I forget how I got here. Him? Maybe not the 4:56 a.m. train. Now that the days have been filled with yesterdays, tomorrows, days after and before, sometimes, when I look in the mirror, I wonder what remains. If nothing remains there is nothing to carry, therefore nothing to loose, but myself with my empty suitcase. Proven wrong. Still. I wait. I remain. Too many days traveling to not loose oneself. I am hunted by memories of me.
Forget yourself, he said all-knowing pushing record on a broken tape player, like how I forget to use articles in the English language. He films that which is not deliberate only seems unrehearsed, unpracticed, unconditioned. How wrong you are, she thought, to
dream of an authentic moment and to think that you
could recreate it ad-infinitum.
Listen to the structure fall apart….
When I
was
brave words
and sentences and
thoughts would
drop from
my
mOUth.
They
would roll
around in
the
s-p-a-c-e-s
we would occupy,
our kitchen, our bed, hallway. Hands shaking. Ipretend. It makes no difference to me how cold America is. I have been fucked, so what if I look away?
He captures me looking away.
It’s like the chair you use to sit on in the kitchen, what if it is just a memory of a chair? Or the chair his grandfather left him, symbolic of nothing, or everything that will fade. This is how we pass, like we weren’t
even here.
“Did we buy it together? Well it is now mine, it was always mine, and you broke it. On misunderstanding, you-”
“Through red-rock landscapes one carries chair. Yet, already, you fight. Look into the camera. Start from: ‘you keep saying this wood is not him. However this lack of common word between us tells you that language can’t substitute for life, but it can substitute for something.’”
You cannot hear him filming me. I sing. Take away the dessert, the rocks, but not the snow from me. “Take away the sky,” what I yelled against the wind. What he said was nothing back, “except I don’t quite belong, once again, nothing has changed.” I wish I could just tell him that none of us belong, instead the silence says it. All the moment remains frozen here while we laid bare. I wept. I wanted. But his hands still found my breasts.
Yet, already.
10 years together here.
This is not just another way to define why he clothed, to explain how I came with, why I endure wave after wave. I cannot look away from us. To outline why I still gaze, still sail, on dreams, still drift away with him. He’s unpredictable. When I was brave ‘don’t fence me in’ was my song, now I can’t express why I live on one thought or as one human being, even though a hujman being is milk and honey. The thught is on another side too sour.
“What about the bitter? Where’s our connection?” I ask. Is it just a word, which word, marriage. Place me on your tongue. Realize a human being is me, a me, the me, in relation to you, my hand, fingers, trying, always in his hand, trying, on his heart, beating:
A lifetime spent
to touch you,
define you.
To touch me,
create me,
to leave a mark.
Which is nothing, but the murmur of cottonwood trees for once anchor
me.
“Not if only we sail on dreams, will we then wake to reality.”
“Reality?”
“The thin moment between tenses of mind.”
“Eat me up or grow up and blow away.”