Who

It's strange to look back at that park from afar, from the seat of a movie theater, or the lacquered library steps, where I thought only a year ago that I loved, how I loved with every inch and end of me. It was that time, with the pink skirt on Carrie's night out, it was that time when I curled in purple fish sheets, so fallen. I can't say that it hurts anymore, can't say it hollows even small parts of me. But there are nicks of nostalgia when the steps of my school stare out at me; when I want so badly to go home. To go back, really, to the metal park bench by that library, the bench and the belated words that decided this. To go back, to the fancied ice-skaters, the eighties music a melody I had not known to suck in and slip inside, I had not known to squeeze tight around my heart strings.

I had not known.

I had not known that the Brooklyn Bridge was no beginning, but rather begged me back to a person, a child, an adolescent so full of flippant emotion, so merry and mighty inside.

I can only compromise with being young these days; I can only try to hide the small grins that grasp me, that somehow tickle those torn pasts tonight, when looking back slightly aches, morose muscles of living I had forgotten were ever there.

These could be jupiter drops, the changed light of eyes at the mere opening of goldfish, splits seconds of august, at this disquiet I so dislike and yet cannot drown in momentary mists. I cannot unmake my own memories.

And so it was slippery tonight, maybe with the sounds of the city I so love, maybe with the knowledge that this is not what I expected. Maybe with the unpatched pattern of promise torn in front of me, so tempting to imagine again.

Or maybe, seriously, it was the smile of him. It was the noisy grin, that fat dimple eyeing me back. How strange it is that familiar greens can fawn familiar faces, those drenched possibilities still tears, but tamed; the roar of clawless lions still enough to make me lick my lips.

I don't regret; and yet, I still yearn for some sort of understanding, for an eventual last isolation of the emotion that colors my mind, that still makes its way back inside, the most untender of exile, my proud pathways to peace.

Inside of the movie theater, thousands of miles and thousands of hours away from it all, there is so much to say, so much steeped, so much stolen by our imperfections, still cold, those frozen fingers of our time.

Oxford, Mississippi

Eventually, I will be able to summarize in paragraphs, etch the hours of ancestry upon a page. Eventually, the stories will be mine, and I will spit them forth over meals, mark the air with laughter, however mild, however molded to spent time.

For now, however, I try to piece together the siding, the cherished, the choked out horror that only what we reminisce expels. For now, I tease a past that preceded me, tickled by the weeping palms and ports, of that very river all children struggle to spell.

I look in books for the beginning. I break open Faulker to adopt the tongue. I imagine my grandmother on a Mississippi street and my father, shirtless, in coveralls, snaking the sodded line of his fishing rod. I imagine a youth I could not have known; not human but continental, a local youth, a youth of drawls and jumbled grits, of Sunday dress and belligerent baptisms.

I wonder if I can really claim it as my own, that past, that ancestry, that fat of cornbread seeped through pores; posh pigs all sweated in those heirloom Augusts; a man who was not yet mine.

And yet, I wonder, without it, how different we would be. Whether those dawns would be of fantasy, or grim folktales feathered with forgotten stows. If collard greens would have graced my plate; if sear-sucker would have dashed my sister's marriage. If we would have perhaps seen those streets that lie smartly magical, a Marquez-land of sorts, spelled out by our father's childhood, the hoods, the quicksand of humid breathing. And yet akin to my fear of viewing movie-renditions of books that I love, I fear encountering that other Oxford, that southern city of his live accounts. I fear not saving a story already put to rest, my own modern Pompei of sorts, where women have denounced petticoats and have men shed their three piece skins.

Expectation

I have no greater expectation than disappointment, or dreaded, dark moments that make me gasp (grasping not for comfort, not for knowledge but for nostalgic narcotics, the brightest underbelly of human hand-holding).

Some days, especially those dressed in sun, I can curl in the very moment that surrounds me--beneath me, a proper love affair with life. Some days, I tell myself, that loss only prepares us for more life at our fingertips, for other days, however hard to wrestle through, however wet with tears or raw with passion. However imprecise.

The last time I was in New York, a close friend of mine looked at me over wine and French cuisine--lit up her eyes at the notion that I, who hid in closets to avoid leaving home; who checked in with my first love at least a dozen times a day; who was so afraid of small hurts; was now extraordinarily independent and strong.

I suppose I should be proud, tickled by this innate strength inside. But the reality is that of little choice. And I would forever choose my small, fanatic, frantic self over any type of human strength I have encountered and hoarded in these last few months.

It is not strength, anyway. It is worn will.

It is still loving the tastes and tenderness of life.

Times

This is the most inopportune time to write. But what are such times anyway-just big bends of constructed living, just ways to seem in control of turning suns that simply sink their teeth.

Maybe that is why I (oh yes me) am organizing. Why I am re-ordering the items of my room, when the much bigger things seem to be spinning and stopping, looking at me- awkwardly apologetic at chance.

Sometimes it really is ok-some things seem easy, even. Some emotions I let touch me, tough or tender, realizing only that I am accepting. That I am able not only to sip coffee and write it down, but also to dance, to seep in the satisfaction of sun, to laugh. I sleep when I am tired and wake without beckoning. I study some days for hours and others not at all. Sometimes I just lay on the lawn and rearrange my thoughts, bring him closer, or pull him out to ornately examine and ache for.

I have given up on the temptation of time, knowing only that it will all take time and that this is less than mysterious. It is only me-amongst my cardboard boxes, having dropped my gentle, fur-clad bear. Only me, still in certain summer dresses, still braided or curled or unbrushed in the morning hours when I have forgotten this saddest facet of fate.

