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tiny cuts

july 2004 i think

I look at myself very rarely, but I examine myself fairly often. I never see myself as a whole; rather, I scrutinize every inch with the disdain of a matriarch socialite. What interests me are the minuscule cuts that appear on my legs, my arms, my fingers, my side. There's a scab on my leg shaped like a tear drop, an archipelago that runs for about an inch down my ankle, pieces of skin on my fingers flapping around like lids to my innards. While some of these cuts can be explained away -- I remember cutting my foot on a line of packing tape and cardboard last week while packing. Others I can infer their origin, the scrapes around the knobby knuckles of my middle fingers are probably the result of my carelessness with the rings on them. The cuts that are most remarkable to me, however, are the ones I don't remember. I usually find a new one every day or so, and for the life of me I don't know how they got there. Singularly, they don't bother me so I don't worry about them.

Upon my return from three weeks up North, I learned a little more about this. I saw these changes in my friends, in the places I worked, where I live. None of these changes were monumental, and for the most part they could have easily been overlooked. In fact, the people who stayed here didn't seem to notice that any changes had happened at all. But years ago I realized that things do not go into stasis simply because I go away.

When I was in high school, I shadowed a respiratory therapist at the local hospital. During the day, a patient had a heart attack and my doc was called to perform CPR. He shoved rhythmically on the patient's chest. The stitches from the man's heart surgery the day before broke, and his chest began to ooze. The therapist didn't stop, but for all his efforts the man's heart didn't start. As the monitor registered a flatline, as the professionals in the room shocked his heart in vain, again and again, I happened to glance out the window. I had been watching this patient the entire time, but something outside caught my eye. It was the glint of an airplane. As this man died, the plane kept moving. The cars below on the highway never erred in their paths. Outside this room, I realized, nothing stopped.

And when we return from wherever we've been, all of these changes that have been building in our absence hit us all at once. Though the people who remained seem unmoved by these changes, together they are numbing. Any departure, any absence, accumulates these changes. Einstein tells us we could age three weeks on a spaceship and see our families have gone fifty years in that same amount of time. In the same way, the tiny cuts that litter my limbs would be shocking if they all suddenly appeared haphazardly across my skin. Each change is a tiny cut, and put together they are shocking when we return. All we can hope is that now we can change; our only hope lies in adapting to this new world that once felt like home.

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i’ll never have a yard

i’ll never have a yard

when i’m on my walks

i sniff the flowers that i see

admire their beauty

how someone arranged them in a sea of purples, oranges, yellows, and greenery

i appreciate the care and patience it must have taken

to plant them with such love

and i wonder

how long i can stand here

before the people behind the windows

start to get nervous

written may 12 2023

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being frank, pt. 2

[written in 2023, when it felt like Frank needed an ending]

It no longer confounded Frank that he was a person worthy of love. He had felt it many times. He had loved, lost, fought, and made up. He had felt desire both from strangers and by people he loved more dearly than anything else in the world. Frank looked back on his life so far, how differently it had all turned out. He smiled and closed his eyes, ready for the days to come.

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being frank

[written some time in 2012, I think]

It still confounded Frank, the thought that he could be not only an object with desires but also an object to be desired. He had never considered himself to be a person whose emotional and physical needs could be met, and the idea that he might fulfill another’s needs was completely out of the question. He had always believed that those who desired him, because of how little he thought of himself and the paucity of people who possessed those desires, were in their own way damaged or unworthy of a love not borne out of desperation or loneliness.

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nota bene

[written August 2011]

He looks like my dad, so much so that my memory of him was actually replaced by my dad. When I saw him the second time, sun-browned skin, long black ponytail with strands of grey, I didn’t recognize him at first. I expected to see my dad there, instead of the guy peering over his fence at me, cutting his grass with a weed whacker.

The first day I met him, when I told him he had HIV, he was floored. He had just learned he had hepatitis, and though the doctors told him he had HIV too, he didn’t believe it. He still insists it’s all a dream. As I sat there with him on his front porch, he said that until that very moment he thought his visit to see me in the clinic had been part of the same weird dream.

"I’m fifty years old," he told me. “I just don’t remember all the stupid shit I’ve done in my life."

He promised me three weeks ago that he would tell his wife that weekend. He still hasn’t told her. I said that I could come to his house again and draw her blood. “I used to be a phlebotomist, too. Maybe that’s why I started thinking, maybe I could inject this. Maybe I could mix this with that." He travels to Mexico every year for bike races, but he swears he hasn’t cheated or done drugs since he met his wife in 1991. “What kills me is that she’s the one who saved me, and now it’s probably too late for her." I can’t help but wonder what it would be like to learn that my dad had given my mom something like this.

