Our Second Date Was At a Hardware Store

On our second date of sorts, we wandered the hardware store and talked about countertops. We agreed that we liked the black granite. At the sight of the price tag, of course, he said, "So we probably won't be getting this for our FIRST home, but you know...someday."

And he meant it.

What affect could I possibly have, what spell did I unknowingly cast, that he would be possessed to say these things so soon? He kissed me in the lumber aisle and bounced my daughter on his hip through power tools, with every movement rearranging my thoughts, with every word renovating the interior of my mind. What did I do to deserve this remodeling? It came at a high price, but his words sanded away my anxiety, and built my trust in humanity from the ground up. An expensive feng shui of the head was occurring as we wandered up and down, and I listened.

"We're GOING to have a bath tub like this," he said.

"How do you feel about crown molding?" he asked.

Our second date. He was completely serious.

And in the middle of this imaginary home he was building with his lips, in the center of our total insanity, I finally, FINALLY felt safe.

Buried

I can't do this anymore, this feeling of the wrong place, fitting myself into a coffin and crawling underground. I'm tapping at the lid, frantically ringing the bell, but no one in this whole damn town has a shovel. My home is in the blue sky, underneath the fishbowl, feeling like a speck of dust so far away from anything, but so close to the infinite, wrapped around providence, staking everything I have on getting out from underneath the earth where they put my bones. Crushed by confusion and the madness that ensues when you lose love and find it again within a two week period, rattling my cage bars and wishing I could see stars, nobody can hear my voice, it just won't carry far enough.

Always Turning to Salt

I use the word nostalgia as though it were a conjunction, threaded throughout every poem, every line dripping in it, if not subtly, repeated like it's cheap to say it, the word itself and the idea too, completely overtaking everything I write or do. And I live in a room with it, imaginary, sitting in the cheap Motel 8 of my mind, the boarding-house of memories, the birthplace of many and all regrets, and I lay in my bed and smoke despair, wondering how I got from here to there. I watch the telly, the history channel, it speaks to me soothingly and reminds me how I got here. The year is 2010 and I'm wandering the halls of a psychiatric ward that came highly recommended. It's 2006 and the summer is so warm, the streets of Paris are so dirty, my best friend just moved to Tennessee. It's 2013 and I'm holding my newborn daughter in my arms as she needs and needs and I give and give, wanting nothing more than for her to stay needy and small. The scenes blur through on the television, hazy through the static of forgetfulness and lost detail, and there is an earthquake in Nostalgia every day. This living in the past, Lord it's just not sustainable, my walls are crumbling and the TV reception keeps getting fuzzier. I'm lost as to how to stop using that N word, lost as to how to stop missing those miseries, embellishing and sugar coating a past in which I never really lived, always looking backwards, turning to salt over and over, always living in this room. The door locks from the outside, and I never thought to ask who had the key.

Her

A slice of soul is missing here, a piece of darkness, like black glass against the sand, like night-times unshakeable but lost, like a past left behind but remembered. A thing that I love is separate from me, a spirit-child, a drunk friend, left to gasp for air at the New Mexico border, struggling to breathe on the SoCal shores, and I can't bring her back without going to get her.

I have been missing her, her of the smoke clouds, she of the random road trips, lady of the backpack, belonging everywhere and grabbing at everything, the pen in her hand a torch to light the way. She lies dying in a garage in Durango, in a shady hotel in the Gas Lamp District, those places where I felt so close to her, dying to do it all over again, but I don't know how to pick up the pen, and I don't know how to let her in.

I've been writing about not writing for a year. I am withering now, and I need her.