Then We Changed

 

You were the mountain and I was the wind.

"I have birds in me."
I whispered through your trees.

 I breathed over your body, cool, invigorating, stirring the leaves, bending the boughs, scattering the snow from your greatest peaks.
Water cascaded down your face and flowed away to distant lands.

"You have trees on you."
I whispered into your ancient caves, brushing over moss, moaning through your dripping stalagmites.

The Doors Of Sleep

If I could run backwards through time I would grab hold of that moment with you and say something unspoken.

It was in January that the key came into my possession, though we had been living in the house since November. In all the winter hustle, with little time to unpack and settle in, it went unnoticed in the drawer of the upstairs bathroom. I recognized immediately that there was something unique in its antique design.

“I loved you from the moment I first saw you.” you said.
If I could catch it like a white rabbit running I would say,
“I love you right now forever.”

The key was as silver as the liquid light of all the stars poured into one peculiar shape. That particular form was linked with that of a lock which by then was gone from the world I inhabited. Keys outlast the doors they open, the locks whose inner workings they alone understand. As the ages pass and their own purpose has waned they must long for the caress of the lock they once knew, that perfect fit.

If the words were spoken the moment would become a moon, full of soft white illumination filling a darkness that has been recorded as uninterrupted through the duration of some teleological history in the Yerba Buena museum.

“I loved you from the moment I first saw you.” you said.
If I could catch it like a white rabbit running I would say,
“I love you right now forever.”

There was no lock in the whole of the house in which it fit. I thought of the door it had once opened. When the door ceased to exist in this material realm was that the end of access to the domain it protected? Or could the key invoke the lock and door once again, opening the way to a world that has passed into dream and myth?

All occurrences affect all occurrences in the past, present, and future.

We did have that pearly eternal moment in which I watched the mechanical shutters covering the all powerful mystic centers of our fun ride machines open. Then we felt the flow of life electric, but it meant one thing to me and another to you. I saw how remarkable were the possibilities, and how unremarkable was a kiss, a lifetime of hand holding, marital bliss, love at fist sight, old age in rose gardens and book signings. To be a lock that accesses the remarkable was my deeper wish.
Destiny opens and closes the doors of sleep.

“I loved you from the moment I first saw you.” you said.
If I could catch it like a white rabbit running I would say,
“I love you right now forever.”
And still I would release it again, a white butterfly drifting into darkness.

He Died For Our Sins

“Oh my God, this thing is from the 90’s!”
It seems so close, so far away. Roller skates and corduroys and neon colors.
They are making weapons out of electric green Bendaroos, organizing complicated games in a home for deranged ex villains. My man is there, looking bad but meaning well, poet in black jeans.
The shadow of a black widow in a thicket of web nestled in a long forgotten Easter basket, still wrapped in plastic.

I can’t believe this passes for technology. It should have been replaced ten years ago. Give it a tweak. Flash of lights red and green.
They’re only games, but they look like violence, like evil schemes plotted by insecure misogynists. They know not what they do, and so they know not how to take responsibility for what they’ve done.
But it gnaws at them. Something feasts on their gut, making them feel dirty but they don’t know what they did. How did they get like this? Were they not innocent boys when it started?

Conversations in parks, in bathrooms, on Christina ct. Were we not being punished for something?
I hoped so, because if so then redemption was possible. If redemption was possible we could do the right things and escape this misery.
However, redemption philosophy required that we all began as sinners and he would say:
“I can’t believe that. What could I have done to deserve what I got? I was just a little boy. I didn‘t deserve that.”

I feared that going back down I might fall. I considered crawling the rest of the way up and breaking through a window.
By now, however, I had learned that crawling through a window would likely result in a rebirth, and then big sis and I would never finish fixing this thing.
I could see the shadowy form more clearly; definitely that creature that I feared. Should I attempt to stab it with the scissors? Should I trust that film of plastic to be a satisfactory barrier between us?
Those flashing lights seemed to be a bad sign. I might have to stay up here with it longer.

