Zwischenraum (the Space Between Things)

The space between is air, light, silver, shadow. It is silence, solitude, alienation.

Feeling the space strips you down to bone and nerve. The silence oppresses once your ears forget what sound feels like; the darkness terrifies when your eyes strain to remember light. But when, finally, the scream has boiled up from inside you, and shattered the silence, you don't feel the space any more. A flash of light is enough to bring back your skin and muscle and organs and blood, because the space only has power when you cannot see the things the space lies between. You feel distance when the wind freezes your skin and you cannot even see the building you must walk to; you feel alienation, the space between souls, when the person you tried to know is no longer even imaginable.

You feel the space between things when some particular thing won't come. But really, there is no space between things. Even air and light have substance. Sunlight burns, wind shoves. Everywhere, photons are flying, oxygen and carbon dioxide are swarming. Even if I slip between the lines of a poem, the paper is pregnant with meaning. Pay attention. No space is empty of things. It is merely empty of things we care about. There is space between the things we notice.

[from a free-writing last October]

Winter Blood

Snow, then rain, then the cold night, and now ice glazes the road. The sky's tears have sculpted the snow on either side of the path. In the bright sun, it shines like sea foam frozen in place. I walked along the path through the woods, where the normally dark ground gleamed silver and white with ice and snow.

At the end of my road stood the glass doors of the SAC. I went in, checked some boxes, signed my name. A series of blonde matrons pricked my finger, cleaned my arm, stuck a piece of shining metal into a vein. Then I lay back, and blood began trickling through the tubing. I have never seen anything quite the color of blood. Wine? Too thin. The ruby I saw in a glass case at a museum? Too bright. The flesh of the blood orange? Too luminous. The blood was alive, but not lively. It was viscous, dark, secretive. It didn't belong in translucent tubing, exposed to the light; my blood belonged in veins, flowing through a million divisions in the darkness. I watched the dark red liquid rise in the hanging sack, until finally it was full.

The nurse came back, severed me from the sack full of blood that was no longer mine, led me away, fed me cranberry juice and oreos. Then I put on my red coat, and went back out the glass doors, into the cold.

The sun had set long ago, while the blood was still warm from my veins. Now the sky was dark, the air brutal. The snow glowed in the pale moonlight. The moon was the sliver of a smile that hung under a black circle, barely visible against the deep blue sky. Walking through the woods, I couldn't feel that I had lost blood, and it seemed strange that part of me could vanish from my very veins, and not be missed. The snow shone the same way, the ice shimmered the same way, the air froze my skin the same way. What else have I lost, and forgotten?

Back my room, soon enough, I shed the red coat, and forget the ice and the blood. Outside, the moon kept still its Mona Lisa smile.

Sometimes I Do Miss California Weather

The snow tumbled from the sky for hours, blanketing the ground and transforming cars into mounds of white. Then the rain came. Each drop burrowed through the snow, leaving the white covering full of tiny scars. Rivers formed. The piles of snow decayed into translucence and began sloughing off layers of melting flakes. We all clutched umbrellas or jammed gelid hands into coat pockets. The world outside turned to slush, and the sky wept relentlessly, and the icy ground betrayed each footstep: suddenly the dullest building was a blessed sanctuary.