iv. first

 

It is late as I sit here biting my lip. Shaking, I must again revel in the power of looking back, of seeing, of opening.

 

Reflection (just as words were always meant to be) is this fundamentally intimate state of being and knowing. It connects me to myself and you to yourself and me to you. To drive down walls, both within ourselves and between others, is to render vulnerability a crucial microcosm of the human experience. Perhaps, after all this, we should understand reflection just as we understand love:

 

 

that spectacular blooming of the unbounded.

 

 

 

 

 

iii. we

 

5 Months from Now

 

I ask myself, for perhaps the last time: what if it’s all true? The said and the unsaid? That loving within the unloving? This duality of my differently sized feet, which both move me through the world and allow me to fall to my knees?

 

A Thursday

 

We are in the middle of a conversation about nothing and everything. My hair is more copper, and my voice is less unsure of itself. Freckles adorn my arms. I rub them when you make me laugh. When I turn to talk to you, I adjust my glasses, which remain smudged with my fingerprints because they feel more honest that way. We are walking in some place beautiful, but the scenery is nothing more than a backdrop since my whole being is paying attention to you. You tell a story with your hands, and even as narrator, I can see you paying attention to me, too. I’ve come to know that paying attention is never a neutral or complacent behavior. In her moving elegy to her late partner, writer Mary Oliver tells us, “Attention without feeling … is only a report. An openness- an empathy- was necessary if the attention was to matter.” In this vein, we open. I am feeling everything. I notice your hair is more. Your eyes are more. Your smile is more, too. All of you is uninhibited. We pay attention to one another.

 

These are the versions of ourselves in which our outsides match our insides. We are saying everything we need to say and being everything we need to be, without reservation and in full knowledge that revealing ourselves- the ugly selves, the confused selves, the vulnerable selves, and the radiant selves- will only move us closer to each other. I align my shoulder next to yours, and you lean into me with charged humor cavorting in your eyes. You dare to say that we are wholly liberated in each other’s presence, like we are catalyzing one another. I look back at you with feeling. Searching you, I know there’s nothing left unsaid. Our usness is on full display. So, I tell you that I’ve never forgotten what your laugh sounds like.

 

In fact, your laugh is one of the things I know for certain.

 

Sometime Later

 

Scribbled onto the bottom cusp of a reading for class, the blue ink drags me alert on this dreary Tuesday morning. Foggy, damp, chilled-- all signs show that I should be bundled up in fuzzy socks as my bed dutifully pushes out the whirs of the World. Mmmm, let’s add a cup of tea there, steaming in my lap.

 

My mind wanders back. The blue ink scribble says: “love is our projection”.

 

I wonder if you know that I love you. Even if you did know, I’m sure you could not know the moment in which I loved you most. It was just when you pushed those hairs off my forehead all while poking fun at my overly demonstrative demeanor. It was there in my bed. I wished to stay on your fingertips.

 

Today

 

I wrote this a long time ago, but of course it was always for you:

 

I’ve heard the saddest loneliness is when you are surrounded by people who love you, yet you can only seem to breathe the burning silence beneath short conversations. Are we all just destined to be black boxes? We will bump into each other every once in a while, feign interest in each other’s struggle for a just a moment before dissolving back into our own daydreams?

 

I am thinking of home. More importantly, I am thinking of you.  

 

No, we may never be fully empathetic, but we can try a little something. I want to try something with you because I am beautiful and you are beautiful and you, you are beauty, and I am estranged by your beauty, and I think that you are so lovely. I hope to awake in your loveliness, and I know that I might sit there and only appear close-- I know that my closeness may never be real because I may never understand you, I may never get you. But, I am not moving. I am here in the fire with you. We will have different scars, but I will burn with you because together we are so beautiful. I will taste your tears and I will summit with your ecstasy, and I will never know you, I will never get you. You are staggering beauty and I, I am trying to be staggering beauty. And we will leave with different battle scars, yours may be ragged and deep and mine might be so superficial, but there will be rotting tissue shared between us. Because we, we are beautiful. If it comes to this, if you ever truly need someone, I know that it might be scary. I know that I will probably never understand. I am here, as open as I can be. I have left my door ajar ever so slightly. Just turn the knob a little to the right.