Existence is suffering. All beings suffer. I had read this.
I didn’t want to believe it, despite the fact that it seemed likely. If we could have understood that concept, perhaps we could have shed our guilt and shame, the hope that we could escape our unknown crime.
Despite the fact that his objections to it were strong, the ideology lived in both of us. Perhaps it was even better rooted in him.
He was an earthy sort, and in the act of fierce rejection he had become locked in an embrace with it, like a bull whose horns get lodged in the opposing structure. 
I was in a process of accepting it and synthesizing it. I would have dreams that something horrible was coming towards me, and instead of running, or fighting, I would try to hold it and transform it by making it a part of myself.
Sometimes it destroyed me.

In the end, he would sacrifice himself.
It would be hard to look at. It would be impossible to remember whether he had been a villain, an innocent boy, or a hero.
The flash created by the sacrifice would be so blinding, it would obscure the past. The power of it would send me hurtling into unknown terrains.
It was a gift.

There was nothing further that could be done. I slid down, dangled from the ledge and jumped. It was easier than I had anticipated.
Sis helped me stand and dust myself off. She checked for spiders. We were about to walk up the path back into the house when we heard it, a ghostly voice from above.
It was a tech agent responding to my prodding of the device. In his far off phone voice he issued instructions for troubleshooting.
At first it seemed like I might need to go back up, but after listening for a moment it became clear that, like the device, the instructions for its operation were obsolete.

Object Petite A

These are the things I don’t want to know anymore, don’t want to say anymore, don’t want to write.  By then it was called the city of Lake Elsinore, but when I arrived in 1986 at the age of five, it was only a town. I’ve been trying to run away from the pain so that I’ll behave like a good citizen. Anything I can do now to pretend it wasn’t me, a little Holly Golightly, phantom without a past. Or, I could let the wound bleed the stories that I don’t want to belong to, like one of the cards that paints the roses red. Summer faded but we remained. We attempted to perform magic rituals using packets of salt and a plastic knife in the back room by the time clock. Even then I wished to be undone, to unravel like the fibers of a rope and become straw.

I recognize that those sweetest of dreams are not of people or events that truly were, but of those that never quite were and never will be. Along with some of my clothes and shoes the package contained an envelope filled with letters and mini cassettes. Recognizing this makes it no easier to say farewell to ghosts. They linger. The mini cassettes were of him talking as he wandered around the town alone. The hotel room was dark, the curtains were drawn and it must have been night outside. It was perhaps a place of perpetual night just as we were those who are ever young.Vampiric dreams to savage the frail reality of the waking world.

It was a weekday. Maybe a Friday. He was strumming his guitar while I poured over the loose pages of the manuscript, looking for gaps, figuring where to take up the telling. It felt good to be sitting next to Alan in the sun with naked legs, trees and ravines and dirt turnouts rushing by. A town with just four stop signs located at the intersection of Central and Lakeshore. Trying to run away from the pain so that I’ll behave. I wondered if he’d ever gotten my letter, but I didn’t ask. It was written on notebook paper with a blue pen and I was continuing it. I saw him then, but I didn‘t know him. I was careful not to touch him so as not to disturb him in any way lest he should vanish once more. He was here now, that was good enough.

Even then I wished to be undone, to unravel like the fibers of a rope and  become straw. I was taking up the text I had left behind, writing my manifesto. After reading one of these I sent him a note from the concession stand that read, “Michael John Sarver, you are so damned good I think I want to have your children.” We attempted to perform magic rituals using packets of salt and a plastic knife in the back room by the time clock. A wild empty place filled with mystery, mountains, and sun baked hills beyond which lakes lie hidden among spruce and yarrow. That was all that I wanted, everything I was reaching for. To be clean of the Born Again Christians and the anonymous alcoholics and the dusty shoeless prostitutes of Grand Ave.

He said,
“This is so surreal, it’s like an alternate reality, and this is my dog and we’re together.”
I laughed appreciatively,
“Yeah.”
The desert with its wide-open vistas, spider-like Manzanita, and unperturbed sky in faded blue.  Some things cannot last, very simply because they are not real. Mirages. Hallucinations. Some fevered madness. Harsh lights, bad smells, and I was injured on entry; the doctor gave me two black eyes when he reached in and twisted me around. I was almost there with the primordial man that is my companion in the dream world.

I was strong and eager and curious despite the circumstances. I couldn’t tell which answer it was, whether he wanted me to be like a sister, or a lover, but it didn’t matter. After all the other kids my age returned to school I was still there popping corn and sweeping floors, and tearing tickets because I had graduated early. Fluid got into my lungs. People handled me through rubber gloves and I was surrounded by Plexiglas or some such material. Furnishings were simple and sparse. The room had an art deco feel. There was a yellow orange quality to the light, and maroon carpet or drapes or bed covers. Some lands lay barren forever waiting for their fisher king.

