Hey

Why you make me wait so long?

Huh? Why is that?

Why you do that, Ruby. Just, why?

Untitled

By the time
its November I will
be all over it, be all over
you I will hang up the hang ups. You can
talk to the crows. I can take
some walks in the early morning
when every cobweb
is silvered with damp
when the fog socks it all in
and by the time
mists are excited by sunrise
stirring and then streaming
off the water
rising into chimneys
I'll be more than fine. I'll be
solidly November. Damp leaves, rotty smells,
cool air steamy sweat, shivering with wet. I'll be
running. I'll be breathing hard. My chest
will burn my heart
will pound I'll kick into the dirt. I'll be
out of the weeds and into the woods. I'll be
socks and warm soup
after a cold hard rain. A rain
all day. I'll be the last of the asters in an
old valley cemetery. Pincushion moss. Stone
epithets, both sets of dates: born, died.
I'll be the cadaver. I'll be
the solid grey sky. I'll be the
crunchy brown oak leaves
all over you
more than fine
by the calendar
inevitably

until the month after that. And after that. and
after that. and after that too.

You can talk to the crows.

An American Myth

Chaplaincy

I am awake in my boat. My boat is on the stormy sea. I will not sail. I will not row. I will quietly look at the stars

fixed in their places. 

*All shall be well. And all shall be well. And all manner of thing shall be well. 

*Julian of Norwich

T.

One of my favorite things we used to do was to run at each other as fast as we could the moment we first saw each other. On campus, where I went to school and he worked; in the grocery store; walking in approaching directions on one of the streets near our house. 

T. was athletic and he could certainly outrun me but he went for style as well as speed. If he was carrying anything, he either dropped it immediately like a dead body, or threw it as high as he could into the air. Once he threw a paper he was reading while walking into the air and by the time it fluttered down he was already a block away. He would run while kind of doing this gallopy hopping at the same time, sometimes punctuated by this very fast hand clapping and grinning. When we would get within a block or two of each other, we would both throw our arms up in the air in a big dihedral "V" like turkey vultures and then hold them exactly that way for the remainder of the running. Its really actually pretty hard to run fast with your arms up that way. 

When we would get within a few feet of each other T. would slow down and I would speed up, and he would bend his knees to bring the trunk of his body down to be even with mine. I would push off my right leg because that's my stronger leg, and I would jump into his arms. I just loved how that felt. My whole entire body would be in the air for at least a few seconds, or it felt like that, and then every part of my body would be in contact with his. His arms would come around my back and waist so fast, and he would just totally crush me into him. I would bury my face in the hollow of his neck and he always smelled so strong. He was not a daily showerer and he didn't wear deodorant, I don't think. But he always smelled so nice to me, in a full and rich and powerful kind of way. Sometimes his hair would flip forward and his ponytail would fall against my neck. He had great hair. Thick, thick black strands, always gathered in a low ponytail, often using one of my hair elastics shoplifted from my basket of hair things in our bathroom. 

There were so many other things I loved about T. but that was my favorite. It surprised me at that age, in my last year of college, and it still surprises me now how hard it is to find someone who will truly play with you. Who will commit to dropping everything on a regular basis to make, and enjoy, a moment of joy. Who sees it something like I do, that things are important and serious in life and that they are also a zen-nothingness, absurd, intangible, rice-paper-thin and dissolving and gone, threaded with death and receding into invisibility like a wind-thiefed balloon into the sky. It feels easy to play to me when I can see myself as really just an electronic battery icon, simultaneously living and generating while also depleting and running out. Living, and dying, at once.

Every single time T. ran at me and I ran at him I was happy and I think he was too. Every time we got to the crash and hold part I was also happy, and full, and I felt like I loved him simply and truly and he loved me back. I think he felt that way too. Its hard to imagine he would have kept doing the whole routine for as long as he was alive if he didn't. He would have known I would have wanted him to, but he didn't like me that much. 

It was three months from the last time we did a run and crash, when we spotted each other walking in different directions on Eddy St., to the moment he shot himself in the temple with a gun he had bought a few weeks earlier. By then I was gone and living in Seattle, and he had moved out of our apartment and was living with our mutual friend G. G. was the one who found him, in a pool of blood on his bed, and T. must have known it would be G. to find him. There weren't any other housemates at the time. G. was so angry about that, for a long time. The selfishness of T. doing that to him, leaving him with that image in his head. 

I don't know why he did that. Shot himself. I don't know what it was about. I still think about it a lot, 20 years later. He was a housemate and a friend. He wasn't a best friend, really. Our lives were really different and we only lived together for 6 months. But I did have a genuine love for him. And I know he loved me too. That's a lot, in addition to the run-and-crash, in 6 months. 

I think sometimes that I wish I had been more serious with him, that if I had been, I might have gotten a feel for something going on in his moods or thinking and that I might have been able to somehow influence him away from death and towards life. Affect his trajectory, directly or indirectly, and change the part of his future when he takes the gun he bought out of the trunk of his car, walks up the stairs, sits on the edge of his bed, puts the gun to his head and pulls the trigger. What would it take, how much would have had to have been different, to change that part? I don't know. I didn't know. I had no idea that his battery icon was outlined in red, that warnings were beginning to come up on the screen to plug the device in now before automatic shutdown and loss of data occurred. 

