Waiter

The waiter balanced the plates and the whole restaurant watched. Lucy thought him so handsome, she didn’t even have the energy available to nudge her friend – so struck by his dark eyes and hair and, above all, the completeness of his focus on the plates. The dining room held its breath, head after head had looked up from meals and conversation and finally the waiter yelled, “I’ve got it!” at a time when it seemed furthest from the truth. Someone dropped a fork and the clatter caused a collected gasp and shiver from the room. The handsome waiter sweat visibly. The plates wobbled faintly and reset themselves. The waiter yelled again, “I’ve got it!” and Lucy couldn’t help herself… a giggle bubbled out. There was a quiet shift in the waiter, “Oh no,” he said on a light exhale and everyone stared as he started to laugh. A big, jolly, belly laugh that shook the plates. And there, in a moment of suspension and tension and miracles, he and Lucy laughed and laughed amongst a sea of open mouths and frozen stances.

Joe

Joe crumpled his last pack of smokes. It had been a long time since he smoked so much that it caused a pinch in his throat. He leaned into it- like someone who loves the moment before they start to cry. The cement steps out of the bar were overwhelming and he fell back against the wall. The bartender stared, paused in the middle of drying a shot glass. Joe made his way up and after the third stair, he sunk to his hands and knees. One sticky stair at a time he climbed, remembering the times his quiet brother would follow him  everywhere – up and down stairs, around corners, lying upside down for whole afternoons, saying nothing and knowing a comfort that existed nowhere else for them except in that suspended place between their reaching fingertips.

Too French or not, To French

When Emmanuel Macron and Brigitte Marie-Claude Trogneux were courting, did they have to make a list?
I am three years younger than your father.
You were a teacher in my high school while I was in high school.
I was married to someone else before you were born.

Or was it something more like this:
“You are so fucking smart. I love it.”
“Your hair looks great like that!”
“I feel so much better when I know that you are in the same room that I am in.”
“I am certain that my favorite memories will have you in them.”
“Let’s go to bed.”

 

 

One Time

One time someone I know pretty well said, “You try too hard.”
And I said, “Fuck you. How’s that?”
And one time someone I barely know said, “Stop apologizing.”
And I said, “Fuck you. How’s that?” and then I said, “Never mind. Fuck you.”

Resolution

I decided I was going to stop having feelings and my friends were like, “You can’t do that. That’s impossible.”
And then they stared at me for a long time and I had feelings almost right away.

Dear Sir.

Dear Sir,

I accidentally took your pen. I took it and I put it straight away into my bag and and I am using it now to write you this sincere apology. I thought to put it in the mail and I went so far as to use it to address the pen-sized package. But when I sealed it up twice over with some extra strength packing tape – I realized, with some guilt and a little twinge of some version of nervous anxiety, that I had left your pen utterly out of the package. It sits on my desk ominously, fixed in its place next to a piece of very very blank drawing paper. I have since, I confess, used your pen to make various drawings. If it is any consolation, and I refuse to take comfort in the possibility of a thing I can not be certain of, I have drawn quite a few pictures of you. Many have been of your face, a few have been of your ears, as those are such delightfully complicated little snails of the human body. But your hands, I admit, were much too difficult. It is not just your hands sir, complex as they are with the details of the work you have done and undone (or, in some cases, if I may be frank, have not done at all.) But rather, it is hands in general that many artists have found most difficult. From Renoir to Michelangelo, I would venture to guess. Not that I mean to make a comparison sir! For certain you would be safer comparing me to a thing that lives beneath a rock. But I would be remiss in not admitting that your pen seems to elevate me to a higher expectation of myself and my abilities and even the attempt at drawing a hand, or hands, as it were – exceeds any other of my past artistic endeavors.  When it is in my hands I am simply better than myself. Maybe it is due to the times you have held it with your own complicated fingers? Designing your life with it and addressing people who have the means to change the world? In any case, it is imbued with something. It has been marinating in some power and when it sits on my table or desk or by my bed, I am surprised it does not sit up or walk about, for the way it seems to address me, so directly, asking me to consider it – to consider picking it up, consider bettering every part of everything I have ever known.
Sir, let me come back to my point. I have taken your pen. Even now it is pressed between three fingers on my left hand. A kind of sin, that left-handedness, as you have said. Sin in sin, it seems for, as I have confessed, the pen is not even my own. Nor have I paid for it. But Sir, if I did see money in your pocket or your beautiful watch on the table, I would not dare to breathe on either. That which belongs to you is yours and yours alone. Somehow I manage to know that and to know this: I wanted your pen. I wanted it more than anything – to feel it pressed into my palm and to see it shining in my ordinary apartment. My apartment that is always either over or under heated and in which I shiver and sweat on a far too regular basis. Where there are no rugs or flowers or plants, but only a wood floor that catches your socks with snags and collects entire bales of hair and dust in its corners. Where clothes, new once to someone else, but old and worn here, seem to multiply while simultaneously falling into pieces not quite qualified for wearing and at once not ugly enough to call a “rag.” The pen is unaffected by the odor of meals made in haste by someone of my meager means or by coffee left too long on the burner. In the bare bulb garishness of the light fixture for which I can afford no shade, the pen only shines like an object modeling for the picture of the perfect example of the most perfect object. It pays no mind to the ticking clock, the hissing heat, the jamming slams and clacks of the things that pass and shake my window. It sits peacefully. Only waiting. But  I do want to say sir, and I say this with much reluctance for I know that I couldn’t be sure of such a thing (how could I?) I believe with all of my heart (which is admittedly a small object, due to all of the falling apart and coming together that it has suffered. Pieces have been lost, surely, in the effort. It’s a lot to ask of a muscle and what with the daily grind and pressure of the life that I walk around in. I try to forgive its feeble remnants.) But still, I believe with every awkwardly shaped, yet resilient, piece of my still beating heart -that your pen, in finding its way to my humble lodgings (and by “finding its way” I acknowledge the use of a figure of speech and care not to, in any way, shrink the fullness of my guilty actions) – even still, as it has found its way to my home, it seems to have resigned itself or… perhaps I should be bold and declare what I believe to be true and say: It has been quite pleased, your pen, to have found itself here. I write this entire letter with neither pause nor cross out and for this reason I am certain your pen conspires with me to stay in my possession – to declare itself “mine” and recognize that perhaps I even belong to the pen in the same way it belongs to me. I assure you that it is almost more of a partnership between the pen and I. “Ownership” is too declarative and rigid, leaving no room for  the kind of sincerity and admiration that passes between us on what has become a daily and sometimes hourly exchange. Sir, the pen was yours for sometime. You found it in the store, recognized its potential, and purchased it in an honorable way. But I do ask you – dare I implore you- to consider it possible that your pen belongs, in its way, here with me. Is it at all possible that fate joined us for tea on that beautiful February morning wherein I took it upon myself to slip it in my pocket?
I appreciate your time and your consideration in this matter and I am grateful for the time you have taken to read my confessions and declarations. I welcome the opportunity for some relief from the guilty feelings associated with my actions. But I admit that I am also willing to accept guilt as a part of the consequences of acting wrongly, while  having no desire to change the past.

