Twenty-Eight

Publishing and drinks and discussions

I was exiting the bar, jagged and in the brush, when I started to think about my relationships, how they tend to feel both sharp and important, similar to a cliff; this rush of chance. Everything Ive touched is plagued by serendipity, a wondrous knowing: this is only happening because something told it it could.

I found the sidewalk and then the black of the sky, licked my lips, and pushed my keys between my fingers. When I got to the car, my friend drove. I pressed my forehead to the chill of the glass and smeared my sweat across the cold in a line.

I’ve often contemplated if there was another way, if softness could be experienced and not just perceived. Even my friendships possess a string of destiny and I wonder if it’s my own voice confessing the weight of the union. You are not just a person to me but a boat, sometimes, a chain. I love you something terrible. Can’t you see?

She drives and the buildings start to blend and bend, swaying like trees in a storm. I tell her I’m homesick.

“Ohio or Texas?” She asks.

I tell her I don’t know.

Acquaintances have rarely remained at the distance they were conceived. I pull them closer than they’d like to be, or so, this is how Ive always imagined it. Every departure feels like an inevitable betrayal. In a sea of faces, it’s difficult for me not to succumb to the fatalistic feeling of connection. An, and yet

and yet

and yet.

There is an ache that fills me when looking at photos of my parents in decades I’ve never touched, accompanied by this sense that I have, that I was with them, always. I experience grief in shifts. It comes and goes depending on how long I think of a person. It comes with a burlap sack, hitches a ride straight to the valves of my heart. Sometimes, it hurts so bad, my wrists throb. I see colors in an entirely new way.

She rediscovers my house like a voyager divorced from her trip. I watch her cradle each wall with her shoulders. Her smile is soft. Her eyes are glazed.

On the floor of my living room, I feel dazed and hungry for another rush of renewal, for a chase. I tell her this and she listens.

“Can I just start over?” I ask.

She groans, shoves her face in her hands as if she’s tucking away old laundry, “Sure.”

And then we tessellate back to the conversation we often have: that I might self publish,

but i’m not famous or rich or even a little well known.

It’s not so much that I think I’ll fail, but that I want more for the book. I want the cliff. I want the breath. For so long, I thought it would happen. All I needed was a yes and then it would happen and it would be good and it would be grand — it would be something. Something more than mediocrity.

Something that explains why love feels too weak of a word for it.