Someone told me once that all the answers we could ever want are locked away behind the strange gateways of our minds. Everything we will ever need to know is sitting there, waiting for us to knock and ask nicely.
We’re sitting in a bar, of all places. His blue eyes – the color of faded denim – are fixed on me. He’s drinking Guinness, laughing a little too hard at my jokes, bestowing compliments a bit too thick. More small, unsettling things in an evening full of them.
The way he showed up out of the blue, smacking of clandestine urgency. Radiating a vision of someone vivid, eager, lost. I’m wistful and faraway tonight – certain I don’t want to be here, ridiculously vulnerable. My mind traces and retraces thoughts of someone else. I had been hopeful about that man, the “someone else.” Now I just feel stupid.
Really, the only reason I am perched on this barstool – surrounded by the subtext and emotional cross-currents of too much booze – is because the man I’m with knows me. He’s known me since before my spry frame sprouted curves and my world fell apart. And anyway, how do you say no to a childhood friend?
He’s babbling on about people we used to know. Despite my best attempts at staying focused, I still end up lost in an underwater hush. Faces and phrases and phone calls and fields, all running together in the stale, cold light of hindsight. I miss the man who reminds me of incense and dying flowers.
I can’t seem to stop the slide down into dreamy, nonsensical tangents. The rustling of the sheets. The soft warmth of his skin on mine. The savoriness of him in my mouth. His pathetic shadow of a smile. I wanted to be the girl in the stained-glass window, forever seen in the best light. Those afternoons colored nearly the whole season for me. Months later, the memories are worn thin from overuse.
He said he always liked me best because of the hidden rooms and locked chambers in my mind. He called it a nearly invisible elusiveness. That I give the impression of being startlingly open. What you see is what you get. But the reality is, you wouldn’t be able to guess at those spaces and dark corners inside, let alone enter them.
Questions unanswered. Topics discussed only in the abstract. Try and pin me down and I’ll skirt away laughing. The enigmatic – the long, rambling paths through the wood – appealed to him. That’s what made him different, unique, to me. He was the guy less interested in the gentle sway of my hips. And I loved it.
Back in the bar, this man is grabbing handfuls of popcorn with the glacial concentration of the very drunk. I am no puzzle to him. Normally, I might find this kind of absurdity entertaining. But tonight, I’m the tiny, ethereal type, surrounded by a tide of strangers. I’m pissed off. I’m sad. I need to get the hell out of here.
How can I ever make you understand? I’d have to walk you down every path of our secret, shared geography. To this day, I hear his name and it sends something through me – something fast and primeval and dangerous. Maybe I don’t want to let that go.
I tell my companion goodbye, grab my jacket, and head through the fog-shaped crowd without looking back. Losing someone that way – the way that man left me not long ago – is a tricky thing. It’s an earthquake that triggers shifts and upheavals far too distant from the epicenter to be predictable. Any nagging, little half-remembered thing shimmers with a bright aura of hypnotic, terrifying potential.
All these private, parallel dimensions, underlying such an innocuous little smile. All these self-contained worlds layered onto the same space, mere inches above my hazel eyes. The answers are so close, I can hear them scuffling and twitching in the corners.
A furious, spring-loaded tension coils inside me as I step outside. I look up at an enormous black bowl of stars overhead. Bustling to the car, each step winding me tighter. I stab the key in the ignition, and the radio comes to life. There’s something in that voice. A deep, accustomed undercurrent of nostalgia.
Nobody knows you like the people you grow up with. And sometimes, that’s a very good thing.
• • •
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwZej4yYRkI]
Pencil drawings
My grandfather died a few days ago. He spent every second of his 92 years reminding anyone who would listen that we should all – and always – do two things: love and forgive, no matter the problem, personal crisis or catastrophe. He embodied those words, too, exhaling them into the air as naturally as shrugging off an overcoat.
Over time, his message colored every season, like a brilliant dye, flowering slowly through warm water. Wind whipped through the eaves. Rain seeped through the sashes and trickled down the panes. Snow piled up outside. My mother would light the woodstove, and we’d take turns . . . was there ever a situation when Gramps hadn’t forgiven? When his answer wasn’t to love anyway?
Not once.
It was his duty and constancy. It brought him, and us, peace. I pictured it – and still do – in pencil drawings with apple-cheeked children on a farm. He may have gotten edgy and worried (and with nine children, who could blame him?), but he never raised his voice. It was as steady and stubbornly old-fashioned as a huge, comfortable armchair. It took up inefficient amounts of space, with massive shelves of obscure thoughts, so foreign they were almost familiar. These memories are comforting, even with an undercurrent of grief.