You know snow globes? How there’s a little figure or a little town trapped inside and you can never touch it and it can never touch you? By then it was called the city of Lake Elsinore. Look there, see the widow sneaking out by the river, smuggling babies and guns and tobacco out of the wasteland? He was one of the cards. I worked in concessions. One night I had a terrifying experience of sleep paralysis. Like all bullies he was scared. Mostly he was scared for me. The carpet was warm and soft, the acoustics were likewise muted, it was dim, and my parents' garments hung around me like curtains or banners, a pleasant array of patterns and colors. High up on the shelves there were strange objects for me to examine in that moment of evacuation and quite contemplation.

Or let the wound bleed. I had the feeling that if they knew what I knew they’d agree, that eventually they’d come around and see that there was no use in doing things their way. If I ran across the stars, skipping from one to another like sparkling stones jutting from a black river, would you run with me? Would you view with wide-eyed wonderment the secret chambers beneath the current of life while I sing my body electric? I know you would. I have become a ghost, the silent center of the vortex. The stories whirl around me. I dart a hand out and grab them, plucking multicolored carp from the whirl pool, making their stories mine.

He also demanded that I read two books: "Dianetics" so that I could learn to control myself and Einstein’s "Theory of the Universe" so that I would see reality’s shabby skeleton. A cover up. A blind spot. I am the secret thing I can not even say to myself, that which motivates all of my existence. I am the unutterable thing externalized. Is this what it means to be a woman? To always sense your worth in the attention granted you by men? All that he was communicating to me was fear. I try to think of what the opposite of that would have been. The real story. At the center. The thing that never quite gets said. The door that can’t be opened. To simulate the force of a shot fired, he’d shove me backwards so I could practice bracing myself.

He was always saying that he wanted me to be free, but I had hardly ever been free. Unperturbed sky in faded blue.  Some things cannot last very simply because they are not real. Even then I wished to be undone, to unravel like the fibers of a rope and become straw.  He walked to his mother’s home on Case St. where he was living and shot himself in the head. And in the moments when I was, I came hurtling
towards other bodies, a brilliant flaming star that they quickly caught and held, determined to keep the heat for themselves. He had a way of laughing after mentioning things that hurt. Phrases like, “That dog was my best friend.’ or ‘It broke my heart, you know?’ would be punctuated with soft laughter that seemed to come rocking out of his body.

“He was a cocker spaniel too, he looked just like this one.”
The window was rolled down blowing my hair a little so that the dog could sniff the mountain air. It was an imaginary place in an imaginary time. Wild, empty, filled with mystery. Mountains, sun baked hills, lakes hidden among spruce and yarrow. That was all that I wanted, everything I was reaching for. When I arrived in 1986 at the age of five it was only a town. I recognize that those sweetest of dreams are not of people or events that truly were, but of those that never quite were and never will be. I am only a sound caught in the throat. I am no one. No longer a character in any story that can be told. Inexpressible. A mirage. Some fevered madness. It was written on notebook paper with a blue pen and I was continuing it. The real story, at the center. That thing that never quite gets said.

Ghost Heart

They conspired to put me in a cage and let me die. My poor, poor, Tiger, the Ersatzanna.

I always weep when I remember what must have happened to you, how you must have cried for help. And he sat there, no more than 20 feet away, and played video games, feeling himself powerful as his avatar crept around toting a machine gun and you died.
Your dear Archie must have come to you and meowed too, he must have tried to get that man's attention and he ignored him too, that loathsome man, the father of my children.
My grandmother was dying that day, and that’s where I was, at her side saying goodbye. It was expected that she would go, but I lost you too, and that should not have happened.

He couldn’t stop hurting. He had to hurt me and I had only wanted to help him. Helpless me, I wanted to help, but he wanted to hurt.
How he could have sat there and not known that you were dying painfully is unimaginable to me. Some part of him knew. He wanted to hurt me more, so he hurt you.
I am so sorry my poor Tiger, little Ersatzanna. He is dead now too, the father of my children, but if I could choose to have just one of you restored to life, I would choose you and not him. Children need kittens more than drunkard fathers.

