Ordinary Art

It feels like every choice has been made, every theme has been written, all our dreams spent.

My daughter plays with dolls in the playroom. I stand silent and watch her. My daughter is a beginning. I stand outside the doorway, suspended in some middle space, I am envious. My daughter is a story.

When I smile at my daughter, the skin on my forehead wrinkles in a way that it never did before. Still, I have never been as beautiful as I am now. I recognize this while staring at my reflection in the mirror, pinning back my hair. I am beautiful. It feels like waste.

Getting in the car to go to work this morning, I see an older couple walking their dog. I notice their matched strides, this perfect unison of legs and arms swinging like the cadence of a poem. I imagine them quite happy. I hope their happiness the entire way to work.

A group of day laborers stand outside this 7-11 and wait, hopeful, that a contractor or landscaper might pick them for a day’s work and a couple of bucks. I can not imagine this is easy living. One of these men rides his bike down the same road I travel to work. He always has blue Tupperware roped to the back of his bike. It is impossible for me to discern what is inside that plastic dish, but something about the homemade meal bobbing recklessly on the fender above his semi-inflated tire makes me want to cry every morning. Does that make sense to any of you?

I see this young girl standing on a street corner. She wears this enormous backpack. It is blue and large enough to bend her at the waist. She waits for the traffic light to change green. When it does, she slowly shuffles forward. I watch her walk and something inside of me aches tenderly. All I want to do is come here and write you all love songs.

All the big bloggers are getting it wrong. It should not be overblown and gratuitous. How silly this blog must seem in comparison.

I am just an ordinary woman who falls easily in love with things like strangers, riding in cars, balancing on bicycles, bent bodies shouldering weight, and baring witness to the quiet humanity found in every day things.

You always drove with the windows rolled down, even when it rained. Once we saw a man standing on a highway median clutching his briefcase to his chest. He looked the way happiness might feel just before a heart-attack. I wanted to stop the car, get out in the middle of traffic, and ask this stranger what he carried in the front pocket of his double-breasted suit.

Pockets are intimate, I said, and you laughed.  You tilted back your head in that way that made me want to kiss your throat.

We met on a Sunday afternoon at the laundry mat. You winked at me as we both watched a woman in a dizzy floral housecoat jam the public washers by shoving thick nickels into the slim spaces of quarter slots. You winked, and I knew that to love you would be like a conspiracy.

I wrote a poem about that woman’s pockets, how they jangled like a love song. I sat barefoot in your car. You turned down the radio that was, at that moment, playing your favorite song. You listened to me read my verse, struggling with the imperfection of the last line.

That night we lay together. You used a ballpoint pen to draw the pyramids on the small of my back. You kissed me like a monument. I walked naked across the room to turn on your stereo. Your eyes watched me move as if I was the eighth wonder of the world.

I played your favorite song. As it swelled above our heads, I came back to your bed.  The moon grinned crookedly in the sky. Through the window it shone on your lips that kept repeating my last imperfect line. Slowly and tenderly, I let those words fall against my skin.

I broke myself, again and again, inside your mouth.

A friend of mine recently went to a psychic. She has been trying to have a baby for a long time. Every time a procedure fails to produce the child she longs for, she aches. She was hoping the psychic would tell her that all her pain would eventually result in motherhood. I listened to her tell me all her reasons for wanting to go see this psychic, and I was silent. I do not think that any of us can escape grief.

You can be standing in the fluorescent-lit aisle of the paint store contemplating the merits of White Linen as opposed to Bavarian Creme when you are suddenly seized with the fear that your life is quietly passing you by, and when you die it won’t matter what color you painted your family room.

I’m never going to be as young as I am today. I’ll never hear my favorite song for the first time more than once. My skin is going to wrinkle. My children are going to move away. Someday. Still, I do not want to predict my life like a tarot card or a one hour session with some spiritual medium. The future can not be known or manipulated. It has to be enough to stand rooted in this minute with the thrill of possibility in the next, and the next, and the next.

None of us are going to escape grief, not by writing, or affairs, or travel. You will not avoid grief by accumulating friends or by loving your children. These things only increase the chances of grief showing up unannounced on your doorstep on some random Tuesday while you are still in your robe.

Fortunately for us poor suckers doing this living thing, grief comes in stages. Denial, guilt, rage, hope, and acceptance are among these stages. Grief, that slippery bastard, is not linear.

Last night, I painted my family room. While dipping the stiff brush into the paint, I began to laugh . I laughed so hard it made my ribcage shake. That is the very best part of grief. There is still joy, even when there are stones in your belly and your heart feels like dead weight.

I’m swollen with unspoken things.

I saw a man on a motorcycle the other day. He reminded me of something beautiful. I rolled down my window.  I was prepared to liberate myself by shouting like the poet Lorca, “I would like to crush a hummingbird of love between your teeth.” Just as the words were tipped in my mouth, this dark stranger rammed a finger up his nose and began to root around. I rolled my window back up and drove away.

