bedroomlight

[bedroomlight]

DUSTING

I thought of sugar first. It wasn't sweet swiping through the snow in the Land Rover headed home because you didn't show. Why had I done this again? In Michigan I would've held onto my dignity; in Hanover I groveled. Dartmouth green with envy seeing how other boys went through life so easy. You should have met me at the theater, at the scheduled time. It looked beautiful upon arrival, snow floating down. I thought of sugar first. Were all people here like this? Freshman year and freshman boys, they seemed different in the pamphlets. I drove home in the Land Rover, through the snow, wishing for sweet Michigan, thinking I'd do this again, Dartmouth green. The other boys made it look so easy.

[bedroomlight]

i no longer have the sheen of youth nor have i (yet) developed the refinement that comes with a certain level of experience i struggled to replace the car battery today i hugged my stuffed animals then researched courses to take at the local community college i don't feel beautiful or dreamy i feel like carrot soup and toast can carry me through late autumn i tuck my shirt in and wear thick glasses i water my plants i no longer see the magic of a gas station at night and rather dread filling the gas tank up past daylight hours i have bad eczema i feel like a lot happened these past few years that broke me but somehow with my stuffed animals and soup and plants patched myself together not quite prettily but am a little more sturdy i hope

[bedroomlight]

i. later, he accused me of casting a spell on him. me - a girl from some small nothing town in ohio, 16, raised presbyterian and decent, plain as bare november trees and just about as easy to look at, too. "you're everywhere," he wrote me in a letter. his handwriting was bad, but the way he wrote "everywhere" looked beautiful. "you're in every city, you're like the fucking pigeons. the girls i see are all you!"

ii. just once. do it just once. fall in love, make it hopeless, come out of it crying. maybe do it with a boy who gives you his varsity wrestling hoodie and makes you feel like you're the only one. try and draw those words - "you're the only one" - out of him. you'll remember them forever. don't be afraid. your spirit will get a little harder - cherrywood hard. you'll thank me later.

iii. but i love him! but i love him! but i love him! (i think this as i walk up our long driveway in the rain, fists clenched, not quite ready to face mother, who perhaps has curlers in her hair and is sitting next to Harold, our maine coon, on the sofa, armed with some choice words because it's an hour past curfew, "blah blah blah i told you he was bad for you," goddamn it all - !)

iv. [english] and what sort of job do you think you'll get with that? [i don't know.] spoiled rich kid burning your parents' money. [okay.] don't know the value of hard work. [okay.] should have gone into engineering, or medicine, or better yet trade school. [okay.] you'll end up working as a barista like all the other english majors. [okay.]

v. i dream of it, pray for it, some kind of magic, completely divorced from the digital realm, you can't take a picture of them, there's no evidence of them on social media or the tabloid websites or anywhere, but THEY ARE HERE, people have seen them, the child, purer than the vacuum of space, come here to this tumultuous country, to save us some say but i think differently - i think to simply remind us...

Discussion 11/22/2024

1. Pigeon

2. Mended heart

3. Bad boyfriend

4. College major

5. Godchild

[bedroomlight]

MA, Nov. 2024

[bedroomlight]

HEARTBREAKER

did you ever? make a list of happy memories? i made one because i knew. i would forget in a year or two. there's so much life, you forget things that aren't supposed to matter anymore. i needed something to explain the feeling of "hole." i feel... a "hole." my memory's not too good anymore. can't cull, can't sift through the files, have no way of explaining why i feel like something never developed. so the list. it explains. why i can't drive down certain streets anymore, why i make coffee at home instead of going to a cafe. even certain boy's names, i avoid. i'll never give my children those names! (but why not? i like those names! and don't holes fill in eventually, with earth, or water, or abstract forces? shall i bear the pain and the hole-feeling, tear up the list?) i do recall your face, i pace about the house, listless, thinking of your face, applying it to certain memories on my list. maybe i shouldn't be doing that. i don't believe you are. unintentional heartbreaker, hole-maker. i've never been in something like this, i don't know how to do it. i wish someone could tell me the right path - lead me by the wrist - list or desist!