 

I have left a cup of tea warming on the stove for you.

 

And,

 

with that, my daydream moves. Our moment was only a figment of the imagined, after all. A new song plays and the sky changes hew and the breeze dissipates into an undertone and this time, I am running. The pads of my index finger and thumb cradle the volume button on my headphones, turning it up, up, up. The only back and forth here is the swing of my ponytail, which dances coincidentally with the pace of my feet. I am alone, solely accompanied by sweat falling in crescent moons amongst my skin and the border of nighttime cracking over mountain ridges far in front of me. I’m running with all the worlds I’ve imagined for myself: the ones that are real, the ones I’ve lost, the ones I’ve never had, the ones I’ll always have, and the ones I hope to someday lead. I am paying attention to myself, feeling everything. I step, step, step and exhale, exhale, exhale. And I still wonder, baby: how many lives do we lead unspoken?

 

 

 

 

ii. you

 

5 Months from Now

 

I wonder, for perhaps the last time: what if it’s all true? That you will travel the world entangled in your fingertips? That you will breathe solace in the distance between us?

 

Yesterday

 

It took you a while to believe you deserved your anger. For a long time over clustered moments, you worked to rust your palms with the hope of salvation.

 

A Few Days

 

You’re on the subway. It’s been raining since late last night when you pretended to be asleep. This morning, you trudged through water darkened by the wounds of the city, black sleet drawing rims around your ankles. You look up from the page you keep rereading to see a woman crying on a seat near you. She is the third person in tears you have seen today. You look at her for a moment, but too soon, her grief becomes just another sound in the cracking of the city.

 

The subway takes you deep into Brooklyn. At the ninth stop, all the white people that look like you get off. It was as if they knew going any further would place them in the Brooklyn they did not want to reckon with. A woman comes on board. She appears to be blind, using her cane to walk through the subway doors and to find a pole to hold on to. Other people on the train move away from the pole, fortifying a small enclave around her feet. She wears black sunglasses and a maroon top.

 

When the train moves, she begins singing the Civil Rights hymn “This Little Light of Mine”, lifting cadences of the familiar lyrics into the space around us:

 

This little mind of mine, I’m gonna let it shine.

This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine.

Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine.

 

She does not raise her voice to overpower our subway car. She sings in a tone that feels affectionate, like maybe we shouldn’t be listening at all. Your eyes are arrested on her performance, but you need to make sure you aren’t imagining this, that you haven’t made it up in yet another one of your fervent daydreams. You look at the other passengers, and everyone in view is looking at her. They have all taken out their headphones, closed their books, stopped dozing off. This is your first time witnessing stillness in the city. You didn’t know it then, but you surrender to ambiguity here— to the ambiguity of many truths. There is both sorrow and care in her voice. There is both sorrow and care in your shoulders, too. Listening to her, you know the heartache, the joy, the disbelief, the wonder, and the sometimes apathy all needed to be true if you were to feel something in the morning.

 

That Wednesday

 

Someone once asked you: have you ever been in love? Do you know what love looks like? You never answered when asked. You couldn’t have answered. You could only think that you feel better (feel something that seems like love) when you know what their eyes look like. When it’s love, you memorize the contours of their irises in full clarity. The thought of this kind of love makes your own eyes well, and you realize your eyes are the only part of you that feel full, like they have enough to give.

 

You come home from work late on that Wednesday night. She looks at you and tells you that you could get help, that you are worthy of advocating for yourself. She says this with intention and with feeling, the half-eaten bottle of hot sauce bearing witness to the silence that follows. You pull your tea bag taught against the ceramic and allow yourself to believe that what she’s said is true. You notice hair falls over her shoulder. You think again to when someone once asked you: have you ever been in love? Do you know what love looks like?

 

You get help. Months later, you will remember two things about this moment:

1. She loves you.

2. You know what her eyes look like.

 

And,

 

you like to imagine there were many overlapping moments in which we both stood in the midst of busy intersections, dreaming about something bigger than the scene right in front of us and being exactly where we needed to be. What ultimately liberates you is not a “cut out those who no longer serve you” coming to. Instead, we let each other go from a place of love. A place of love for myself, faults at the front and center, for the life I built with the palms of my hands, for moments alone, and for you. I think this was the best and most honest way I loved you, actually. To wish you everything when I knew I was no longer going to be a part of it. To let you go because I knew we needed to do things without one another.

