IJ

Once upon a time, we sat by the window in the third floor of the library and watched a hawk chasing a swallow. We were young, and I was unbroken. Later, night fell. You came for me, and I could not drive you away, and I could not dip and soar like the swallow to escape. Your hair was the color of night. I should have known the sun would leave me, and like the silent owl, you would arrive.


You left. You left me, broken; you left me broken. You left my space, my time, my thoughts, but I could not leave you. I keep finding you, a splinter in my heart. You are still exactly the same as when we soared over the island and the waves diminished into minute wrinkles below us, and between us the silence roared so I could scarcely hear the music that still calls up your ghost for me, when I hear it, these long years later.

It is November, a season I never saw you in. Yet I find you living in my memories, as you have lived with me since that single rainstorm.


In a few hours, my husband will come home, and I will live again, in the beautiful present. In a few years, these memories will be buried under more strata, starting with the autumn leaves of today. When I die, they will die with me. And when I live again, there will be no more tears, no more secrets, no more death, no more night.

3am Despair

The party is raging outside my window, a few stories down. Whistling and shouting mingle with the insistent background pounding--drunken drums, throbbing like a heartbeat from a car stereo.

I can't sleep. I am so frustrated. I shouldn't be awake right now, shouldn't have been awake for the past several hours. But I can't make myself go to bed because I haven't gotten anything done. It feels like a waste of the lost sleep if I give up without figuring out what is broken.

I pin my identity on every problem. Then the problem runs away from me, and I chase after it, because I am tied to it. I grow weary of running, but cannot stop. The problem pulls me onward... When the solution eludes me--slipping through the shadows, dancing in the darkness (like the smokers partying outside)--I feel abandoned and lost. I've come so far, but arrived nowhere.

Meanwhile, the music outside ebbs and flows like the tide, like the ocean. It washes over me, but I can't swim tonight. The pounding waves of sound break over my head. I gasp, and breathe in saltwater. Choking, I kick myself to the surface, just in time for another wave.

The person I wanted to be stands on the shore, silently watching. Is she smiling, laughing even, as I flail? Impossible to tell from this distance, with the water spraying in my face, the salt in my eyes. I want to scream, but the sea rots my voice. Only a gurgle escapes me.

Another wave comes, and another.

Maybe one of them will sweep me, kicking and coughing, into sleep.

Alone

Across the miles of snow, your pain stretches out to me. You are floating in the night sky with the drifting snow, and you send out a tendril through the cold. It touches me. I wake from my slumber, look around, seek your face. But I cannot see you. Here with me is a fragment of who you are, this fragile tender shoot that has grown to transcend the distance, yet again. For we keep moving, keep uprooting ourselves. You especially, you have been replanted so many times I can't count the number of soils you have twined roots into. And how many little pieces of yourself have ripped away each time your growing plant has been transplanted?

Yet the vines connecting us never wither. Across a continent, across an ocean, we are the same. Born together, we are bound together. Now you have replanted yourself again, closer by but still hours away. Our roots don't tangle together these days; we grow in different soils and when the rain is watering me, snow is freezing you. I worry about frostbite for you, and I wish the Sun would thaw the hard ground where you are trying so desperately to grow, and encountering only ice. I don't sing to the Sun for myself anymore, to shine down on me--I sing for you, and send His rays away from myself because they need to hit you instead. I need a mirror, to reflect that warmth across the rivers and farms.

Can I be the moon, at least, to turn the light toward you? to cast pale moonbeams into the dark sky where you hang? The whirling snow will glow where the moonlight illuminates it: a hundred white dancers, stark against the black sky. You are stationary amid all the spinning, green amid all the black and white. In the wind, your leaves flutter gently, and your roots sway, naked in the winter air. Nothing holds you down, but nothing holds you up, either. Where is the Gardener, to plant you in a pot? to wrap your exposed roots in soil to protect them? to fertilizer and water you, to put you in the sun or shade, wherever you would grow best?

I am only a plant myself. I can't give you a pot, or shine on you like the Sun, or rain on you. My leaves don't reflect the light enough to even be the moon. But I will never untangle our twining vines. If a few drops of water flow down my stems to roll down to your roots, that is enough to make me glad.

December Rain

The rain is very cold tonight, a chill that seeped through my coat and spread across my skin. The starless sky is weeping, I fear. But inside, the lights are on and the air is dry. Back from a concert that I fell asleep during; away from the cold and the rain and the dark; out of the mass of people: I finally stripped off my wet wool coat. My feet escaped from their black boots. I struggled out of a wet clothes and put on freshly laundered pajamas. The world seems so much friendlier, the dark so much less daunting, when I'm warm and dry. Is my soul so intimately tied to this body that I need those outer protections to find inner warmth? But I do have these material wrappings, and I can be grateful for them.

"Walk with me quiet, walk with me slow"

Incoherent negotiations, a hug goodnight, and I'm out the door, down the stairs, pulling on my jacket. Night soaked up the day's warmth while I was inside, and, still thirsty, it sucks heat from me. The campus is deserted at this hour on a Monday, and the unexpected chill of the air matches the unexpected unease that seeps into me. Here I am alone, walking in the dark. The streetlights cast my shadow on the ground before me, a slight figure fringed by the shades of my hair fluttering in the cool.

Under the lamps, boys in baseball caps and backpacks wait for the bus. My road leads away, half a mile between the trees. I shiver, and wish you were with me. Irrational, but I feel abandoned. What's the use of a warm hand on my back when we're inside in the light? Now that the cold has wrapped around me, I need a warm arm, a solid presence. But you are back there in the building, so I walk home alone. I feel so small in this vast night.

But I get back safe, and later you apologize for not looking out for me, and I know that in the bright morning, the fear I felt walking tonight will seem as distant, as inconceivable, as the darkness that permeates the world now.

Adulthood eludes me.

"Your shoelace is untied." "Oh, whatever. I'll race you!" So we dashed up the black marble stairs, leaving the cavernous building with its roaring fountains. M. crashed against something but I ran past him. I shoved the glass doors open and burst into the night.

M. called my name as he ran after me. "I almost broke that sign! but it wouldn't be the first time I broke Wang Center property. But that other time I wasn't alone in the breakage! I couldn't have folded the boat myself." "The fountain was your fault! You're the one who put the boat there!" And we ran through the campus. Our feet pounded between the buildings that loomed, silent and empty. I'm sure they wondered why we were laughing so hard. Maybe I'm supposed to be too old for this.

But who cares?

The stars don't mind, and neither do the crickets.