art of living

this is the art of living:
to take something strangled
and make it beautiful.
Every day I take the
leaves off trees
curl them in my fingertips
put it in my mouth
and suck until the taste
of the earth runs rich on my tongue.
A papery supplement.
I smell the rim of the collar
that holds the
secret scent of a person
when I hug them.
I watch the way people look
at each other when speaking,
the thoughts that flicker
in their eyes
droplets of water disturbed

I buy my books used
to glean the personality
behind the pen marks
scratches of thought
purled into the margins

Is this what it’s like?

By myself
I try words like incantations
into the whisper of nobody’s listening–
elide
elude
efface

I give myself instructions
but watch myself stray from them
like a child commanding a butterfly
to stay
watching it flit into the places where the
light takes its wings, transforms them.
When a hand touches
mine
I am startled
to have been placed back
into the world
and I think to myself
is this what it’s like?

A hundred years from
now
when the things I am afraid of
have all passed
and all that locks
me to
the earth
is the pooling light
of age
will I still be wondering

Is this what it’s like?

Clouds

“There’s little pieces of it still.”

“Of what?”

“My soul. It’s floating around up there.”

“Is it a cloud?”

“Yeah.”

After a moment, “It’s that one.”

She points to a thin wisp of a cloud, the shape of a long razor clam with tiny little ridges along one side of it. I am surprised. If I were to a pick a cloud that was my soul, it would be one of those enormous, billowing ones, that shine in different pockets and glow darkly in others. But the solemnity of her voice makes me think twice before asking her to reconsider. This is one of those moments where, despite being almost three times older than Liv, I wouldn’t be able to understand whatever wisdom she has access to in the complicated universe of hers. Undoubtedly, my answer would provoke laughter. Grown-ups have no clue.

“Which one’s mine?” I ask instead, nestling against the grass. Above me, Liv’s dirty sneakers waver slightly against the backdrop of the sky. Clouds drift around her ankles in a slow, undulating dance. She’s wearing the green socks with bananas on them that I gave her.

“Hmm,” she thinks. I stick my feet into the air, so our legs float side by side in the blueness together. They sway slightly back and forth. “You don’t have one yet.”

“What?” I protest, looking over at her. “Why don’t I get one?”

“Because,” Liv says thoughtfully, her brown eyes catching reflections of the sky, flicking back and forth in that somber way that eyes do when they’re not being watched, “You’re a grown-up. I’m a kid, so when I came down from heaven, my soul stayed in the sky to stay safe until I am big. But you don’t have a cloud anymore because now you have it back.”

I am silent. Sometimes, the things that Liv says slice me to my core. In those innocent eyes, she has more perception than anyone I’ve ever met. She can look at someone and see right through the flesh, right through everything that makes us human and ugly and imperfect, and find intricacies that exist so deeply within a person that they are almost imagined. How long did it take me, to lose this?

I press my hands to my chest and hold them there, to stall the aching. I miss this life. When problems seemed to have such simple solutions and imagination made the world a rare and beautiful place. How quickly do our eyes glaze over with reality? When does this jadedness and loss of creativity begin to cloud our perspective with such insidiousness? I want to preserve this person, this little girl with tangled hair and messy bracelets and fingers stained with Crayola markers. I want to hold her to me, to stop the world from turning, to never let the ugly side of life bruise her and take this from her.

It’s this kind of thinking that makes me exhausting to her. She hates it when I’m thinking. I turn to her.

“Want to go play on the swings?”

The feet disappear from the sky and she’s running towards the playground. I get up and follow her.  

Nina

One of the most startling realities of the situation was, when investigated more closely, there really wasn’t anything so special about Nina. To pin her up against a board and dissect her features piece by piece, like the anatomizing of a rare species of butterfly, would reveal a number of human qualities: blond hair that frizzes against either side of her scalp, a pale complexion whose pinkish pallidity makes her lips difficult to distinguish from the rest of her face, and an average height that is often disguised by moderately-heeled ankle boots. Overall, as a creature evaluated behind an objective barrier that excludes all remnants of human inclinations, she was really quite ordinary. However, remove, the boundary (if such a thing could ever exist), and the complications of emotion interfere with the picture.

Firstly, she was the “new girl”. I’m sure that regardless of stature or aesthetics, being the fresh face in a sea of uninteresting people whose particularities have long since melded into unrecognized and commonplace features can only serve you well. However, it wasn’t only this new sense of arrival that drew our eyes to her like hungry moths to a luminous flame; it was also her command of attention.