 

And, we did. We did do things. I got to live in the city, working long hours as a hostess in a restaurant, immersed daily amongst strangers, raw to the vulnerability the city flaunts. And you traveled the world, finished your degree, formed new relationships I knew very little about but which from the outside seemed special and necessary. In other words, submitting ourselves to the distance and to the absence of words was not a loss in the negative sense; it was an act of liberation.

 

At our beginning, we often talked about the front porch, a metaphor we used to describe where we would be in 60 years. For a long time, we were firmly on each other’s front porch. You’d be sitting close to me, drinking something warm, and re-reading “The Glass Castle” (our shared favorite) with wire-rim glasses. I would have an old computer nestled between my thighs, still observing too much and trying to write it all down. In the midst of our indecisiveness about everything, the front porch represented all that was at stake and all that we could lose. The fear lingered: what if this shared front porch disintegrated into an impossibility?

 

Now, after it all, we still think of the front porch. Thinking of the future makes us smile. But, instead, we don’t see us together on a front porch. We see us apart. I know your front porch will be full, perhaps with people I’ll never know. You will be laughing and blushing. I will likely be somewhere else entirely, beaming in another mosaicked corner of the universe. Yet, the knowledge that we will not share a front porch no longer makes us sad because this new future is not made of brokenness. It is made of something else entirely.

 

It’s love.

 

 

 

 

i.

 

 

5 Months from Now

 

I realize, for perhaps the first time: what if it’s all true? The crookedness in my smile and the names I protect in my belly and the daredevil potential at the edge of my tongue. Because it’s all true, I remember that high sun over blue skies plants roses on my cheeks.

 

Years Ago

 

I love you even when you’re not brave.

 

Today

 

I love you *especially when you’re not brave.

 

Sometime Mid-Morning

 

I’ve started to picture myself at age 70. She always has wrinkled hands coveted around the indelible heat of her tea mug. She still wears glasses and bites her nails. She still gets sunburnt sitting on the sunny side of the car with the windows rolled up.

 

This time, I picture her, and she sits down next to me. I turn my face toward her, resting my cheek against the cool wall. I can’t quite muster the words out loud, but I know I am silently asking for her wisdom, for her guidance, for her assurance that all of this will work out okay. Instead of answering my silent pleas, she looks back at me. It is not the steady, all-knowing look I expected; instead, I feel her eyes searching mine too. While I am at first unnerved, I eventually realize that in searching my eyes, she is trying to remember me- just as I am in this moment. Vulnerable, uncharted, hesitant. Her remembering eyes soften me, as being intentionally thought of always does.

 

I hold her hand in mine; I am trying to remember her, too

 

And,

 

I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to render happiness right where I am. About how to stay steady in the hard times, in the miraculous times, in the times when nothing else makes sense. About fighting to stay present and advocate for the good in myself. About cultivating remedy. Remedy for and remedy from and remedy with and remedy as and remedy in. 
 

This time, remedy comes in eyes wide open. There is remedy in I am happy I’m here. In this life, on this wide-veined road, bearing witness to the havoc of my breathing. In thank god I’m here. In I have nowhere else to be. Remedy in I’m so glad you’re here. In let’s stay forever; in you by my side; in I am happy I am here. Remedy in breathe, breathe, breathe. In picturing tomorrow’s proliferation into daybreak and in the coming and going of things. My remedy. I am here.

 

This thought carries a smile to my face. My tears grow old and salt my dimples. Stopped, with two feet edging a thick crack in the pavement, I realize I am holding onto my shoulders. I have a habit of doing this; I elongate my fingers to form cradles on my shoulder bones, pulling them taught as if I am about to pin myself up on a clothesline. I move my hands down my arms and into my front jean pockets. I press against the warmth of the crevice between hip and thigh. I am breathing, slowly and with gumption. I relax my knees and lean back on my heels. Softly, I look up at the night sky.

 

I place myself amongst the infinite.