Sun

Of course it was the sun, the certainty when the first reminder was left wet, a floated kiss I could not grasp within my palms or rescue from memory.

It could have been the photographs, tried, told, as torn as electronic worlds allow.

I can't tell which part is pretending, if the disappointment of dried mango, the dispersal of my recollection, if the yearning is even mine anymore. And where I belong is even more fluid, fought with in moments of frantic recall of being stark, being strong along the trembling, acrobatic line I never named.

Or is it that I am forgetting. Is it that I am replacing? Or reaching for small swaths to bandage the wounds, curls of laughter and crisp if candied knots upon my tongue?

The Hardest Part still haunts me; and with it American Pie. The shadows of trucks and trembling drivers, the traffic where I held my hand, my heart, out to the wind. It just takes two notes and I am knocked back into that past, portly with pretense, but particular in numbing my naivite. Only moments and I am promised fine wine ice cream and an eventual passing of the storms.

I guess, I suppose, in the icing that is nostalgia I must one day accept that such divine delicacies only came with attics and escalation. That, while I miss most my father, I may also miss myself; or us. Or then.

I miss the roast chicken dinners, the crease of smoke, even; I miss make-believing.

And so I've stopped screaming, stopped stomping, stopped complaining. The ease with which I approach my world at once entertains and drastically disappoints. The extreme inevitability of growing up brings sighs where there were once cries, sleep where there was once sprinting. I don't think I somehow feel less, but I have foregone my own avenues in a lull of exhaustion that seems circular and endless and, more than anything, awfully, endlessly, achingly unreal.

Play for Today

In the words of the Cure, 'Play for Today.' I am unsure if this makes me think of music or the fields of tulips, so fat with Easter spirit that I wanted back.

We piled into a car and drove to the Cotswalds, the land I thought England was, shallow valleys heavy with laughing Sheepdogs, disappointing fudge, rainwashed brick, the gray of dusk or dawn the everyday, every moment, every sidewalk and sideways, every sight of ours. I wonder if the sigh inside was the flutter of Anna's parmigiana melting inside, or the memories of plaid pants suddenly more meek than morose; if it was the deep muddiness of it all that melted all my edges, the sweet of jam and cream encrusted on my tongue. Or if I simply, subtly allowed myself to see without seeking, without looking for recollections or reminders, without sight of him.

And what I saw instead: country pubs with fat scones; a functioning flour mill; ducks in restaurants, unwarily waddling; abandoned schoolhouses; perfect chapels with the faintest of forest gauze; homemade ice cream stands and purple sprouting from a Cotswald town; pale blue eyes and endless rows of antiques; wine houses; a penguin home; palaces and pristine gardens; gaudy old women descending B&B steps; the elderly whiskers of portly husbands; tottering babes in broken sandals, awkwardly embracing the rain.

It is funny how, just like not thinking allows you to recognize, not pushing allows me to recall. I closed my eyes on the car ride home and he was there, certainly beside me (not in a ghostly way, but in the way that all memories sidle up and suck you in, allowing life to carry on both forwards and backwards, the Coney Island Whip a ripened core of life). I could see him smiling on the Wisconsin road, my eyes opening and closing, the pink of middle America sunsets ascertaining small, if bloody, births. I could see him with the cinnamon bread in his lap, country blues unbearable and inescapable on the radio, the scent of rental cars and curls of smoke that he promised would, could never wield themselves inside of his veins...could only feign the threat of poison I so thoroughly studied and sternly advised against.

And most of the time, I was smiling, sucking in the small romantic beauties that make this right. Only the smell of leather reminded me of his tawny coat; and this return, this moment of relaxation in which I find myself now, all the small memories I want to keep alive, reminds me that I have lost my confidante. That only my father would comprehend how the kiss of a shaggy sheepdog made me swoon, how the taste of rain chartered me back to our Nova Scotia cabin and the sooty sand that made me love blue. That I look, inside of my friends, my family, my notebook, myself but there is no relief, no release, no remedy for this severe silence I have stumbled upon.

No Volvere

There was a time when I knew how to write, what to write, when the words bled through me--shot such spires from my veins. All seemed at peace in those moments, a child curled in tulip sheets, one world wet against my eyelids. The words were my own tripping blues and I would sit there, knees against my melodies, mulled at night.

There was a time when Broadway was all I needed to alight my life--when pink flicks at sunset or porcelain cups of Corona cordoned all fears. When dancing on doorsteps was decorated or deviated from only in directing: in dealing such sour spades of love. How I loved then. How I loved my city, my spark, my storms.

There was a time when I clung to forgiving; all was accepted or enveloped. All I knew was the chipped smile of partnership and lightning stuck on thundering Sundays. All I knew was the fat feather of pillowed pretense.

I am afraid, I suspect. But also disappointed in this more grown up of self, fearful of letting it show, fearful of what, exactly, I am unsure. Of knowing there is not enough or there is not, at least, all that I want. That the single thing, person I need now is gone, having galloped to some corner unreachable, unwritable even. The truth is so simple and yet still cutting, crisp and calling of my core. This is not right--but rightness and righteousness are overkempt, overspent. I want to be the exception to the human, the mortal, the mortifying; I want one step backwards to sew closed whatever wound--of head or heart or soul--weakened all wisps of waking. If only the world functioned, filled on such robust, raspy, unreal emotion. If only this once I could return.