Tag: remember when we were in love

a higher fidelity incantation

  • Here With Me – Susie Suh x Robot Koch

    Now that I have returned to Vancouver my days are spent, again, tidying house and looking for further work. Selling things, making charity bags, writing cover letters. The details shift, move, and fade away, but the general thrust remains the same: find work, leave this place.

    I was recently disrupted, though, by a simple thing; an old greeting card with a picture of a leopard-print rabbit that fell from between some books in my closet while I was struggling to put my suitcase away. It’s from a lover I was with in 2006, a man who was almost exactly twice my age at the time, who I still think of with affection when he comes to mind. We haven’t been in touch since January of 2012, when there was a brief flurry of five or six e-mail that died in his court.

    Inside is a lovely little note, sweet, hopeful and warm, from a time when we still felt protected by each other, even after the close of our relationship. Time travel via information packet. Memory conjuring his voice, his toothy smile, how bright it was the day we walked in the fog by the water, how much I mourned when the silver and green amber brooch he gave me was stolen and lost. (There’s plenty of writing about him in this journal, actually, tucked under a code-name tag, just like everyone else I’ve shared my life with since 2003.) I do not think of him often, but when I do, I wonder where in the world he is, what lunatic art he is birthing, who he is currently inspiring. I hope his family has healed. I hope his head and heart have found peace and delight. I hope, as he inevitability swans through the world, (and swans, he does), elegant and full of light, he does so with gentleness, ferocity, and grace.

    So I wrote him a letter, the contents not much different than what I’m sharing here, and I put the card up on the thread I have on the wall above my desk where I keep emotional reminders. It fit in nicely. Such good company on that length of string! Photographs of photographers, snippets from writers, postcards, and similar paper miscellany. All of it positive, but all of the people gone from my life or far away.

    It was interesting to find myself writing again to someone I haven’t spoken to in so long. So many commingling layers of motivation! He was the center of my life, the vortex of everything spun around him, but I’m in my thirties now and I don’t think we’ve been in the same place since I was twenty-five. (Seven years is a fairy-tale number. Even with seven league boots, I’m still so far behind that it’s almost a fifth of my entire life.) It’s so peculiar, that such distance could come into play, that such distance is what became ordinary.

    As I clear my life, hone it down like a knife, I wonder who else I will reach out to.

    • like living on an island

    He used to call it Small Town Entertainment, following sirens, standing out front the house to watch police dogs search the neighborhood, grabbing our coats whenever the sound of a firetruck stopped nearby. He transformed us into voyeurs searching for burning houses, lucky that our neighborhood was so fraught with crime. I have particular memory of the shooting up the street, a gangster hit, old fashioned in a barbershop, towel still wrapped around what was left of his head. Standing on the sidewalk, barefoot, I felt we should always be in housecoats, that I should learn how to have my hair in curlers or wear something green that cracked as it dried upon my face. What were we really looking for, I wondered, with no television, hardly any internet. Were our avenues to knowledge really so slim? He threw me down the stairs once, but we still called it love.

    based on a brick of a pillow and a plank of what it used to be like to be me

    She looked all curves and shiny eyes. Posed as woman as a simple cure-all, her body a pill, the waiting chemistry of the word Yes. One word untying every victim of life from the railway tracks. New blood, brooding on the futility of sexual capacity. Those bastards draped in honey-suckle, in ample feeling. Hands with too much strength trapped inside. Drunk on missing lovers, driving to the homes of people they all used to know together, they never had each other biblically, except in her city-block verses and tired dreaming. So she hotly looked at him and thought, I could leave right now. I could walk out that door saying, hey, just don’t call me for awhile, okay?

    Shuddering into a more sober awareness, the touch of grass beneath her reminds her of fiction. Stains of umbilical fantasy grabbing at her memories, images of kissing, of improbable situations where she gets to be impressive. Doctors saying, we don’t know how long until she’s leaving, but out of everyone, she’s asking for you. The scream of anniversary panic, not in this life, she thought of carrying him through passageways, his body light as music, until she comes to a door with a red exit light and puts him down as if that was the plan all along. Running from wolves, pulling him from fires. Solid threats she could rescue him from. Gratitude dripping from his smiles, another day blocking the doorway with her body.

    She can put an edge on any word, turning it on the lathe of her tongue to remind him of all the things that he hasn’t given her, treating him like a sarcastic stranger. The verdict, hell to pay. Incredibly, they kept going. Independence a death in the family. It was like the stop-gap job she took in college, steady, with no real reason to leave. It had never been meant to last so long, but it paid the bills, and she kept hoarding his voice in her fantasies. She began to smile as if goodbye was one last joke between them, and she saw instantly how easily he could defeat her. All he would have to do is laugh. Laugh and turn to her and all her certainty would vanish, replaced by his universe. How can you leave someone who implies that black velvet threats are the smallest plant in an undistinguished windowsill garden?

    This was all part of his plan, a map of telling secrets in her dancing. He knew how to pull her hair, how to find her fingertip sounds. Her limited view gave her this, like dust that persists, in spite of the fact that he’d never touched her. It was a game as sharp as the rays of daylight that sent her to sleep on winter mornings. Tall, she thinks, staring fixedly at the ceiling as if there were nothing blocking her gaze from the mirror of the sky. Did I used to like them tall? She thinks she’s stupid and immature, only able to think in boy with girl relationships, unable to conceive of a place where she understands only friends. Fifty ways to leave your lover – by keeping her adoration a secret, by winking uncertainly at a taxi-driver and paying him all the money she could find, by suddenly playing aloof like she was on t.v. Running out of fingers, counting issues instead, so much baggage it’s a matched set.