[bedroomlight]

November thought-process - everything I write this month is just fertilizer

[bedroomlight]

"Hell is real." Anyone who knows anything about driving through Ohio knows about that billboard sign, black and biting and, as I learned later, true. Hell is real! A man in a black bolero hat proved that to me. Under the pretense of being a mold inspector, he took one walk around my daughter's bedroom while she was away at school and appeared to collect items in a black trash bag. (I'm not quite sure what---he wouldn't let me watch...) The next morning, my ex-husband sat across from me just as he had the day before my sister slammed into him with her Chevy. Hell is real---he had come back from it! "Tell me all about it," I wanted to say, but then I caught myself. I looked into his eyes, the familiar little voids that I had wanted to spit my frustrations into back then, and again now. Hell was here! I thought back to the day before. Why had I let that man in the black bolero hat into my house, and into my daughter's bedroom? Where had he come from? We'd been having a mold problem, but he wasn't really a mold inspector! I snapped back to my ex-husband before me. He had gotten up and began looking at the photo frames on the wall, everything he'd missed out on after he died. He didn't say anything. He didn't seem too concerned with me. I supposed his head was still fuzzy after his return from being dead; perhaps necromancy did that to a person. I muttered something about going outside for a smoke, though I hadn't smoked in years. I called my sister, who answered with a shaky voice.

[bedroomlight]

Funny—we’d spent so much time together, had enjoyed each other’s company so much (walking side by side around the park, driving to our favorite restaurant in Detroit, being practically inseparable at the Bray-Dawson gala), that it hadn’t bothered me that I didn’t know him well at all—and never would. Was this intentional on his part, or was it a willing acceptance on mine? You could ask me what his favorite color was or what his parents did for a living, and I wouldn’t know. And yet, I felt like being with him was a highlight of my life. He was gorgeous, but was I really that shallow? (“Sounds like it,” Christopher uncharitably told me.) Our being together all the time was an impersonal engagement that felt, in the end, like a story tragically left unfinished. We looked so good in the pictures. I thought so, and people told me so. People associated us with one another, the beautiful angel (him) and the ugly gremlin (me). In my head I thought it was all “gorgeously shot,” like a movie, which is funny because I doubt he’s thought of our time spent together much at all.

Maybe I’m alone in this. Maybe I was crazy (fine), maybe Christopher was right, I shouldn’t have let the whole thing get to my head (fine, but painful). I cling to the photos though I can barely bear to look at them. We looked so good. I looked so happy! I wish the movie hadn’t ended, it’s so hard to watch the credits roll.

[bedroomlight]

After the Sagittarius, necromancy became possible. I don’t have to tell you that - you came back from the dead, following my voice, laughing. “What was it like in hell?” That’s the question your children are too scared to ask. For we all know where you went. Do you still like coffee, do you still take it black?

[bedroomlight]

I was desperate for a connection. Nature, spirits, angels, God, boys, anything. I wanted to go on a road trip but I couldn’t drive. And had no friends who would go with me. I wrote poems but they came out barren because there was no life in them. Because I hadn’t lived! I spent my days in the pretty house that looked like a cake and had groceries delivered to my doorstep. I wanted to invite someone into the house, even if it was the strange man who was haunting the children’s hospital asking to buy children’s stuffed animals. But even strange persons like him seemed to avoid my house like the plague.

[bedroomlight]

I LOVE YOUR WRITING SO MUCH!! you have such a gift for words and they are so vivid and alive. reading your poems has them crawling in my brain like ants on a melted popsicle in summer. your work is truly fantastic <3

This is very kind of you and I am so grateful you took the time to send this! Also I feel like you are a great writer because the ant / popsicle simile is really good?? Thank you so much again!

[bedroomlight]

