know it will, and the river only widens for those who believe its banks can widen too. The door will widen when she walks through it and so will the bits of light she can see in his eyes when he opens them for her.
I want you, she will tell him in the morning and before the words travel through the tunnels of limbs or behind the crevices that filter the world to and from his open lips, he will repeat them.
(Source: cosive, via teachingliteracy)
Sometimes she woke up in the middle of the night with dinosaurs marching up her forearms. Leaving blue footprints only seen in the moonlight, they climbed along her transparent nighttime skin, following her veins as though they were roadways.
Morning would come, the sky the color of oatmeal. Like a river that widens but never seems to thin, she funneled her heart through her hands as if it were made of quicksand, hoping someone would catch it and make it into something else.
Tell me a little bit about romance, she said. Tell me a little bit about what it means to be in love. She said, I heard it’s a carnival opening up in your heart, walking on a tightrope holding onto nothing but his hand, and not needing a tamer because you become the lion of his love. She said, I heard it’s holding nervousness before giving a speech, feeling each nerve pushing at the underside of your skin, holding your lungs still because air doesn’t seem imperative. She said, I heard it’s looking out of your window on a plane, seeing a city made small by the space between engines and concrete, understanding you’re not as big as you seem and the world is as big as it seems, realizing the odds that stood in front of you to find him were a jungle. She said, I heard it’s a beginning, I heard it starts things. Romance, she said. Love, she said. Give me a definition, someone!
She wanted change, but she didn’t want to cut or stain her hair. A tattoo was not an option, nor was moving away. Money was not present for either of the four options, and if it was, she was unsure if she would use it. Looking around her kitchen while leaning on her counter with her arms across the middle of her, she decided a paint change was what the house needed.
She weighed her options as if they were loaves of bread. Sky blue: the living room of her grandfather’s beach home. Tucson red: her sister’s first car. Custard: the newspaper clippings in her father’s office. Eggshell: the color of a blank canvas in her high school art class.
Identifying less with who she was in high school and more with the intentions of it, she chose eggshell. She repainted the walls of her house in eggshell because it was the most practical for new homeowners if she was to move away. Having the option of leaving was what mattered.
Threading her fingers through her daughter’s hair as if it were made of ropes, she counted the days Molly had been alive. Six times three hundred and sixty-five, plus eleven times thirty, give or take a few days. Giving and taking, her husband kissed her on the cheek before work that morning but forgot to call to say he wouldn’t be home for dinner.
“Mom?” Molly said. Her hands stopped moving, a queue.
“In school, my teacher says that things happen for a reason,” her daughter began.
“Most things do.”
“But what if I can’t think of any?”
In a moment sewn of both clarity and surprise, she looked at the back of her daughter’s neck, her father’s skin tone stretching over the hills of her vertebrae.
What it must take to ask such questions and what it must take to forget them. Not knowing the answer, she looked into Molly’s crushed ice eyes and wondered if this was a piece of her own self, if the eternal struggle of self and the sense of it found its way into her daughter’s bones, a dominant gene.
“Sometimes you have to be creative.”
“I’m not very good in art class.”
Halfway smiling, she said, “Reasons can be found everywhere.”
Her daughter was silent for the length of two clock cycles.
“Mom?”
“Yes?”
“Is there a reason dad doesn’t come home anymore?”
Before she could respond, she began listing the reasons in her mind of why, recessively, she should leave her husband, while her daughter leaned against her chest. One, the possibility of an affair. Two, his dinner grew cold every evening. Three, morning kisses were the only kisses. Four, doubt was manifesting in Molly. Five, he wasn’t the same. Six, she wasn’t the same. Stopping at seven, her lucky number, he didn’t mean as much anymore because she didn’t mean as much anymore.
You sit in your rocking chair and look at your children, their faces familiar but distant. You want to ask for their names but something tells you it will only upset them; you’ll forget them anyway. You always loved reading, six books stacked high on the coffee table in front of you, each one with a bookmark on an arbitrary page because you won’t remember their plot lines anyway. My book is sitting at the top of the stack. I sit on the couch behind your rocking chair as you open the first pages of my book, your fingers running over the printed words, the deepest part of me. I’m sitting behind you, watching you read my name printed on the front cover. You don’t remember who I am. You taught me how to write my name in cursive, how to build letters into words, how to lose myself in the pages of a book and how to find myself when I tried to write one. You look at me in a certain way when I stand up and kneel beside your chair, my hand over yours. You still wear your wedding ring, and I wonder if it’s because you don’t want to let him go or if you don’t know that’s he’s gone. I say, “I’m Laura,” and you smile halfway, your eyes reading my face as if it were a page of a book. You used to tell our grandfather that my brother and I grew up as quickly as the leaves changed colors in autumn. Without recipe cards and with nothing but the memory of your mother showing you how to turn a spatula, you used to bake us family-famous desserts, but these days, I’m not sure you would know how to measure anything but the time of day based on the sun hanging in the sky. I turn over your hand and look into the palm of it, willing a world to form out of the creases. “I’m Laura,” I say again. You repeat my name. Your eyes are gray wells that I can see myself in, and I wish you could see me, too.
Reasons she believed in it*: A wedding ring stuck on a man’s finger because of wrinkled years, coffee on the table every morning from a wife to a husband, children running on a playground because children are promises, a porch light left on for someone coming home late, a phone call from a mother late at night to remind a son that he always has a home with her no matter where he tries to create another, a puppy sleeping on the edge of a bed and waking up by the pillow, letters sent to and from friends separated only by postage stamps, kisses on foreheads when saying goodbye, an engagement ring slipped onto a left-hand finger three breaths after “yes.”
*love