At times, it feels like even my wildest dreams are ugly and common. Sometimes silence is best.

Jim bought his first used car from his uncle. It was a rusted out Chevrolet with no radio antenna. Jim’s uncle had no need for an antenna. He was deaf in one ear, and he found it too distracting to listen to music when he drove. Jim was not deaf. Music mattered to him. This is why he was laying underneath his car looking for that missing antenna wire the day that Kathy strolled down the street.

She was on the way to buy ice cream at the corner store. The day was hot. She wore a damp bathing suit underneath a long white tee-shirt. From Jim’s vantage point, she was all legs. Jim claims it was those legs he fell in love with.

A colleague tells a version of this story in the faculty room. I sit like a spy and make notes like fiction in the margin of the test paper I should be grading. Later when I am alone, I fill in the gaps of other people’s history. I finish the story with an abandoned carton of ice cream sweating on the driveway, a cool puddle forming next to a greasy wrench in the melt of a summer afternoon.

I write down the story of Jim and Kathy, but it leaves me unsatisfied. It is not really the story of how two people meet that interests me. Stories, like our past, get hyperbolized. This is a basic survival skill.

My husband might sit at a dinner party and tell our friends that the first time he saw me he knew I was the one. Maybe this lessens the sting of how we sometimes live like fighting dirty, and how often I love him like a sucker punch.

For me, the best part of our story is not when David kissed me under a street-lamp on a Buffalo corner that was as simple as solitude. No. It’s what he was thinking hours earlier just before we introduced ourselves. David’s first impression of me was that I was too loud. That is the heart of the story.

See. What I’m really curious about is the moment that came just before the second you saw your wife across a crowded bar room. You are standing there holding a Corona in your hand. The taste of lime is on your lips. You are laughing at some dumb joke a co-worker is telling you, wholly unaware that your future is wearing a red tank top pressed up against a mirrored wall on the other side of the room.

I like us best when we are blind. Kathy’s legs are not the most interesting part of Jim’s story. The deaf uncle is.

Buses carry strangers traveling crooked highways. On a bus in some weary landscape, there is a woman with swollen feet carrying a plum she hides like a secret in a brown paper bag. I do not know her, but I want to.

Maybe tonight. If I sit real still and listen closely, she might tell me her stories, like varicose veins or the picture of her grandson she keeps pressed in the pocket of her factory apron.

I want to bear witness to her graveyard shift, and her memory of the ugly brown sweater her Momma forced her to wear, second-hand, in her third grade school picture. That was the sweater that made her whole life itch, if only for a day.

It is only when the night pitches itself heavy with stars, and my own babies are bathed and put to bed, after the dishes have been cleared from the table and washed by hand in the sink, and all the dresser drawers are stacked with fresh laundry, that I find a quiet place to reminisce the day that is filled with the fragments of stories.

Only then, can I lean my head close to the warm red raisin of this old woman’s mouth, and write down everything she says.

They stood in front of a large tank of clown fish.  Orange, black, and white stripped fish darted in and out of brightly colored anemone. All around her people took pictures and delighted. She remained unmoved.

She never understood people’s fascination with fish. When she was 12, and the goldfish she had won by throwing a ping pong ball into a small plastic bowl, died. She giggled as it was flushed down the toilet. It was not that she was cruel. It was just that the solemnity of her mother, assuring her that the fish was going to heaven, stood in stark contrast to the image in her head of tiny turds sprouting wings. Her idea of heaven was always marred by notions of excrement.

Clown fish live in breeding pairs. When the female fish dies, the male changes his sex. He becomes the female.

She listened as Mark sited his knowledge of clown fish. She pictured him at his laptop googling clown fish minutes after she had called to ask him to accompany her to the aquarium. She was still unsure why she called. She did not particularly enjoy Mark’s company, the way he held open doors and breathed out of his mouth. He always tried too hard to impress her. She assumed he only had sex in the missionary position. She never planned on testing her assumptions.  

She might have called Mark because she was bored, or because it was the sixth day of a week that was filled with rain, or because her apartment complex was being fumigated. Not everything had a reason.

Mark was uncomplicated. They could walk around the aquarium and he could share facts like some fleshy version of Wikipedia. She simply smiled and pretended to listen. Spending time with a sandy-haired and uncomplicated man, who tells you how clown fish were the first fish to be bred in captivity, is not a horrible way to spend an afternoon. It is no way to spend a lifetime.

And she was still completely unsure of the trajectory of her own future, but she was certain it was not Mark. This might have been precisely the thing that attracted him to her the most. 

*This is the beginning of a story I was working on, but I got completely bored with it. So, I figured I’d just dump the snippet of it here. What good is a blog if not for the cast-offs of our imagination, right?*

I made my first vlog!

If you are interested in narcissism, writing, finding out about this amazing place you can go to submit your writing and art, and you are not afraid of poor quality video, way too shiny skin, a crooked front tooth, and this incessant smacking sound I make with my mouth, well then,

Click it!

The Moment

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.