Everything I love is outside of my body; my hands are not long enough to touch.

Our boy lays down in the middle of Target and takes off his shoes. He throws them at unsuspecting customers. They shake their heads, never having seen your body tilted against a doorframe at three a.m. They do not know what I have seen. Some days you are so tired from the way that J can hit, and kick, and spit on you without provocation. Still, you find it impossible to tear yourself away. You stand over our small boy sleeping. Those nights you help him to dream.

You come to bed. I hear you slip between the sheets. I instinctively roll over and away. I am too scared to let you touch me. To scared to let myself admit that this is harder than I thought it would be. I need to protect myself from the memory of how I use to fit against the curve of you. When babies were just wishes we made on nights that were alive with stars, my back was always the soft absence of space pressed next to your heart.

I bury myself in taking J to doctor and therapist visits. I scour the internet for answers. I busy myself in cleaning the kitchen floor. At night, I crash on the sofa in the den. All my energy spent on being hyper-vigilant at the park. After a long day of mediating the distance between J’s sharp teeth and the unsuspecting skin of innocent boys and girls, our mouths become the enemy. We do not kiss the way we did before.

I do not remember the last time I told you I loved you that was not a means to exhaust a fight. We rarely laugh when talking about our future. We barely ever use the word future, at all. Everything feels tenuous, raw as an exposed nerve.  I miss us, but I keep turning my back against your hands that gave up reaching for me a long time ago.

What I want you to know is that some nights when you sleep, I whisper in your ear how much I love you. When the room is dark and still, it is easy to admit to you that I am terrified we will not be able to fix what is angry and sad inside of our boy, what is torn and tender inside of us.

We stand in the kitchen and speak words like hunger. My husband makes rice and tofu. I lift the simmering lid to taste. An argument bubbles to the surface that is and is not about how much garlic the recipe requires. It is the same argument we have been having for the past 10 years. It is an argument about expectations.

When David and I were first dating, we once walked home from town in a rainstorm. We took off our shoes and splashed in muddy puddles. We held hands impervious to the damp and the cold. We plotted our future. David was going to change the world. I was going to support him.

I was going to do such amazing things./I was going to simply stand quiet beside you? Both of us are incredulous.

Recently, we bought a house. A home is something we always dreamed we would make together. I am determined to be the one to paint the cabinets in our kitchen. I remind David about how I had to spend an entire day re-sanding the drips he left when he primed. I tell him that I do not trust that he can make the kitchen look the way I envisioned. I tell David that I do not want him to help me paint. He simply shrugs his shoulders, shakes his head, and moves to stand on the periphery. On the last cabinet, I make a huge mistake. I slap my paintbrush down. I am frustrated. David makes a joke about my perfectionism. He makes a joke that is really a gentle observation about us both. This is the shift. We are aware of what is happening. We hug each other in the kitchen. We lean our bodies against the wrecked cabinet. I am struck by the courage it takes for two people to love each other.

When my husband and I jumped those muddy puddles, we were different people. We were just kids. David was confident. I was diminutive. David had dreams. I was content to follow. We have evolved outside of those roles in the 14 years that we have been together. Some of our expectations, of what our life together would be, have not caught up to the adult versions of what we are. I believe the adult version of us has the potential to be better.

Let’s go back to the idea of rain. Gently. Gently. Everything is always falling.

We pull on raincoats and boots. We ignore the umbrellas. We dive in and out of raindrops as we race towards the car. My family drives across town in a storm to find the perfect pencil. David wants to draw pictures. He is at the wheel. I sit comfortably next to him. I am content in the passenger seat with a novel in my hand. There is laughter, and the sweet buzz my children naturally make. My son wants to know what colors combine to make his favorite. He wants to hold orange like a tiny fire in his hand. I tell him red and yellow. I make a mental note to buy him a book about Prometheus. My daughter stares out of her window, grateful. I lean my body towards her to listen. She whispers and I can only nod my head overwhelmed.  She says, Thank you, rain, for falling.