I felt sorry for him when he shot himself in the head, I felt sorry because he had been hurting, and that’s why he hurt others, I felt sorry that he had suffered, that I could never help him.
But I was never sorry that he was gone. That is one point upon which I can agree with him; the world is better without him. I am better without him.

The world is worse without you, my heart.

I set the cage out there. I did it. My father convinced me it was the only way to protect you.
The neighbors' black cat had bitten you twice and almost killed you. My father bid me to put out the cage for the black cat.
In the morning my grandmother was dying and I forgot to bring in the cage before going to say goodbye. The father of my children did not come with us to say goodbye to my grandmother. It was an uncommonly hot day for so late in the fall.
You wandered into the cage they said would protect you. It killed you. And he sat 20 feet away letting you die.

After I screamed Tiger, after they grabbed hold of my arms to hold me back while I screamed and the unborn baby in my womb covered her ears and screamed too, after they held me up by my arms and I screamed louder and the other baby, the one you helped me to nurse, stared wide eyed and silent, after I screamed and they tried, as always, to silence me, after that Tiger, I promised that I would never listen to my father again.
And I knew, after he, the father of my children, let you die in the cage my father had bidden me to set, I knew that was what was in store for me. My agony would be prolonged by indifference, my pleas would fall forever on apathetic ears.
I would be caged and killed bit by bit. Just as it had happened to you Tiger, my heart.

I never said goodbye to you. I don’t even remember what they did with your body.
So I dream that you’ve come back, that you’re there playing with your Archie or running alongside the overgrown mint, streaking past a window.
I am overjoyed to see you so, as you were, as you would still be if you had not gone in my place, little Ersatzanna.
My Tiger, ghost of my heart, I see you rushing along the shadowy edges of my dreams, but I cannot touch you, cannot scoop you up, cannot call you back into the house for safe keeping against the night.
I cannot press you to my chest where you belong safe and warm, small brave Tigress.
So I watch you through the window, stalking through the shadows as dusk deepens, as forgetfulness fades and I remember everything.

Some Things Should Be Like That

In the comic book store.
For so long I looked at it, not knowing what it was.
I went away.
I came back.
Again and again. Circling the table like a shark, tasting this mysterious object with my eyes and fingertips. Still I did not know what it was. Suddenly I realized; no one knew what it was, least of all its makers, and it made me feel glad because there should be things like that in the world, things without measurable purposes, and here I had one in my hands.
That time I didn’t put it down. I bought it and slipped out of the lighted store into the urban night. The darkness was thick despite the few fairy lights that glowed over lampposts or sped by in the streets. There are many places in the city where the light does not manage to reach.
It is also dark in the country, I know, but there you can see the stars and the stillness is what can put the terrors in you. In the city there are no stars because city light is a sort of lesser darkness that eats up celestial light, its brown halo holding at bay the fire and ice of the cosmos so that its own breed of glimmer and shadow holds sway. City darkness moves. It pulses. Here, there are things oozing and swirling, killing and eating and dying very near to you, in the murk where you must not look lest you enter into their order of existence.
“Can you help me?”
A face emerged from the blackness, separating itself from the thick communal dark. It was a cocoa colored heart shaped face that seemed to come bleeding out of the inky depths for a moment.
I heard the voice first, sweet and trembling, like the trill of a little bird. It was the voice that stopped me.
“Can you help me?”
It was only after I had stopped that the face surfaced and hovered timidly at my elbow, petite, neither young nor old but weathered into timelessness.
I knew as soon as I heard the voice that I could help. My hand had dipped swiftly into my pocket and retrieved twenty three cents.
“This is all I have.” I said and she was already thanking me in that voice and asking if I had bought a comic.
“I did buy something.” I said, “And now I’m broke.”
Her face was so sweet and her voice so delicate and I was lying only because I could now see another dark shape behind her, leaning against the wall. I wanted to give her more, but I wasn’t sure it was safe. My pay for a day of work was in my wallet in cash, too much money to open it here on the street.
“No, wait,” I said, “but I do have a little more.”
I dug into the coin pouch sewn into the side of the wallet without taking it out of my purse and filled her hand with pennies and dimes.
“That’s it.” I said and started to go, feeling disappointed with my meager offering.
Then I remembered that I was carrying a bag full of various breads from the bakery where I worked.
“Oh. I do have bread.” I said hopefully and began to dig in the satchel. “How about some pretzels.” I said putting them in her renewably emptied hands.
“Oooh. These are good.” She said and looked eagerly to her partner who was smiling now in a gentle compassionate way, as though he were a saint in a black hoodie leaned against the wall.
The longer I stood with them the further the darkness seemed to recede from our vicinity. They became distinct and less shade like. I was grateful that I was helping. One day, I felt, it could be me asking for help.