 

Humbly yours.

Eleanor

Eleanor woke up – sat straight up in her bed- and the words came to her instantly: “I have no children” and they rolled over down a hill and fell deeper and deeper inside of her. She was half asleep , her usual defenses melted away like a tablet on the tongue at bedtime and she began to sweat through her t-shirt and then was instantly cold and shivering. She counted frantically back from a hundred, trying to picture each number in bold black print. But by seventy five she was turning over and over. And then she was up and grabbing for a new shirt in the dark – all fabrics in her drawers familiar, all of her night clothes familiar, the longer she stood rummaging the deeper she went into a sleep that was at once deep and fast-moving like a bowling ball sinking hard and fast to the very bottom of the ocean.

I’ll Write A Book

I’ll write a book called “I Don’t Like That I’m Getting Old But I’m Really Glad I’m Not Dead” and when you open it up it will be full of blank pages for you to fill with pictures of your babies and your husband who still looks great in a swimsuit. You’ll use the little picture corners you can get at expensive craft stores and there will be fabric stitched into some of the pages. When you flip the book over and open it to read the last page – you will start writing about the choices you didn’t make and the amount of times you’ve sat on the landing between the first and second floor of your house, your head in your hands and the tea kettle blaring – wondering where you are and what you even did yesterday. The person you were in high school is still in your parents’ house while you’re here, the wall to wall carpeting rough under your bare legs. It’s summer, it’s summer – you at least remember the season. And the phone will ring in the kitchen and you will get up, finally, to answer it with someone else’s voice.

The book will only be available in hardcover and the back pages will be written fluidly, urgently, frantically, and backwards. No one will bother to put it up to a mirror to decipher it. But they’ll quickly flip through the photos and clippings and happy quotes at the front – thinking of your smile and envying your easy beauty and all of the trips you took to Europe.

What Do You Think? (of me)

Isn’t it all so romantic? How you feel pain all the time? I bet it is terrible!

Today I ate a sandwich with avocado and sprouts and I tasted every bite. I sat in the sun and thought about the grass on the bottom of my feet and I finally felt home. Truly home. Not like you feel home. But the way I do. I am really really good at feeling things.

How do you feel?

Never mind. Let me tell you about my day. Changes are afoot! It is all so tumultuous! I had to sit by a fire to calm myself. Everyone looked at me with sympathy and my eyes were filled with tears. I am surrounded by such good people whose names I don’t recall. 

Far Away From Here

We should be movie stars.
We should be at a party.
We should be living in another country.
We should be spending time with friends.
We should be readers reading.
We should be hikers hiking.
We should open a school.
We should be bakers.
We should take a class.
We should wear different clothes.
We should be different people.
But instead, here we are, your arms around my neck, in paradise.