Marriage is hard. That is such a simple statement. A true statement. Sometimes marriage is too hard and a couple realizes that they need to walk away. I think that is incredibly brave. I can not imagine how hard it would be. I wonder how many of you have ever wondered if that couple might be you? Maybe you thought it in your head when disappointment built, or aloud in arguments where you strike out to hurt. If so, you are not alone.

I met my husband while in college. We started talking at a dorm room party. We have not stopped talking since that night. We moved in together within six months. We were young and relatively poor college kids, rolling up quarters to buy gas and the cigarettes we smoked back then. We laid on the rooftop. I use to ask him, What if?

What if a genie said he would grant you every wish you had, but it would mean that I had to lose a leg or be horribly disfigured? Would you do it?

Inside a silly game, we both knew what I was asking. There were things that made me afraid. What if you hurt me? What if you lie? What if you break my heart? What if I break yours? I wanted protection against the inevitable.

This year, my husband and I will be married for 10 years, together for over 14. In this space of time, I have broken my husband’s heart in ways both small and large.

Some would say that I am not an easy woman to love. I have thrown around the word divorce as a weapon. I have let my anxiety get in the way of my logic. I have pushed away my husband’s need for the simple intimacy of having me, his partner, look him square in the eyes. I have spent hours on the internet engaging with others when I should have been engaging with my husband. I have even wondered, in the very darkest of moments, if Dave was truly the one. If you knew my husband, what we have together, you would know that this is the most egregious fault. I am not proud.

14 years together. We are not poor. The roof is over our heads. The ground is under our feet. We construct and deconstruct our daily boundaries. We ask questions. We no longer play, outright, the game of, What if? Instead, we live it.

What can we do to make sure our children grow up healthy? If we buy the new house will it be something to make us happy, or a burden we can not afford? What are all the ways we can ask forgiveness for how we hurt each other? If we evolve separately, let us promise to remember that we love under the exact same stars?

I think that what and If might be what constitute a marriage. My marriage has been a series of what and if. It has also been about, Why? I used to constantly ask why does my husband stay with such a difficult woman? Why does he continue to love me so faithfully when I have made so many mistakes? Knowing Dave, he will answer for himself. He will come here and he will say sweet things because he is good and kind and whole in ways that I admire. I am lucky that way.

I do not know if we can ever truly explain, why. Sometimes we just are.

When my husband and I first met, I was unsure and insecure. For a long time, I thought that David saved me from myself, my loneliness, my pain. I have learned that another person can not fix the cracks, the fissures of self. I can take credit for that all on my own, even if I am still a work in progress.

There was a time when I could not see past all that David did for me, to realize that I do for him too. I note with pleasure the absence of space when my hand reaches out to find his. I am a really good listener. I fill our house with goofy laughter. I burn toast with grace. I mother with love and good intent, always, his two children. I am a devoted wife.

I am also a reflective enough wife to know that i have been selfish. Finding myself should not be about dismissing the person that I love. This is what I hope to be forgiven for.

My husband and I are beautifully bound. We fail in a million different ways on a daily basis. But add us up to sum, and we make it work in all the ways that count.

David, I love you. Then. Now. Always.

New houses are seductive. A fresh coat of paint splashed on the walls, colonial crown molding. Every time I walk into a Home Depot, I am thrilled with the potential for re-invention. I have never owned a home before, was always at the whim of a stranger’s aesthetic. In past rentals, I covered old-fashioned wall paper and fake wood panels with Matisse museum knock-offs, old album covers, and Moroccan-styled tapestries. I marked each temporary territory as mine. I struggled to define each room’s identity.

In the first place I lived outside of a dorm room or my parents, I shared this fire-trap rental in a college town with my husband who was just my boyfriend at the time. We used milk crates as tables, and pushed together two twin beds we slept on horizontally. Our apartment was the second floor of a house that was otherwise abandoned. We had a big claw-foot tub but no shower, and two lizards we named Bonnie and Clyde. Having recently become vegetarians, we cooked rice and lentils and climbed out of the kitchen window each night to sit up on our rooftop drinking cheap wine straight from the bottle. Back then, we smoked under the stars. The lit tips of our cigarets punctuated our idealistic philosophy. Who we were going to be when we grew up did not matter. What mattered was that we could listen to bootleg Grateful Dead or Bob Dylan strumming acoustic. The possibilities were infinite.