He would play word games of his own design and complete crossword puzzles with a frenzy. He would steal my cigarette packs and write on them in black marker, and in capital letters, “CANCER STICKS.” He would twinkle his blue eyes, the color of faded denim, at any beautiful lady. He would laugh and dance and sing and smile – and love and forgive. You never had to guess what you would get from Gramps. Hugs and compliments and beefy, florid features.
The thought of trying to be as good a human being as he was, of the responsibilities and complications, it makes me want to curl up in a ball and whimper. I loved his gestures so much, loved the sure, unthinking ease of them, the taking for granted. His was not a practiced sparkle. Do people like that exist anymore?
Things are very much in a submarine haze. Today, a sort of dull relief sits in my chest, knowing he is not suffering. Just this morning, I prodded cautiously at the edges of my memory and came up nearly empty. Except for two things. My grandfather’s absolute and undying faith in the power of love and forgiveness, and the fact that in 92 years, he never let anyone take it away from him.
Thoughts like these, in the days following the death of a loved one, they’re like a dam breaking. Everything around you gathers itself up and moves effortlessly into high gear. Every drop of energy you’ve poured into that relationship comes back to you, unleashed and gaining momentum by the second, subsuming you in a building roar. You can surrender everything else, lose yourself in the driving pulse of it and become nothing but one part of a perfectly calibrated, vital machine.
Love and forgive.
• • •
This post was inspired by my brother’s eulogy at our grandfather’s funeral.
Hidden rooms
Someone told me once that all the answers we could ever want are locked away behind the strange gateways of our minds. Everything we will ever need to know is sitting there, waiting for us to knock and ask nicely.
We’re sitting in a bar, of all places. His blue eyes – the color of faded denim – are fixed on me. He’s drinking Guinness, laughing a little too hard at my jokes, bestowing compliments a bit too thick. More small, unsettling things in an evening full of them.
The way he showed up out of the blue, smacking of clandestine urgency. Radiating a vision of someone vivid, eager, lost. I’m wistful and faraway tonight – certain I don’t want to be here, ridiculously vulnerable. My mind traces and retraces thoughts of someone else. I had been hopeful about that man, the “someone else.” Now I just feel stupid.
He’s babbling on about people we used to know. Despite my best attempts at staying focused, I still end up lost in an underwater hush. Faces and phrases and phone calls and fields, all running together in the stale, cold light of hindsight. I miss the man who reminds me of incense and dying flowers.
I can’t seem to stop the slide down into dreamy, nonsensical tangents. The rustling of the sheets. The soft warmth of his skin on mine. The savoriness of him in my mouth. His pathetic shadow of a smile. I wanted to be the girl in the stained-glass window, forever seen in the best light. Those afternoons colored nearly the whole season for me. Months later, the memories are worn thin from overuse.
He said he always liked me best because of the hidden rooms and locked chambers in my mind. He called it a nearly invisible elusiveness. That I give the impression of being startlingly open. What you see is what you get. But the reality is, you wouldn’t be able to guess at those spaces and dark corners inside, let alone enter them.
Questions unanswered. Topics discussed only in the abstract. Try and pin me down and I’ll skirt away laughing. The enigmatic – the long, rambling paths through the wood – appealed to him. That’s what made him different, unique, to me. He was the guy less interested in the gentle sway of my hips. And I loved it.
Back in the bar, this man is grabbing handfuls of popcorn with the glacial concentration of the very drunk. I am no puzzle to him. Normally, I might find this kind of absurdity entertaining. But tonight, I’m the tiny, ethereal type, surrounded by a tide of strangers. I’m pissed off. I’m sad. I need to get the hell out of here.
How can I ever make you understand? I’d have to walk you down every path of our secret, shared geography. To this day, I hear his name and it sends something through me – something fast and primeval and dangerous. Maybe I don’t want to let that go.
I tell my companion goodbye, grab my jacket, and head through the fog-shaped crowd without looking back. Losing someone that way – the way that man left me not long ago – is a tricky thing. It’s an earthquake that triggers shifts and upheavals far too distant from the epicenter to be predictable. Any nagging, little half-remembered thing shimmers with a bright aura of hypnotic, terrifying potential.
All these private, parallel dimensions, underlying such an innocuous little smile. All these self-contained worlds layered onto the same space, mere inches above my hazel eyes. The answers are so close, I can hear them scuffling and twitching in the corners.
A furious, spring-loaded tension coils inside me as I step outside. I look up at an enormous black bowl of stars overhead. Bustling to the car, each step winding me tighter. I stab the key in the ignition, and the radio comes to life. There’s something in that voice. A deep, accustomed undercurrent of nostalgia.
Nobody knows you like the people you grow up with. And sometimes, that’s a very good thing.
• • •
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwZej4yYRkI]