When G. called me to tell me T. died, I felt and I still feel undeserving that I got so much of T. in those last 6 months. He had a girlfriend, a sister, an ex-girlfriend, a mother, a best friend from grade school. But a lot of his time for those last 6 months of his life was with me in our apartment, teaching me how to make curry, showing me his collection of Japanese weapons and his comic books, making me heavy metal mix tapes to counteract what he saw as my terrible folksy taste in music, watching MTV with me late at night in our kitchen, sitting on the folded and duct-taped mattress that was our couch. And doing the run-and-crash. 

The truth is, I would like to run-and-crash just about everyone I love, and everyone I like. I would like to hurl a gallon of milk and a plastic bag with blueberries and a roasting chicken and a bag of pretzels sky-high and take off up my street doing the gallopy-hop. But at 40 years old I don't find there are a lot of takers. I think most people I know would be OK about it once, maybe. I think if I did it the way I would really want to do it, all in, they would find me to be what they consider a little abnormal. I might be. That's possible. My kids would do it. There are people I love who might participate, but they aren't here, and are all far away. 

Nothing is different, though. I still sometimes do mental run-throughs of run-and-crash with T. when walking around, as if he might be just around the next corner, and I need to be ready, even though he's been dead for 20 years. Twenty years later and that's still with me. That means something really good, I think. I still have the impulse to do it when I see someone I love, and I sometimes hug that person that way, and smell their necks, although I do it with discreet restraint, and I don't drop or throw anything up in the air beforehand. 

Nevertheless. Run-and-crash. And T. I still feel about all of it the same way. I still say, and think, and believe: joy. Joy. And death, too. 

Both, at the same time. 

Death

The body dies while it lives. My heart dies. 27% of my heart is dead, from infection. I thought we were watching West Wing reruns and recovering from weariness, my heart and I. I thought I was figuratively heartsick. Dear heart, sweetheart, I thought you were pounding in my chest like that just to shake me a little, just to say hi. I thought you were pounding and that you and I were full. Full hearts.

You weren't. You were resisting a mugging. You were slapping his hands away and yelling, really loudly. You were trying to run except you were tethered and chained in my chest.

A little bit of my heart is dead. No one broke it. It got sick, it died. Its how it happens.

Its not a euphemism. Its just viruses, being dead themselves, being elegant, being perfect at what they do. If you're going to strive for the highest possible level of consciousness while your ticker is still ticking, forget about mediation, yoga, certain books, certain music, certain things with certain people.

Fall in love with a virus instead. I did. A virus stole my heart. A piece of my heart.

All is fair in love. I don't know yet about war.

Untitled

One time, Jared asked me to come to a function at the house he lived in. He had advantages, living in that house. He was special for living there and he was probably special all on his own, though I don't remember, or possibly I never knew, what it was about him that made that so.

He was from California. He had great hair. He was charmingly nervous underneath his coolness, adaptability, and intelligence. I was...I don't know what I was. I was 19 years old. I didn't own a dress. I borrowed someone's plum-colored cotton sheath in a size two sizes too big for me. I had some white satin ribbon, I'm not sure why. I tied a cord of it around my throat and I sewed some of it to my shoes and wound it around my ankles. I put my hair up. That's how dressing up still goes pretty often for me. I think its safe to say now that I'm not the girl with the right thing to wear, or the ease. I don't hate it, or mock it. It just moves away from me, like same-poled magnet ends.

He liked the way I looked. He liked me well enough although he did all the talking. He liked, I think, my listening. I think I can now and could then listen so hard that it would knock you out. Its not my party trick or my thing. Its not my way in or my way of getting you to stop thinking about you, while you're talking about you, and instead notice me.

Its just what I would like to do, usually. I'm generally interested. I'd like to know you, usually. And also it works with my shyness. That hasn't changed. I do now have a dress appropriate to each season that fits, and shoes and some jewelry that will go with it. Its 20 years later, and now I have something to wear that I don't have to sew an hour before I get picked up. It seems like a grown-up thing to arrange for myself that makes me feel a little better. It alleviates the background anxiety a small amount, to have that in place, and to know its in place. I don't want to have the outfit for you, so that you like the way I look. I just don't want to have to find something to borrow and then sew on it to make it OK. Its for me.  It gets it out of the way.

Anyway, that night we listened to a famous newsman give a speech. We had a glass of wine and we held hands and we had a small kiss goodnight after sitting for a long time afterwards in his musty basement apartment, him smoking weed, me in the beanbag chair, him talking, me listening, with party lights on and ska music playing. Then I got a ride home with a friend and the friend and I had a small kiss goodnight with the car idling, the dashboard lights on, the radio playing the college station. He liked the dress too, and especially the choker ribbon.

I walked into my dormitory and waited for the friend's car to pull away. I think back on that, and I thank fucking god for the world without a smartphone just then, no texts, no pings, no notifications, no nothing. Just watch someone pull away in secrecy, from a room with the light turned off on purpose, and when they're gone, they're just actually really gone, and its over. Its done, its ended, its over. And you can say, OK, and goodbye to that whole thing.

I waited a few minutes and then I walked down the hill through a cemetery that was there. I found a particularly soft spot in front of a very old slate headstone, worn and illegible, under a pine tree, cobbled with mounds of pincushion moss. I laid down and untied the ribbon at my throat, ripped the ribbons off my shoes. Rubbed my neck a little. Put an arm back bent under my head. Looked at the stars through the pine branches. Was alone. Felt comfortable.

Listened to the wind in the pine branches overhead, and the murmur of voices going on up the hill.