Years later, we rented an apartment attached to the house of an angry landlord. My husband and I, newly married, would press our ears up to the shared wall that shook with his violence. We worried about his children. During the daylight hours when the wife left the house to collect the mail, she always wore dark sunglasses. In the sixth months we lived there, I never once had the chance to look her straight in the eyes. This is a regret I carry. That house accumulated sadness. My husband lost his job while we lived there, and I began to regret my own professional choices. Maybe, I’ll go back to school and get my MFA in creative writing. Dreaming is not the same thing as being brave. Like the inhabitants of that house, I cowered.

We lived in places that grew us like skin. The basement apartment we planned our wedding in, the two bedroom house we have lived in since five months before our daughter was born. I can trace the trajectory of my life, of all of my choices, by the shape of keys, the memory of their weight against my keychain.

There was a cottage the color of margarine that sat snug inside of woodland. From the computer desk tucked in the corner of the living room, I could look out at the bay when the trees were bare and beautiful. The air always smelled like salt from the ocean just a short ferry ride across to the barrier island. The hardwood floors were always gritty from the sand we tracked inside with our bare feet. David fed us all summer long from vegetables he grew in his garden. At night, we walked up to the movie theater in town. We watched old movies in black and white. We ate ice cream on the steps of historic buildings. We held hands. I lost three babies in the four years that we lived in that house. And yet, I still remember it as someplace that made me happy. Maybe it was because we adopted my son while we lived there. After he was born from another woman’s body, we brought him home to the screened in porch, to the pale green bassinet that we wedged next to our queen sized bed, the only furniture we could fit inside the tiny bedroom. It was in this house where my words came back to me. Some places grow themselves with only regrets, this was not one of them.

We are moving again. A home of our own is being created. There are rooms being painted like candlelight dinner, a bathroom the color of a Caribbean sea. I am hanging stars like Japanese lanterns on the bedroom ceiling for my children. I am still contemplating the perfect space to put my writing desk. I know that I will be a wife, a mother, and a writer inside this new place. I dream this is the house that I grow old in. But, as I contemplate the right type of art to hang in the living room, the perfect size area rug to cover the hardwood, I’m intrigued by the idea of identities and reinvention. I wonder just who I will become inside of these walls.

I can not breathe. I dream the weight of stones pressing heavy on the back of my throat. I am like the last lines of a Beckett play, Let’s go. Yes. Let’s go, only to be bound by stage directions. It is not suppose to be this hard. I am not suppose to be feel this trapped. But, I do.

My three-year old is screaming upstairs as I type this. I put him to bed three hours ago, exhausted by his fits, doors slammed, toys thrown, anger and constant unmet expectation. I kiss him soft as sparrow’s wings and stay by his bedside until he drifts to sleep. I try and tip-toe down the stairs, but he wakes up, and wakes up, and keeps waking expectant and needy every half hour. I feel like I’m drowning in his greed to touch my hair and smell my skin. I lose my patience and finally yell at my husband, who has long gone to sleep. I demand that David wake up and be a father. He looks at me with sleep and bitter. It reminds me of all the ways that I am failing.

We use to be young. We used to try and pants each other in the kitchen. Do you remember the smell of snowflakes falling on a Buffalo winter?

Figure it out, Kelly. You need to figure this out. I wonder when he expects that this will happen between the full-time job at work and the full-time job at home being a mother, in between the navigating phone calls to doctors to set up the battery of tests that are suppose to give us answers. Answers that only serve to scare us both into protracted silence like a thick rope that strangles. Bet we never imagined it was going to be quite this hard. Marriage should not be like a luke-warm bottle of beer full of yeasty sadness. Mothering is not suppose to feel this lonely.

When my son was small enough to cradle in my hands, I used to sing him Joni Mitchell songs at midnight. I use to rock him on my shoulder pressed against his tiny belly, one hand upon the round of his back. Bleary-eyed, sleepless, on instinct. I knew exactly what my infant son needed. I try and sing those same songs as lullaby to my son, now. He puts the small spread of his hands over my mouth. He reminds me that he is no longer my baby. Oh, but you are, my darling boy. You are. Even if I am bereft.

