The last time I saw you it was 5 a.m. in Burlington, early October. We kissed in your warm bed, and I lingered for as long as I could before driving the two hours back to New York for my 7 a.m. farm shift. We kept up the daily good-morning, good-night, I-love-you texts for a couple of weeks and tried to make plans to see each other soon. Then a few days went by and you were silent. Halloween, it was a blue moon. You called me while I was driving home from work and told me you couldn’t do this anymore. I pulled over, and we both sobbed on our separate ends of the phone line.
Then it was New Year’s Eve. We hadn’t talked in two months, and I called you because I wanted more closure. You said you still wanted to be friends. I said, okay, but slowly, Ryan, slowly.
Now we are both in the Springs. Just knowing you are in the same place is tempting and my heart jumps at every stranger walking down the street that could be you. I didn’t do anything about it. But then you surprised me at that group picnic. Our mutual friend brought you without asking or telling me. It wasn’t a good setting to see you for the first time. After everything. Later, they told me that you said you still loved me.
At the picnic, you didn’t share the other half of my blanket. I acted too normal, very conscious of how much my bare stomach peeked out from my shirt when I stretched out on the lawn. You said we should hang out, and I agreed. You texted me after the picnic, saying it was nice to see me. I asked if you wanted to go on a walk.
Here I am, a few days later, sitting on the grass behind the student farm, imagining and reimagining how it will be when we are alone together. I mean, you’re the one who broke up with me, so part of me is upset that I was the one who asked to go on this walk tomorrow morning. But part of me needs to talk things out, and I just want to feel what it’s like to be in your presence again.
I want to be sitting when I see you tomorrow. When I asked you to go on a walk, I really meant a sit. A long look and no words, and maybe a hug if we hold our breaths? And the floor. Maybe just to soften into. The way we cried on the phone the last time you called me and said you couldn’t hold me anymore. I should have known something was wrong before you told me that your body was breaking.
Where will we sit and how? Your front porch? A bench? The stale french-fry grass near the river? But no one else. I want a void around us. I would really prefer nakedness. Somewhere to float in the maybeness of it all. Pure darkness. Almost-boiling consciousness soup.
I want to decondition my joints from holding this maybe as a place of weakness. I can learn to say I don’t know with conviction. Every morning the sunlight reigns in a new color. I would never ask you to tell me what shade of pink will broadcast on the cloud at 4:43 a.m. tomorrow, and I would never ask that of myself, although I trick myself into thinking that I can predict the color of the clouds, that I can know how it will feel when I see you. I wouldn’t expect you to know, but I would close my eyes and ask you to tell me about the colors of the air and how it feels to be a cloud bumping into another cloud. I would ask you to close your eyes and tell me how the color red rises from spinal fluid to throat, then forehead.
I am asking you.
And when I say I want the floor, I am not saying that I want the stripped lumber or nails or the ground beneath or a family of ants. I want breath. All the maybes. I want us to lay there, just close our eyes and catch the changing light. Now the heat is orange in my throat, rays blooming, soft, dark lilac, numbing fingers. And a bright white at my temples and a deep blue-blue black somewhere behind it all.
My nails dig into the grass as the sun dips behind Tava. Her profile a flattened screen print in the last rays. I close my eyes, and it could be a dull summer morning, birds clustering above, throwing around their remarks. I open my eyes to the too-warm winter evening.
I close my eyes, and I could still love you. I open them. I still could.
How do I know, in this moment, if the air is getting warmer or colder? If dropped here, I wouldn’t know if winter is dying or stirring. If I woke up in the middle of the night in the middle of a month, and the moon shot out at me, how would I know if it is waxing or waning?
When I see you tomorrow morning, how will I know if I love you?
When I drop out of dream-sky into body-realm tomorrow, I pray that I don’t start thinking right away. I hope that I slowly become aware of every moment of waking up as my body and soul once again sink into each other. I want to breathe and stretch in all the matter I am, then choose to open my eyes.
On the walk, you tell me that for the first five days after you moved in, you didn’t ask anyone to drive you to the store, and when Stevie asked, Ryan, dude, what have you been eating this whole time? You answered, not that much.
I used to press my skin so hard against yours. No opportunity for passage. No way for me to love the space between us. No way for that space to be a place of growth. I always had to be holding you. I couldn’t even drive without reaching for your hand. When we walked to the edge of Lake Champlain this fall in the bright cold wind, my hair still long, I had to hold your left hand with both of mine, even if it made walking down the street a little funny. I told you it was because I didn’t want one of my hands to get jealous of the other.