She had no shyness–not even a drop of self-consciousness–in her warm-blooded body. She was bold and unapologetic. She would laugh loudly at inappropriate jokes, a spew of giggles that unraveled in spurts of endearing raspiness and high-pitched chortles. If she didn’t like the way someone was acting, she’d roll her eyes and say, “For the love of God.” Taken aback by her confidence, anybody would stop mid-sentence, with eyes widened with sudden awareness of self that was inextinguishable. Nina’s legs sprawled, uninhibited, underneath the desk. Boys whose legs usually sat, wide-kneed and unapologetic, suddenly drew in with timidity. Nina had a possession of authority, but seemed completely unaware of it.

Because of this, her name spread around the lips of everyone and anyone who had met her. Sometimes, it would be a mere topic of conversation, you’ll never believe what Nina said today, and was typically met with a falsetto spew of laughter that rang with slight envy and amazement at whatever they had found amusing in her that day. Other times, it would be coiled in hushed conversation, whose content would remain behind drawn curtains, did you hear what Nina did, and bore the jealousy of girls who can’t stand to see someone else’s confidence illuminate the lack of their own.

I watched her carefully, myself. Fortunate enough to have classes with her, I had a healthy spread of time in which I could indulge the corner of my curious eye with observation. I was startled when she entered class, in shirts whose hems hung just above her stomach. I studied her closely for signs of self-consciousness of the line of pale skin that banded her waist like the sun-bleached ring that appears on stones collected from the beach. I was confounded by the fact that she didn’t seem to hide herself. Her body lied languorously in her desk, limbs sprawling, hair spread across her shoulders. She wasn’t like the other girls whose clothing hung around their bodies–revealing a glimpse of a thin shoulder here, a peep of exposed waistline there–whose arms probed their stomachs nervously and gently pulled folds of their clothing out from their frame as they spoke. When Nina raised her hand, she didn’t bring one hand to her waist and one arm up, halfway, hovering. She thrust her arm all the way up in the air and if her hand wasn’t noticed promptly enough, she just spoke.

I watched her with awe as she gnawed on the rim of water bottle. I smiled to myself when she swore loudly when the teacher moved to collect last night’s homework and how nobody seemed to care. Not even the teachers penalized her, so hypnotized by her confidence were they: just like the rest of us. Amazing. I watched her with a gleaming mixture of pride, you can do it, and amazement, how do you do it, and a sliver of hope that toyed in the back of my mind, I wish I could do it.

We Are So Young

We are so young.

Our minds are still building

Our bones ares still sculpting

Our knowledge is still finite

 

But we’ve got love on the brain and

tiny wrinkles on our wrists

and

loudloudloud opinions

and we’ve got a million things we want to share

and

a

million

things

we want to know.

We are so young,

but we are climbing with every molecule in our bodies

to make our minds expand and make our bodies set in their molds

and make our knowledge infinite.

We want so much

and we are so young.

 

The First Day

I wrote this, inspired by a light exchange I saw between two people, an elderly man and woman, in a coffee shop. I love the idea of reunion, and that is what sparked this piece. Sidenote: this entire this was formatted correctly, but WordPress suddenly erases the formatting when I copy + paste, so forgive the tab errors and whatnot. Enjoy!

 

 

She didn’t like coffee anymore. She felt she had outgrown the froufrou selections; a shot of this, a swirl of that, a cappuccinio espresso whatever-it-was. She was simple, she always had been. She ordered a simple cup of coffee– hold the sugar, I’ll put it in myself, thank you–and sat down with it, in the far corner of the café, where she could watch the door.

She had contemplated going by her neighbor’s, Ms. Whitman, to pick up the morning paper. She stopped getting it delivered to her house years ago, when Vern died. It made her think of him sitting in his arm-chair in his white and blue striped boxers with his pipe, spilling out the contents by his feet to get to the sports section. She had always nagged at him for it, but she didn’t realize how much she’d miss it when it was gone.

However, she always thought it was prudent to keep a respectful eye on what was going on in the world. Keeps you centered, she’d say. At least that’s what she told Ms. Whitman, who agreed to let her have the paper after she finished it.

But she did not stop this morning, because Ms. Whitman was not out in her garden among her dahlias and geraniums like usual. She was inside, presumably; the car was in the driveway, and Ms. Whitman hated to walk anywhere.

“I did my time walking all my life. And now it’s my right to sit down and let other people take me places,” she would say. And if Ms. Whitman was inside, she was most likely fussing around the house, cleaning non-existent messes. Alice did not feel like barging in on a woman’s cleaning, nor did she particularly want to partake in a one-sided conversation about the proper cleaning product to use. The smell of ammonia did not agree with her.