And, we are, my darling man. We are. Even in these days we live as disappointment.

We are driving. I turn to my husband. 

 There is something inside of me I cannot name or place. I want to create beautiful things.

You do. You have. David says. I picture the blades of my daughter’s shoulders.

I want the power to narrate beauty. This is what I want.    

There is beauty everywhere. Just think about Warhol. He made 32 simple soup cans beautiful, didn’t he? David draws out my introspection with this question.

I do not think those soup cans were particularly beautiful. They were commentary. They were a statement about the nature of art. I say this without truly meaning it.  

Are you trying to tell me that one man’s commentary on the very nature of art and commercialism is not beautiful?

We laugh this nighttime together. There is beauty everywhere.

We drive. We drive pass supermarkets and laundry mats, gas stations, and Mexican take out. We stop in front of a used car lot. I  have the sudden urge to get out of the car. I want to run my hand against dented fenders, press the warmth of my thighs against synthetic upholstery, open the hood to spill the engine’s guts.

The first law of Thermodynamics states, energy cannot be created or destroyed. It can only be changed.  Somewhere in the state of New York there is a junk yard, overseen by a greasy-haired man and his three-legged dog. In that junkyard, there lies the decomposing bones of the car my parent’s drove to the hospital the day my brother was born.  The story of my brother’s birth clings to the rusted hulk of an old abandoned Pinto, the color of a banana that’s been peeled.

I imagine the greasy-haired man cocking an attentive ear against the bumpers and back-ends of autombiles to hear the secrets each car tells. The three-legged dog sniffs out the memory of my newborn brother dropping with a thud and a wet suck onto the car mats of the dirty floor. The dog laps up this memory placental and then he lays himself beside the blown out tires and bays contentment at the crescent moon.

I want to press my own belly against the dirt and bay crazy at the moon. I want to lay myself flat against the back of all those Chevy trucks and bend my ears to all those lost stories. I want to, but the light turns green. I stare into the rear-view mirror and watch as the car lot is swallowed whole by the horizon. 

I’m so often moved by the art of others, the stories that objects tell. I once stood in a gallery in Chicago and wept in front of an artist’s self-portrait. I was drawn to the old man eyes staring out from a black and white canvas. I had this urge to take off all my clothes and climb inside the picture, to drape myself as comfort against this stranger’s loneliness. I still carry that moment with me. It’s catalogued next to the lyrics of songs, the lines of novels, poetry, photographs of my children laughing unaware that their Momma is even watching, moments of cinema that steal my breath. The muse that is the ocean for me.  Each creates an accumulation of ache. The need to come here and write it down.

I want to pluck beauty from where it waits for me in trash heaps and watering cans, old socks, and knitting needles. I want to write shoulder blade sonnets and short stories as common as car parts, as beautiful as 32 soup cans stacked together on a canvas never thought of before. I want you to take off your clothes and climb inside my words. I want you all naked and willing with me.  

David, I just want to write something to make someone feel like I feel now.

What do you feel?  

The car rolls down Main Street. I press my forehead against the window, cool. I marvel at the glow of the dashboard superimposed against the glass, a backwards reflection of machine meeting sky. My husband waits for me to sort the confusion and elation that so often tumble together in the spaces of my brain. His eyes remain on the road, calm and sure, even as I dig to find just the right words. I know that if I asked him to he would wait forever for my answer.  But, this is not about forever. This is now.

What I feel is… moving, movable. Art.

I pin my hopes atop of houses. I plant imaginary Christmas trees in front of desolate fire places and tell myself that with a little bit of love these crumbling buildings could be home.

I tell myself that all we need is sheet rock for the hole in the bedroom ceiling. Who needs second story heat when it is summer anyway? I tell myself these beautiful lies because the neighborhoods are good, and the schools are prime, because I need to believe we can buy our dreams back.

House hunting is wearing us thin. Each rejected bid, each pretty house that hides a history of termites or molds, we lose a little bit of faith, faith that we use to carry in abundance.  

