notes app draft dump

unfinished bits of what i write in line at grocery stores or in between meetings

I. A portrait of everything I have ever wanted 

At night we hang out in your backyard, drinking and painting wooden pumpkins. I steal a moment to meet you inside, while you watch your dog eat her late dinner.

I was always worried about what it meant to feel so close to your own kin. When I moved out I worried we would never be that close again. There we would be: two people drifting far apart, interacting rarely, and seeing each other less and less.

But how impossible it is to leave somebody’s orbit. How easily two people gravitate to each other. How the solar system of our lives would keep us close together.

My dog stops on a walk to look at someone who looks like you.
My partner asks how your week has been…

II. void

We leave totems of our grief all around. A chewed dog toy, gathering dust. A Polaroid of downtown Boston. A yellow hat you got at Big Bend before Christmas. A half-finished short story about the man who broke you again and again and again. A poem about the one who didn’t. 

Now you arrange Tupperware and vacuum the bedroom, hoping to drive away your loneliness. Maybe if you get the dose just right you can reach through the void…

III. old grief

Inside each body is the legacy 
Of some old grief
Eating skin and muscle
Rotting. festering. 

I heard, on Post Reports,
That grief is the absence of someone 
the process of leaving
That the sea levels are rising and soon a great tsunami will hit Seattle,
caused by the big one
How feelings like a
tightness
in the chest 
Can be symptoms of a heart attack or something less severe:
-Chest bone popping.
-acid reflux. 
There is no time left to mourn.
There is nothing but time left to mourn.

IV. mothers

When your mother was young she hiked the rim of the Big Bend basin, sheltering from the wind in old building ruins.

When your mother was young she had her heart broken and drove by the boy’s house just to check if he was still there.

When your mother was young she owned a dance studio, jazzercise where she danced and jumped and moved without hesitation.

Every man you have ever loved has left you in the summer: Spain, Minneapolis, Wisconsin. 

You never thought these things would align. The security of their shared traits, the way you would speak (or not) to each of them through digital boxes. 

These things are not related, but they keep you up at night. At night you could weave a tapestry of loneliness, thick enough to keep you warm. Each moment between the moment amplified by the quiet.

Now you feel the pressure to build something that lasts. Even if you don’t know what that is.

Driving home you think of love like a Texas highway: stretching out across cities and small towns, cutting through deserts and empty expanses where nothing lives. 

The quaintness of your changing and expanding view. How when you were young you thought of love as a feeling, not an action. A sensation of lust, a flash of heat, a stumbling obsession. Love is like an action: ongoing, endlessly repeated.

Nobody dreams of you in their sleep(except for him). Nobody passes by you and feels ashamed. Nobody misses you in Minneapolis; grieves you in Portland. 

V. Georgia on my mind

And if I wanted to I could write The Truth of what I’m thinking.
Like why did you leave me?
Or.
When will you return?

How I remember:
the summer when Lilo & Stitch came out.
You arrived midway through the day to take us
front row, craning our necks to see.
How I cried throughout the movie, but you never said a word 
against it.

Or later when you lived with us
Dying.
Always dying.
After the flood, after the leaving of your house.
We would work together on puzzles
and you would yell from the bottom of the stairs
Voice barely audible: hoarse like winter 
telling us to quiet down when we were
too rowdy.

If I would have known
how to track each moment so meticulously 
Stop and listen to the change—
The time between the time—
When your life is shifting before you and you are
Out of body.
Watching someone die.
Watching someone disappear.
Watching your first boyfriend leave for Spain.
Watching your third one return from Wisconsin.
Watching your childhood dog take his last breath.
Watching your partner cry after putting his dog down.

I could have told you then
Wrote down pen to paper
Feverishly scrawling out each memory 
past, present, future.

A sensation for each feeling:
Warm, hot, comfortably coated in sticky amber…

VI. summer, the hottest day of the year.

I think I might fall in love with you.

First in summer the hottest day of the year

I’ve read somewhere that you could close off your heart, padlocked and dreary. It was in a book on not getting hurt. Or something a therapist recommended I never do.

When I got too high you were swimming in the pool around your friends. I wanted to drown myself, sink to the bottom, and hold my breath. I keep trying to…what did Adrienne Rich say? Transcend the wreck? Uncover it? Dive deep enough that I might find a revelation, buried among the wreck.

And then there you are: in the morning cooking eggs and baking, belting out a showtune. “What if when he sees me” like a narrative lost in time.

VII. declining empires

This has always been my gift: premonitions of declining empires. A routine walk up a forest trail in the northwest, you walk in front of me, ahead while I linger back.

I want you to understand. This is as much my fault as no one’s. I could have sped up, I could have kept pace. But there it was: the end. So clear in front of me. Why bother?

When you leave I tell myself I will not come back. I will move away and cut my hair. I’ll find new paths and walk them religiously alone. Solemn like a monk, no word to break my silence. But still, it is the same street. The same trail. The same grocery store a thousand times. Each path is a remnant of the end and me: post-apocalyptic, mourning something long past dead.

What a tragedy to survive the end. To keep on living when things decay. Responsible for building something new. Rebirth. Renewal. 

VIII. Match Stick grief

Our grief is like
match sticks against a box:
A strike, and then 
Ignition.
A flame, and burnt black and curling
Wood.

When we were younger 
there was endless land 
& sky
& water
& where they touched a single point:
A black seed
growing vines & barbs
envious of your
sorrow.

There is no coming back.
To return is to give it up
that thing you love so much
(Matchstick grief)
hot and bright
nearly gone and curled
to ground.

IX. moving in

I am thinking about each second now. Writing stories about lingering ghosts, plagues, and ice cream trucks melting in the Texas heat.

Tell me what are you afraid of? For me it’s:

Sundays
Moving on
Parking lot conversations where I ask to move in.

And yet, there he is each morning and each night. Like routine or a revolutionary act, whichever one suits you best.