And so she sat, without the paper, staring blankly at the wall. She wrapped her weathered fingers around the porcelain of the white mug, the warmth brushing against her skin. She studied her hands; the skin was soft but loose, wrinkles rippling around her knuckles every time she moved them. Her veins bulged from her skin. It seemed that she had been young all of her life until suddenly, bam, she had woken up with old ladys’ hands. When did that happen? She couldn’t remember.

A small tinkling of a bell rendered her attention to the door. Its heavy frame was pushed open and in stepped an older man. As the door shut behind him, he adjusted his keys nervously in his pocket and exhaled slowly, looking around the shop. His eyes caught Alice’s, and she could still see the irreverent twinkle in his eye as his lopsided smile expanded over his face. He loped over to the table, where she stood up with some difficulty–the chair was too close to the wall–and before she could utter a word she was swooped up in a bearlike embrace.

“Alice Gardyner. Jesus Christ, how are you doing?” he released her, and she found her way back into her seat, smoothing her hair as she did so to regain some composure.

“Your language has never been delicate, Oscar.” she scolded. He laughed, and the twinkle showed again; however this time he was close enough that she noticed the rippling of wrinkles across his face as he displayed his teeth.

“Thirty-something years later, and you’re still on my case about my language,” Oscar chortled to himself, before his face froze seriously. He took her hands, and she felt the tenderness of his fingers enfolding over hers. There was no wedding band.

“But, honest. How are ya?”

The depth of the questions startled Alice; nobody had asked her that with such deep care in their eyes for a very long time. Not since Vern died. The neighbors had stopped dropping by her house, leaving lasagnas and mince pies on the doorstep. When she went out to church, which she only did from time to time now–nobody said “God bless your heart” to her as she sat down. It was in this question she reflected on her life since that time; turning pages in her mind. There was the gardening. The bills. Her son away in New York making his fortune. Her daughter and her husband Phil were trying again.

“Mundane.” she admitted, through the palm of her hand. She giggled as she said it; the noise escaping her throat startling her. She had not ‘giggled’ for years. Oscar laughed right along with her.

“Good.” he nodded, clearing his throat a couple of times. Alice waited for him to say something, but he merely stared at her. As his eyes fluttered from her hair to her face, she looked away. Something red and embarrassing turned her eyes away from his. But before long she looked back, and he was staring out the window. She took in his features; remembering them slowly as her eyes retracted their patterns. The gray stubble lining his square, handsome jaw. The tuft of hair on his forehead. The arms, somehow still muscular through the faded flannel of his navy shirt. He still looked the same, she reckoned. He was just given the same beating from time as me.

“How’s the old friend?” he asked her suddenly, teeth breaking from his lips in a big smile once more. Alice’s eyes snapped forward.

“Ms. Whitman? Why, she’s fine….”

“I don’t know any Whitmans,” he stopped her. “I mean, how’s Vernon?”

She felt her blood pressure rise…had nobody told him? Suddenly something shifted inside of her, and she felt a squeezing pressure around her throat.

“Oscar…” she began. He smiled encouragingly at her, before his expression started to fade. The color in his face melted away, and she could hear her heart hammering. She never had to do this part.

“No,” Oscar said. It wasn’t a question.

“Vernon passed away, three years ago.”

A flutter of shock overwhelmed his face, and he pressed his hands to his mouth. Alice took her empty hands off the table, restoring them in her lap. She could feel her heartbeat subside. She had not really admitted Vern’s death aloud before–but now that the words had left her mouth, she felt fine. Normal, even. What was this?

“How?”

His voice was pale. The question wheezed from his lips.

“The doctors said—–”

“No, no. I want to know how he died. In a bed? Hospital? How did he die?” his voice came out harsh and angry, but his eyes were soft. She pursed her lips and looked down at her hands, once more.

“We were in the car….” she said. Oscar closed his eyes. “I was driving. We were arguing, I told him he was horrible with directions.” She held her breath for a moment, and then laughed. She felt the hot swell tears overcome her eyes. “And he was.”

She paused for a moment. Oscar kept his eyes closed, nodding.. She continued.

“Then he stopped talking. He–he,” her voice faltered. Tears ran down from her eyes now, she felt the brutal pain twist itself around her chest again. “I stopped the car, I could tell something was wrong. He just started shaking, and clutching at his arm.”

She was crying, fluidly, openly. Nobody blinked an eye in the coffee shop. Nobody noticed, except for Oscar. He put his hand on her face.

“It’s okay, Alice.” he said softly, the old in his voice grating against the young. “You are so strong.”

Alice nodded into his hand, the threads of tears still spilling down her cheek. Thirty-something years later, and Oscar could still lull the harshest of heartbeats, the worst of nightmares.

Thirty-six years, and she still loved him.