— phrases and idioms, insults and musings to speak like spitting. The house was dancing with all the hate I'd never had the exquisite privilege of tasting. Heavy percussion on my taste buds.
I shoved the chair away behind me, almost frantically. It screeched against the floor. Aching into my marrow and deeper, lower, into some part of my soul that lay below my body, a magnet embedded in the hardwood floor that pulled me to and fro.
"What are you doing?" she said, and I simply couldn't believe how ignorant she was, how little she knew me. I guess I didn't really know her, either, and I . . .
. . . couldn't speak. Had I ever been able to? In my watery years of life, had I ever truly spoken? I was stranded on a silent sea, always had been. Not even a murmur. I felt sure that no matter how many lifetimes of words I thrust from my burning throat, she would not hear a single croak.
"I need to leave," I said and gritted my teeth until my jaw felt warm and fierce. "I can't do this. Ivy, remember the dinner we shared that final night, before everything ended? Remember how charismatic and interested and ridiculous I was? That wasn't me. This is me, sort of. I'm emerging. God." She looked at me in bewildered silence as I loosened and opened and preened, a rotting bloom of sticky truths. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't parse even a single emotion from her face. It was simply a map of lines, a piece of abstract art for me to admire from across our museum.
I turned to leave, then heard a short creak and looked back, and she'd stood up too, scarecrowed and trembling. We stood there in the room that smelled like garlic and tupperware and filtered dust and looked at each other. Animals, I thought, it's all we really are. And I wanted to yowl and break things like a beady-eyed primate I'd seen at the zoo when I was seven. Hair on end, bloodshot eyes.
We both sat down and talked for a long time. Dominance in the conversation shifted to her. Of what she said, the stories she told, I really cannot remember, and I suppose that testifies against me more than anything else. What I knew of her had remained constant in my mind: the chimes of her laughter, the way new light slid through her hair, her unrelenting kindness (the kind I envied), her intelligence. On that fateful day so long ago, she saw someone trapped and reached out an arm. Despite all her foresight, she must not have seen my foolishness, my pettiness, my hatred, and most of all my weakness. Did I drag her down with me? I thought.
I do remember how I felt after the air had settled: ashamed, and strangely naked. Before she had spoken, I could've walked away strong, largely the same person as before. But now that it went both ways — now that the pain was built between us ever-so-carefully, I could not step away without shattering something important. That terrified me.
Nevertheless, all constructions crumbled, all structures were sifted into the warm winds of life. It's pleasant to imagine my metamorphosis, something dripping with symbolism. But I am no butterfly. I stumbled out of the kitchen, opened the door, almost closed it, looked back into her eyes, her irises, the deep blacks and navy blues, a swipe of green like God's green thumb in pupil-dirt, the shine of sunlight hovering beside a reflection of my own ugly twilit face. I said something, a few things . . . closed the door . . . walked down the steps . . . down the sidewalk . . . to my car. On and away.
And then there is now, immediate like arctic water on my face. Heaving myself out of bed, grasping for something, my nails crooked against the neat cold wood. It had been a week since the reunion with Ivy. Mind abuzz.
"True?" I spoke to the furniture. My funds were running low; I wasn't sure how many more third-rate motel bedrooms I could afford before I'd be empty-handed, empty-willed. The time on my phone was blurry. For a moment, I considered the delicious idea of turning on the lamp next to me, chasing clarity. Instead, I let the dark linger and stir around me. My eyes did not adjust; it was still dark outside, and the room did not even have the banal comfort of silhouettes. If not for the firmness of the moth-eaten mattress below me, I could've been floating in some hole at the center of the earth. Wheels grinded down gravelly streets faintly in the distance. The ticking of a cheap clock, tic-tic-tic . . . the rhythm of memories.
I stood up in the harrowing dark. I could feel the forking of fate around my confused heart. What could I do but stand there as my future bent around my back? What was so wrong with that, to stand between roads? To feel the wind whistling against goosebumps, twirling across my feet, forever? To see the revolving sun on its path? To love the mundane as grandfathers and flies and painters do?
I stood there, in that motel room, until the sun rose. Then I stepped out onto the deck that smelled of cigarettes and confusion, and I watched the world move. I knew that there was nothing for me to reach for anymore. My hands lay at my waist, reunited with the manageable sliver of being I'd always tried to climb out of, to shed like snakeskin. Mountains had disintegrated under my feet. I stood now with the sun-warmed detritus of the world, and finally let the skeletal fragments of destiny fall from my hands.
*****
The man grew his own garden in a plot at the crook of two freeways, leaving his guilt behind like immutable perfume. He had his plants, and they had him, and not a word needed to be spoken. Nature knew his name.
