East End / Aspirate

Dreaming is like swimming. In the morning I come up for air. Catch breath. Whatever we experienced in the dream world, close, something I could reach back into. Real: you taught me words that now sound slowly in my head, like a poem. Pohenegamook, Alagash, Madawaska. That place, home for you, bore such an imprint, as if your growing up, childhood, what was in your bones became part of me. The green, so many greens you had told me. Different because of the black. All the time we knew each other this pressing on my thorax.

Your weather I had never known. So much about your life was other, set far apart from my experience and easy to incorporate into a cinematic story-filled place. A narrative I had written for decades of what was on the other side. All of my concrete and oceans and movies and malls and coyotes and absence next to your woods, peat bogs, lakes and a family that made things with their hands. Horses outside your window. A circle of people who could hold you. Caribou. Thirty-seven degrees below zero and the weight of the cold in my compromised lungs. Icicles on your mustache. I realize now it’s been so long since I knew who you saw when you looked at me. Unrecognized. Can eyeballs actually freeze?

We had no place. You followed me and arrived hating, growing it across miles and pinching your heart. Shut. You kept it up, making me invisible, crossing out many days with crude hatch marks. My hopeful eyes too shiny when you lied. Alone with you next to me, the yellow shape of your body stained onto my sheets. Hollow. I waited a long time for your joy. Your squinted eyes into the sun and only a memory of your laugh or desire. At one time: open.

The horror of the night comes back so readily. All your words to ash in an instant. Your tears at the end, my body crumbling down the wall in the kitchen, the diesel engine leaving. After you said it, you said it wasn’t okay for you to sleep here any longer. Sound of a branch cracking, the many pieces of something like porcelain shattered against stone, images of falling from great heights. Flashes of blinding hospital lights. Oh, the emergency. Th e pain sharp and just as cutting this morning as then. Electric. I had worked so hard to find faith. One that trusted we wouldn’t be taken under by our human errors and fragility wasn’t the right kind, I guess. Faith is also something I wasn’t taught that I think you were. A place where our constitutions diff er. My world was a floating world where I learned to always anticipate, to never fall into something soft, one where alone really meant alone.

How are you doing? is a simple enough thing to ask. The answer could be never-ending, somewhat epic and eternal. It grows. I would like to sit with you outside at night next to a fire and have you see me, is how I want to answer. I have involuntarily been moved away from familiar. Truth gem vaporized and erased. Pages written, the jug of tear; it’s the dreams I wish I could hand over. Give them to you, so you come up in mornings, wet and gasping. Shocked into light by dream laughter colliding with real laughter or the psychic knowledge of betrayal recognized. Fist gut. Leaden. The illuminated room so different from where you thought you were. The presence of I no longer know you.

originally published in Inventory Issue 8