Remember us as two kids on a trampoline against an upstate night? We counted stars and foolishly thought we could hitch our futures to any one of them. There were no miscarriages then, no jobs we would love and lose, no struggles financially or otherwise. We laid side by side in mock philosophy under a sky that offered us only promises in the form of thousand points of light.

Tonight the sky is dull. You are upstairs putting one of the babies to bed. I sit alone here in the dark. I wonder about your heart. I worry about this distance between what we thought we would be and what we have become. I worry that I am chasing you away with my fear that we will never again be those two kids who glowed against an August night. I want you to stay, and so I have to will myself to stop retreating. 

I want to reclaim the glittering silhouette of long forgotten nights. I want us young and fearless, your finger an arrow pointing to the moon, my laughter filling up the big dipper. I want the safety of a home to call our own, and a mantel on which to hang the Christmas stockings. I want hardwood instead of linoleum.

But even more importantly, I want a future where we both remember what it is like to dream our dreams together.

I would like to lick you, love. I would like to slurp you up greedy like an overflowing spoon, all metalic shine against the moon that pours itself sideways in a slant against the couch pillows that we rock our bodies against in this rising heat. 

They say that in her 30’s a woman’s libido is at her peak. I used to laugh at the cover of glossy magazines that promised orgasmic perfection if I learned to tip and angle myself to fit against the trajectory of what they said a man’s body could do. I never once believed until now. 12 years we have been together, and suddenly we are new. I find myself laughing at the shape that I’m discovered in the cupping of your hands. I find myself laughing until you mold me into sighs. Then I am made quiet by all the longing that climbs like flames to lick my legs and settle in the center where I open up to bloom.   

I once thought that it would never be as simple as skin to skin, the fumbling touch of me at 19 with grass-stains on my knees. The first time I made love it was not really love, but this sort of awkward bucking above my body. I did not close my eyes the way I had read that women do. I did not throw my head back in anything but quizzical wonder at why the stars spread themselves out like mathematical equations above my head. The only sighs that escaped my body were from the startling realization that there would be no poetry in my lithe form lying naked on a baseball diamond in the waning of the moonlight.

Everything has changed now. I am hungry and in heat, rubbing myself against the furniture to substitute for your absence. When did this transformation begin? A part of me believes it was giving birth, knowing the power of my own body as I pushed life from the once angry spaces between my legs. I was a wound turned flower, then.  

There is something sexy about motherhood, isn’t there? The confidence I have as I shepherd them in their little lives that grow,  through diapered infancy, the tantrums of their toddlerhood, pre-school and beyond. There is the thrill of knowing you are watching as I bend over to pick up the toys in the playroom in my stretchy grey sweats. I am so very good at this loving of my two children.

I am so very good at loving you. It makes me want to lick you, full and warm, spit out the bones, and roll the flesh of you between the dizzy of my tongue. You are this love that leaves me hungry.

And I? I am so very good at loving, me. That is the greatest aphrodisiac.

Where Daddy?

My daughter wakes up every morning and this is the first thing that she asks. The eight hours of her sleep is too long spent away from the object of her affection. I used to be jealous of the way my daughter always wanted the strong arms of her Daddy, the scratching of his beard against her morning kiss. I used to be jealous, until I thought about this…

I was raised by a man with dirt under his nails. When I was small, my father worked three jobs to put food on the table and a roof over our heads. He often came home after working the night shift that turned to day then tumbled tired night again, only to fall asleep in his soup bowl. This was no disrespect to my Momma’s home cooking. It was just his sheer exhaustion.

My father used a hammer and nails to build my mother a coffee table for their first apartment. Later, he would build her the house that I grew up in. I like to imagine him at 19, meticulously sanding down the wood, whittling away at the curved lines of that first table. This was the poem he would create as a means to love my mom. He does not believe in wasting words.

My own children sit at that very table, now the centerpiece of my living room, and they color pictures for their Grandpa. He always brings them white-powered doughnuts every time he comes to visit them during the week. I come home from work to find them all wide-open grins of white sugar smiles. It is a tell-tale sign that they have spent a happy hour with their Pa.  That they love him more than any other person in their lives makes perfect sense for anyone who sees it.

