I am uncertain of where to look. In the broken drawers, perhaps, or the cardboard box I once used to remain home. I don’t know where to find you, to unleash your laughter, to reiterate your promise of permanency.
I think now, again and again, of the time when I came home to the open doors, the dog gone, you and mom having left with the curtains curled around the wind. I remember the flowered love seat on which I tucked my knees, the hot tears marking your departure. How I mourned you then, pre-emptively, convinced of obscure wrong. Breathless in an apartment filled only with air.
That was not the time. Nor my refused departures to camp, nor my need to be told each night that nothing, no beastly beetle of reality, would crawl into my heart. Perhaps the fairytales were the shell, the protective angle or earthly angel under which you could operate, young fallacy of perfection. Perhaps you knew my fears, in all of their extremity, were real.
Because now, I don’t think I was a child hypochondriac. I think I was a child. In that children see much more clearly into our world, are not armed with masks that mould themselves to desire, don’t falter on the fragility of fantasy. They don’t seek to explain, are hard pressed to understand, what at its very core is not god or gained emotion, but simply wrong.
I think also of Vieques, ice-cream sandwiches melted in my nailbeds, my metal pen. I think of our gypsy escapades to entertain horses, photographs and videos of empanadas. Running hand-in-hand from town or me wrapped around your shoulders, a wild-haired extension of sorts.
I called again today—and your phone, to my dismay, had been disconnected. I wanted to hear your voice, as of course I knew you would not be there. My messages of yours—they too have expired. Where can I find your voice now? It is not my own. And while still familiar it is ever quieter in my head, only whole whispers real in memory.
So many parts of me are you, of course. They are starved for contradiction—most absurdly alone in their relation to you. Sometimes, I wish all of me were that way, and other times, I can’t stand to see my,your, upturned nose.
I want to call you to say that I have found so many of Alice’s entrances into other worlds…from her windowpane onto Christ Church meadows, to her rabbit hole well. That at least some of it is real. I want to write you to remind myself to remember it all: snowfilled walks, the Hungarian cafe, your dinner comedy skits, benefit banter, your baby blue eyes. I tell myself I will not let you be gone. I go to sleep in fits of refusal, certain you will come back to me. And when I dream of you, of childhood, I sleep soundly, lured in by conversations that cannot be; but then, wandering into adulthood, I awaken to the re-breaking of my heart.
Sometimes, I am certain that I will return home and see you again. Certain that I will climb the stairs to the roof and you will be there in a wooden chair, chuckling, camera in hand. Or you will arrive from the Caribbean coast, a fat bass to your name. This is the real impossible. And yet I have to fight my crazy faith every day.
I know in this corner of the world I can pretend, with pretence harder and harsher than my many years of games. With better endings. Without the phone calls. Without the fear. But back on Broadway, memories are melded in the urban landscape; and yet I am somehow less afraid of harshly hurting, of burning to the beat of pigeons' wings, than of eventually exorcising our past.