A Fact: I found it easier than I thought it would be to separate the you that I loved from the you I saw this morning. I slid surprisingly easily out of the skin my body occupied when we made love. The skin of rain on rain. The skin of two fir trees growing trunk to trunk, a constant rustle against each other, my leg folded over you as we slept.
Another Fact: I am terrified of how I build a wall around myself, of how easily I turn into a mason. Unconsciously preparing the mortar, catching stones overnight. In the heat of midday, I paint sunflowers on the outside wall and hang triangle flags around the rim. I think I am happy. I sing audibly. But painted sunflowers don’t grow.
This morning before our walk, I was waiting outside your house, crumbling dried lavender between my forefinger and my thumb, holding it under my nose. Your door closed, I heard your footsteps behind me, my skin tightened. I turned around and saw you. Hi. The “us” skin dropped dead on the floor.
I told you I am reading Wuthering Heights. I didn’t tell you that I am reading it in part because my friend Ella told me it is her favorite book. She was the first girl I like-liked. Just a few inches of desert floor between our hands. Ella and I, side by side. Eighth grade. We camped in Anza Borrego, our counselor talked through constellations, my pounding heart the only sound in the night. Should I move my hand to hold hers?
Fact: I don’t feel any freer after seeing you. Not like the last time we talked on the phone when I pulled off at least some of the layers of my hurt. I made that call, after hours of sitting on my porch staring at my phone, New Year’s Eve. I wasn’t going to party or get drunk. I was going to call you. I needed you to listen. I was determined, angry, still not angry enough. I collected my hurt like unshed snake skins; I am ready to take those skins and weave them into a stack of rugs. I tried to describe to you the intricate patterns of hurt on each rug before shoving it into the sea. But a stack still looms, moored, sloshed at high tide.
I cart all those skins. Through each sunray, I blink. I carry, grow, shed, and weave. I want to share with you each snake skin rug every time it flakes off, before I lay it to dissolve, peach fuzz in the waves.
Your hair was sopping wet this morning, like you ran out of the house without putting a towel to it. That’s one of my favorite things about having short hair, rubbing a towel on my head like I’m drying a dog. I wish I didn’t drop my skin this morning when we talked. I wish the sun was in my throat with all its dew, and I wish I told you I wanted the floor.
Before I came to the Springs last week, my family and I were going through old photos. My mom picked up one of her as a baby in her dad’s arms. He is smiling, eyebrows raised, as if asking her a question. My mom looked at the photo and said, my dad loved me. And it sounded like she thought he really did. My throat tightened with longing. My grandpa left five years after that photo was taken. He ran off with my grandma’s best friend and never sent help to my grandma, even though her daughter was permanently in a wheelchair and her son had seizure fits. My grandma told me that after my grandpa left, she took his job at the court, started going back to college, got her tubes tied. She was only a few years older than me at the time.
I asked my grandma if she remembers any major historical event from when she was a kid. She said, I had asthma. I laughed, that’s not a historical event. Yeah! It was historical for me! I went to the hospital a lot from my asthma. That night I dreamt that my grandma and I got the vaccine together. But when it was my turn, the nurse stuck one needle in right after the other. No curing time. The second needle pushed into an already forming blood bruise.
The night before my 21st birthday, I wished hard for snow. By then, you practically lived in my room. I woke up to snow. I was experimenting with perfection, with getting everything I wanted.
On our walk, I didn’t tell you about my dream or my Grandma’s asthma. I didn’t tell you I have a hunch your body is rebelling because of your mother’s trauma. Didn’t her mother die early and violently?
Now it’s the morning of my 22nd birthday, and I wake up, twice. The first time, I don’t open my eyes. I’m drifting, half-dreaming. I feel like I have something to remember. Then the facts roll in: first, that it’s my birthday, second, that you and I aren’t a thing anymore. I fall back asleep and dream that I open the windows to a dusting of snow outside.
I didn’t laugh on our walk. We didn’t laugh. I guess I don’t really remember laughing, like dying laughing with you, ever. We were always giggling. Making up little worlds and tickling each other in bed and giggling.
I wake up for the second time on my 22nd birthday. I roll up the shades and pull back the curtain. Light flakes carpet the lounge chairs and sidewalk, a snow skin returning to the seafloor.