Now I slid back into the flow of the sidewalk, back into the ranks of the purposeful marching to their independent destinations.
Drugs or alcohol ushered some into the world of shadows, but there were others that were there because something inside of them was different. I was like that. I didn’t know what that something was. Nobody knew what it was, and there should be things like that in the world, things without measurable purposes, and here I was one of them. But there is little market for such things, despite their rarity, and I knew it might be only a matter of time before I became a shadow on the street, with no past and no future, depending on those that had not yet become me for my daily bread.
I knew it, but it was not yet time for me to step into the darkness and join in the pulsing. There might yet be some other way, so clutching the thing that was not a comic book but could only be defined by what it was not, I hurried on into the underground train station to wait.

Where Dark And Light Meet

I hate my father. I hate all men and everything male. I do secretly wish to castrate them, to dominate and humiliate them. This secret hatred running under my skin ran rampant and was vented on my husband until his death, frightened my old teacher when we sat together under the trees.
In those early days, when it first boiled over the top and I grew out my arm pit hair and swore off the boys, I thought it was because a boy had broken my heart. A boy did hurt me, but even before then my heart had been broken, smashed into a thousand pieces by my father who crushed all of the life out of me, sought to dominate every aspect of me mercilessly, unintentionally. The hatred, the rage must have been growing, welling up inside of me long before that silly boy dealt his blow, also unintentionally.
I could not look at my father after puberty, because of the fear of being squashed, because of the hatred whose twin was desire. Now I know what Freud knew, that I have secretly and unconsciously wished to replace my mother. I have also looked for a man who would replace my father, the one who would be stronger than him and overcome him and become him.
I look at my biological father now knowing these things, and it is knowing them fully that allows me to look because I can be certain that those urges are not what is doing the looking and smiling. I am looking and smiling. The deepest me. The me that is nobody’s daughter, nobody’s wife, no man’s enemy, a wind in the doorway, an eternal notness.
I look at him and he smiles back. He said during a game of murder that he knew I was the murderer because I looked at him and I usually don’t look at him. From then on I made the effort to be awake and look at him. I do this for him, for me, for the eternal notness.
In the forest, with one who would replace him, I also look. I look until he is trembling, I look at the one I have known for 15 years and never looked at. We have inflicted emotional injuries upon one another both intentionally and unintentionally, always driven by those unconscious motives, acting out with each other the desires and resentment we harbor for our parents, always fearful of being crushed.
But now for an awakened moment we are free of those bonds. We are together, our grievances are gone, because I drop all of the barriers that I am aware off and let my heart burn bright and he responds by dropping his and glowing with me and we understand each other.
We are so happy together, like when we were lonely confused children who found solace in each other’s company, only far better because my heart is so much bigger now than it was then, so much braver, brave enough to swallow us both whole and carry us smiling over dusty trails, big enough that this one time, I can protect us both from the unconscious hatred that I have harbored, the hatred that had, from time to time, been vented on him in our youth.
Big and brave enough after a week of time with my biological father, that I know that whatever unconscious urges afflict and drive this other, he can’t hurt me. If he bites my bare pulsing heart with steely knives of rejection, or mischief, they will be baby bites compared to those made by my own flesh and blood.
But he does not bite, instead he hears me telling him something that I have tried to tell him before, something that could not be communicated until we were both made vulnerable by this torrent of love flowing between us. Now, because we finally truly have this understanding, he lets me collect a lost piece of myself that he had greedily and hungrily and achingly horded. He too collects a lost piece of himself in this fair and ecstatic exchange, and he tells me to go and collect the rest of the pieces of myself, all of the pieces that I can find in the darkness of the wasteland. He tells me to love the ones I am journeying with in that darkness, to love them as much as I love him and he loves me, as much as we could have ever loved, as much as we would have loved if we had only known how to do so.