What I forgot about road trips: you can be any age. The sprawling lands still feel like forever. There can be different reasons for it. Magic flashes by, almost blinding, unless you stare at it head-on in which case it is actually but temporarily blinding. Gas station slush drinks taste delicious. They stain your mouth which is half the fun. On a similar note, there’s nothing quite like a 7-Eleven sign flickering at night. Remember that? We formed a religion around it when we were teenagers. We’ve got a different attitude towards religion now - not all aesthetics - but we love 7-Eleven just the same. Let’s see… then there’s the black trucks. You’ll recall the boy who disappeared in one and was never heard from again. Most drivers are perfectly nice but there was that one demonic one wearing human skin. Our Land Rover couldn’t keep up. We passed through roads carving through old forests, remember how we sensed all those crows in them? “Like too much black pepper.” That kind of eerie stuff is still out there, but when you are older you can reflect an eeriness right back. Someone looks at you funny and you look funny right back. Same applies to dogs. You see a poodle standing on its hind legs at a pawnshop, front paws on the glass counter all businesslike, staring at you expectantly, you copy its pose and stare it dead in the eye. How fun! Then get back on the highway and see the shadow of a giant devil in the mountains. It looks like your shadow, only huger, and for some reason you feel safer seeing it. Not that a feeling of safety ever translates to actual safety, anything can go wrong on a road trip, at any age. We’re in the age of cell phones now but in certain areas you get no reception. No signal - so you’re forced to pay attention to signs. Not just road signs (o beautiful road signs, gods of the interstates). Signs of the apocalypse, sometimes. Like the one time we saw “GODDESS LEFT” on a billboard (white background, red letters). Someone in our car said “so what?” A debate ensued. Okay. This has been a lot of remembering a lot road trips, and I didn’t really make any points, which is really the point, I guess. Sprawl. If you had to go on one tomorrow, who would you want with you? What would it take for you to go? Of course, sometimes you just have to. Sometimes you are chasing someone or running from someone. You fill up gas and you feel alive and you just keep going.

[bedroomlight]

I want to talk to you about the stuffed animals we care for lovingly in our home.

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The experiment failed. It couldn’t go on. The doctors hooked me up again, this time to reverse the effects of the dream. Do you want a keepsake, the nurse asked me. Maybe a photograph? A standard question, but a cruel one. No, I said, torch it all, I want nothing to do with it. I want to wake up and live my life without the dream swimming beneath the surface. A leopard seal under ice, hunting… haunting… who wants that? They hooked me up and incinerated.

[bedroomlight]

TRAIN RIDE

I miss trains. I was just on one. When I got off, the thought hit me: I missed it already! The fields passed by and I saw cows and deer, lush forests, creeks, lakes, old industrial towns and quaint college towns. Alternate lives passed me by, the sort where I’d go out drinking and walk out to the local theater and eat dinners in diners with friends I’d known for, like, ever. I’d never choose that life over what I have now, but I love the train for the glimpses. It’s always so pretty. Even prettier on the way home, all the land we (the train and I) cross to get back. It feels romantic, even alone, looking out the window. Sometimes I catch my reflection in the window and am met with this ambiguous expression. My eyes dart away quickly when I see that, I don’t like the look of it, the only time I see it is on trains. It’s the only thing I don’t like about the train, but it’s such a small price to pay.

[bedroomlight]

DISTANCE BETWEEN US

We always used to talk about Boston like “it” was going to happen, Boston this, Boston that, Boston the inside joke, we’ve scouted it out, we like it, it’s the next step in our lives, Boston the Historic, and especially Boston the Future. I never thought I’d end up on Cape Cod looking at furniture with someone who wasn’t you, but here I am: married. With a house I couldn’t have predicted, around people who still believe in and talk about the magic of the Kennedy family like they’ve spent even a second in the same room as Jack and Robert and Caroline etc. Sometimes I think I don’t belong here, but then I shrug and figure that I must. To have gone with you in the opposite direction—that is, south, would have disrupted things. Your family in South Carolina would not have liked for you to be with me. Isn’t that awful? After all the drives home, the drinks with just us and the conspiratorial asides, not to mention all those eyes on us, speculation flaring like a newspaper after an American assassination (“Where do you come up with this stuff,” you asked me once, bemused), we concluded that that’s not enough to build a life. (And I’d add, it’s not nearly enough, especially after The Sagittarius.) Does it make you sad just a little, though, even if you don’t regret it? Do you think of it the way I do, more than I think about the hole in the country, a single Staffordshire dog that looks quite lovely in the front room but naturally seems a little lonely? My husband takes drives out to Chatham to meet with his friends, he leaves me at home and I walk out to the sea just to listen to something. I want to say I wish you were here, but I stop just short of it, because I don’t believe I do. (The cape is not for you.) Rather, I wish you were in Boston, sitting at one of the restaurants we discussed or in that tiny hotel you stay in, and I’d like to meet you again, drive in for once instead of taking off towards the airport, hands clammy on my suitcase, so desperate to leave.

[bedroomlight]

IN THE SLOW UNIVERSE WHERE THINGS HAVEN’T HAPPENED YET YOU SEE HIS PICTURE FOR THE FIRST TIME