Papa1
Bluelighter
- Joined
- Oct 16, 2008
- Messages
- 467
She canceled on me. As though I’m not leaving in a day. I wonder if she thinks I’ll ever see her again. I loved her. I guess I still love her. The buds come out in April and I’ll be gone by May. This is the end.
Truly, maybe it is. Maybe those stories that finish with heroic light and glory, trumpets and violins are fiction. It fits better with the world I know for it to it end here: an apartment, a lamp, a child sleeping, these walls, this floor, the wind. As though it were all a lullaby.
It’s raining on the earliest hour of Sunday morning, April 27th two thousand eight. The apartment is beneath the cloud bank and I can see spotlights from the skyscrapers plumb the mist. The child sleeps in her crib. I think about the radio, just silently, and I half sit up to turn it on. I half sit down. She only just fell asleep, only just.
It’s windy on the mountain, and the rain is against the windows like fists or handfuls of sand, like it were aiming to flood. The windows vibrate long and slow like whalesong.
Vibrate. My phone. Did it? I need my phone to move. I don’t know why I expect her to call tonight, but it’s in me like an addiction, her.
I think back to the Sunday that my wife died, by the water, by the water, by the sea. My hands were sticky from eating seafood when she jumped. So first I was eating and reading, and I heard the waves coming, coming coming against the cliff for an afternoon, and way out at sea it was raining and I was dry, and so on the next day I came back and she had jumped. Because of me, because of me, because of. My hand moves.
I need the phone to vibrate, I need her to call. I need her to call. The baby stirs.
Someone has knocked on the door. Was it her?
But when?
Nothing in the apartment moves but the windows.
I wait and think that maybe the room can forget, but the sound reverberates: I echo it with my heart and my pulse and my ears. It is me, me, me. I need to forget. Has she really knocked at the door? How could that be? That idea is seductive and impossible, a tortuous dream.
A while ago my palms have sweated through my pockets, but I haven’t noticed until just now. The room and the sound of the wind come in over me like it just started up again.
Against my will I get up, to the door and through the peephole I see no one, but that means nothing for there’s a bench in an alcove outside my door, and there is a bench at the end of the hall in front of the windows that face the river into the storm, and a bench by the elevator, a bench in the lobby. An army invisible and infinite is outside my door.
I take my eye away from the peephole and rub my hands together. They’re so wet. I lay my hat over my face and place my hands in my pocket to clutch the phone and try in vain to fall asleep as I lie down. Maybe I drift off. I stand up when the child starts crying. By the time I get to the crib she is sleeping again.
Lightning is falling like rain.
Either everything is an end or else nothing is.
A window blows open, the latch broken. A while ago? The window’s been open for a long time, and I realize that I must have fallen asleep and that I’m being woken up. It is all I can do to close the latch.
I check on her crib one more time, and I lie down again and think about my wife and all the ghosts.
We talk of ends as though we know what words mean: maybe with memory, maybe time, maybe sleep or confusion we drag ourselves down into the ends, following lightning bolts to graves, as if in my heart of hearts I believe this to be the last April and the last May, as though it’s not all darker than night any which way. As though I’ve never woken up.
As I fall asleep I imagine that I’ve turned on the radio, softly, and wonder once more about the sound of violins.
Truly, maybe it is. Maybe those stories that finish with heroic light and glory, trumpets and violins are fiction. It fits better with the world I know for it to it end here: an apartment, a lamp, a child sleeping, these walls, this floor, the wind. As though it were all a lullaby.
It’s raining on the earliest hour of Sunday morning, April 27th two thousand eight. The apartment is beneath the cloud bank and I can see spotlights from the skyscrapers plumb the mist. The child sleeps in her crib. I think about the radio, just silently, and I half sit up to turn it on. I half sit down. She only just fell asleep, only just.
It’s windy on the mountain, and the rain is against the windows like fists or handfuls of sand, like it were aiming to flood. The windows vibrate long and slow like whalesong.
Vibrate. My phone. Did it? I need my phone to move. I don’t know why I expect her to call tonight, but it’s in me like an addiction, her.
I think back to the Sunday that my wife died, by the water, by the water, by the sea. My hands were sticky from eating seafood when she jumped. So first I was eating and reading, and I heard the waves coming, coming coming against the cliff for an afternoon, and way out at sea it was raining and I was dry, and so on the next day I came back and she had jumped. Because of me, because of me, because of. My hand moves.
I need the phone to vibrate, I need her to call. I need her to call. The baby stirs.
Someone has knocked on the door. Was it her?
But when?
Nothing in the apartment moves but the windows.
I wait and think that maybe the room can forget, but the sound reverberates: I echo it with my heart and my pulse and my ears. It is me, me, me. I need to forget. Has she really knocked at the door? How could that be? That idea is seductive and impossible, a tortuous dream.
A while ago my palms have sweated through my pockets, but I haven’t noticed until just now. The room and the sound of the wind come in over me like it just started up again.
Against my will I get up, to the door and through the peephole I see no one, but that means nothing for there’s a bench in an alcove outside my door, and there is a bench at the end of the hall in front of the windows that face the river into the storm, and a bench by the elevator, a bench in the lobby. An army invisible and infinite is outside my door.
I take my eye away from the peephole and rub my hands together. They’re so wet. I lay my hat over my face and place my hands in my pocket to clutch the phone and try in vain to fall asleep as I lie down. Maybe I drift off. I stand up when the child starts crying. By the time I get to the crib she is sleeping again.
Lightning is falling like rain.
Either everything is an end or else nothing is.
A window blows open, the latch broken. A while ago? The window’s been open for a long time, and I realize that I must have fallen asleep and that I’m being woken up. It is all I can do to close the latch.
I check on her crib one more time, and I lie down again and think about my wife and all the ghosts.
We talk of ends as though we know what words mean: maybe with memory, maybe time, maybe sleep or confusion we drag ourselves down into the ends, following lightning bolts to graves, as if in my heart of hearts I believe this to be the last April and the last May, as though it’s not all darker than night any which way. As though I’ve never woken up.
As I fall asleep I imagine that I’ve turned on the radio, softly, and wonder once more about the sound of violins.