My father taught me how to body surf. He would bring my brother and I to the ocean, weekends in the summer. He would show us how to throw our bodies in time with the waves. He had mastered the art of allowing himself to be caught up in the perfect trajectory. We would ride along with him, hurtling rocket-quick into the white foam before beaching on the shoreline with bellies turned to kiss the sky. I attribute my love of water to the way my father taught me to read a ripcurrent, to understand how the cycle of tides is controlled by the ebb and flow of the moon. 

My father is a man of science and hard fact, but he always encouraged the mystic, the poet, the daydreamer that was me, his only daughter.

I do not fear men, even after sexual assault, and a rough few years of giving myself away in an attempt to discover what was worthy of loving. Sticky bar floors and dirty bathroom fucking could not displace what I knew about men at the core, from watching the way my father takes my mother’s hand after 34 years of marriage, smiles as if it is as new as the first time.

You do not forget that you are worth something, even if the memory is long buried under your grief. I had a father that never raised a hand or a voice to any of us. My father would stay up late after a never-ending shift of dirty laborious work to patiently explain math problems or to help me rehearse for a school play. 

My father took me for a long drive when I came home from college. I was all aflutter with the news of the dread-locked boy who wrote me poetry and kissed me sweet under the lamplight on a twilight evening at the college campus that was 7 hours away from home.  My father told me confident that he would always love me. Four years later, we would drive alone in an old expensive car, hands clasped tightly to the other. When we arrived in front of the tiny historic chapel, he laughed and said it was not too late for me to turn back and go home. What I heard was him telling me that the choices I made each day of my life would always be my own.

It is not difficult to be fearless growing up my father’s daughter.

Where my Daddy?

I go to find my own daughter waiting impatient behind the baby gate at the top of the stairs. I pick her up. I kiss her cheeks. I breathe her in. I tell her sure, Your Daddy is downstairs, baby.

I carry her down and put her in the arms of the man that I have married. I place my daughter safe against his chest.  I stand back watching, now proud instead of jealous, certain about what I am seeing. I head into the kitchen to call my father. I call to tell him Good Morning, but what I am really thinking is that I am so thankful for all that he has done.    

We do not hold hands. We do not press our tongues together as the house lights dim. Our bodies keep their boundaries in these side by side seats. Your side popcorn and Diet Coke. My side Junior mints and water. When you ask for me to share, I do it begrudgingly. I like my candy all my own.

During the film, you lean over into my territory and you whisper,

Hey, why don’t you squeeze me some fresh juice in the mornings like this here Kate?

I am all straight-faced when I reply,

Be happy to, dear, just as soon as you look as hot as Leo.

I do not have to check your profile to know that you are laughing.

Later on in the car we analyze the characters’ motivations. Who was more sympathetic? Her need for something other than babies and tin-can trash in straight as narrow lines, against his need to believe the lie she mimes as he draws her a sketch on the cloth linen napkin of their morning after, this is all heavily debated.  

We both agree that it is a draw. Both heroes and villains.

Your hand shakes itself across the console. It finds the waiting warmth of mine. 

We are driving another road. Now, the kids are tucked tight in their car seats, asleep.

If we never achieved anything more than this, would it be enough? 

You have seen me struggle the past few weeks with my voice. I beg you day after day to take the kids out into the yard while I try to find the thread of this story. I am desparate to claim ownership of this slice of past and it makes me frustrated and short with the present. 

I need to write it down. I need someone to hear it. I need this to truly matter.

This is the mantra I repeat, even in my sleep.

There is not always room for you in this dreaming. But, there you always are.

 Even when I push you off to the periphery you are always at its core.

Would this be enough for me?  Daughter. Wife. Mother. Sister. Lover. Your Best Friend.  

My answer to your question is simple.

Everything that has ever mattered to me is right here in this car.

You smile and shake your head.

When we get home, you better get that fine ass of yours up to that computer and write it down.

This is me becoming. This is a testament to what we are, not a revolution baby, an evolution, quiet and more powerful by far.