I shoved the chair away behind me, almost frantically. It screeched against the floor. Aching into my marrow and deeper, lower, into some part of my soul that lay below my body, a magnet embedded in the hardwood floor that pulled me to and fro.
"What are you doing?" she said, and I simply couldn't believe how ignorant she was, how little she knew me. I guess I didn't really know her, either, and I . . .
. . . couldn't speak. Had I ever been able to? In my watery years of life, had I ever truly spoken? I was stranded on a silent sea, always had been. Not even a murmur. I felt sure that no matter how many lifetimes of words I thrust from my burning throat, she would not hear a single croak.
"I need to leave," I said and gritted my teeth until my jaw felt warm and fierce. "I can't do this. Ivy, remember the dinner we shared that final night, before everything ended? Remember how charismatic and interested and ridiculous I was? That wasn't me. This is me, sort of. I'm emerging. God." She looked at me in bewildered silence as I loosened and opened and preened, a rotting bloom of sticky truths. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't parse even a single emotion from her face. It was simply a map of lines, a piece of abstract art for me to admire from across our museum.
I turned to leave, then heard a short creak and looked back, and she'd stood up too, scarecrowed and trembling. We stood there in the room that smelled like garlic and tupperware and filtered dust and looked at each other. Animals, I thought, it's all we really are. And I wanted to yowl and break things like a beady-eyed primate I'd seen at the zoo when I was seven. Hair on end, bloodshot eyes.
We both sat down and talked for a long time. Dominance in the conversation shifted to her. Of what she said, the stories she told, I really cannot remember, and I suppose that testifies against me more than anything else. What I knew of her had remained constant in my mind: the chimes of her laughter, the way new light slid through her hair, her unrelenting kindness (the kind I envied), her intelligence. On that fateful day so long ago, she saw someone trapped and reached out an arm. Despite all her foresight, she must not have seen my foolishness, my pettiness, my hatred, and most of all my weakness. Did I drag her down with me? I thought.
I do remember how I felt after the air had settled: ashamed, and strangely naked. Before she had spoken, I could've walked away strong, largely the same person as before. But now that it went both ways — now that the pain was built between us ever-so-carefully, I could not step away without shattering something important. That terrified me.
Nevertheless, all constructions crumbled, all structures were sifted into the warm winds of life. It's pleasant to imagine my metamorphosis, something dripping with symbolism. But I am no butterfly. I stumbled out of the kitchen, opened the door, almost closed it, looked back into her eyes, her irises, the deep blacks and navy blues, a swipe of green like God's green thumb in pupil-dirt, the shine of sunlight hovering beside a reflection of my own ugly twilit face. I said something, a few things . . . closed the door . . . walked down the steps . . . down the sidewalk . . . to my car. On and away.
And then there is now, immediate like arctic water on my face. Heaving myself out of bed, grasping for something, my nails crooked against the neat cold wood. It had been a week since the reunion with Ivy. Mind abuzz.
"True?" I spoke to the furniture. My funds were running low; I wasn't sure how many more third-rate motel bedrooms I could afford before I'd be empty-handed, empty-willed. The time on my phone was blurry. For a moment, I considered the delicious idea of turning on the lamp next to me, chasing clarity. Instead, I let the dark linger and stir around me. My eyes did not adjust; it was still dark outside, and the room did not even have the banal comfort of silhouettes. If not for the firmness of the moth-eaten mattress below me, I could've been floating in some hole at the center of the earth. Wheels grinded down gravelly streets faintly in the distance. The ticking of a cheap clock, tic-tic-tic . . . the rhythm of memories.
I stood up in the harrowing dark. I could feel the forking of fate around my confused heart. What could I do but stand there as my future bent around my back? What was so wrong with that, to stand between roads? To feel the wind whistling against goosebumps, twirling across my feet, forever? To see the revolving sun on its path? To love the mundane as grandfathers and flies and painters do?
I stood there, in that motel room, until the sun rose. Then I stepped out onto the deck that smelled of cigarettes and confusion, and I watched the world move. I knew that there was nothing for me to reach for anymore. My hands lay at my waist, reunited with the manageable sliver of being I'd always tried to climb out of, to shed like snakeskin. Mountains had disintegrated under my feet. I stood now with the sun-warmed detritus of the world, and finally let the skeletal fragments of destiny fall from my hands.
*****
The man grew his own garden in a plot at the crook of two freeways, leaving his guilt behind like immutable perfume. He had his plants, and they had him, and not a word needed to be spoken. Nature knew his name.