He says what freaks him out is that he doesn’t feel any different. Every morning he checks himself, looks to see if his skin is turning yellow, peers into the whites of his eyes to check for jaundice. Every time he gets a cold, or a cut, he monitors how long it takes him to heal. Everything seems normal, and he thinks that maybe he doesn’t have it.

He’s avoided going to the doctor for this same reason. He tried explaining that illness is partially in the mind, so if you avoid the illness you can avoid getting sick. I say that isn’t exactly true. I told him I was on my way to interview a patient at the hospital who had no idea he had HIV. He went in with tuberculosis, and since many TB patients also have HIV, his doctors tested him. Lo and behold. I told him that the ones who do best with HIV are the ones who stay on top of everything. The ones who do the worst are the ones who hope it will all go away. HIV isn’t something you run from.

"Whatever you do, man," he says, after asking how old I am. “Whatever you do, don’t do stupid shit. It’s not worth it." He fights back tears, like the last time we talked. There is only so much I can say.

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funny you mention that

[written May 2004]

Over the weekend, we bought a strawberry rhubarb pie. Last night, amidst studying, we got to wondering what, exactly, is a rhubarb? This led to a small google-based research project, where we decided the rhubarb people eat is the stalky portion of a plant that looks like collard greens crossed with celery. And red.

This morning, I was carrying a banana at the bus stop, and the guy standing next to me remarked he didn't remember to bring his banana for lunch. We got to talking about how bananas no longer grow on trees, they grow in grocery stores, and soon enough he is telling me about his youth on a farm. He used to pick raspberries and gooseberries from the nearby field, and the gooseberries were so sour that they had to have a lot of sugar added to them. Nearly as sour, he said, as rhubarb.

"It's like red celery," he recalled, "but sour."

Later, i'm reading Conversation with Neil's Brain where the characters are discussing features of the brain. Visual processing works best, they say, when you have contrasts. Like a good cook will know to mix sweet with sour, strawberry with rhubarb, to make things distinct.

It's always funny to see coincidences like this pop up. If we hadn't bought the pie, if we hadn't talked about it last night, if the man remembered to bring his lunch, today wouldn't have been the same. Would it?

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eloquence

[written September 2002]

She mumbled something to him as I approached. I didn't hear what she said, but he nodded and reached for a pack of Marlboro Reds. He asked for ID for the cigarettes and the beer. I remember that she was carrying a metal box. It was the size of a lunchbox, which is what I thought it was at first. The handle was black plastic, and there was a red star with a black outlined border on the side. She finished paying, grabbed her bags, and then announced in a slur that she didn't have her ID. Before the cashier - Robert D on his nametag - could protest, she was out the door. Robert sighed, then turned to me. "Is this all for you tonight?" he asked. I nodded, "I think I'll make it through the next five hours until you open again." We grinned, and I took my white bag emblazoned HEB.

I had parked away from the entrance, and moved forward into the space so that it looked like I had reversed it into the space I now occupied. Of course, the woman ahead of me in line had parked behind me in the lot. She was one of those people you don't think you notice until it's too late. Until you realize that you did. Brown, frizzy hair. Black jacket, the kind with sweatshirt material on the inside and shiny material on the outside. It was what coaches wore. She drove an ninety-three Buick, but it looked older. I can't help but feel bad for these parts of society: the downtrodden that never seem to get back up, the ones that you give a dollar to and know they'll just use it on beer. I did what everyone else like me does. I shrugged her off. I know, stick to the story. I will. But I turned away from her, as she repeatedly tried to start her car and keep it from stalling, and unlocked my trunk. I set the bag into the large compartment smelling of oil and mildew since before I owned it, when the woman's car sprang to life.

Her car jerked forward, pinning me to my bumper. My head rocked, me in shock, and I cracked my lip on the still-open lid of the trunk. My head kicked back now, as my knees gave way and I fell backwards onto the roof of her Buick. My eyes rolled to the right, and focused on a bug plastered to her green hood. It shared a a similar fate. Realizing what she'd done, the woman pressed on the gas even more, vainly trying to put it into reverse. As I lay on the hood of her car, the whirling of the engine inches below my ears, I couldn't help but hear the cracks in my legs as my car lurched forward under the strain. My hands were useless, the shock of the pain below effectively locking the commands my brain was trying to send. I imagined a steam ship up against a rock, the paddles churning, the captain screaming, but no movement from below deck. In an instant, my arms jerked up and about, and I felt my watch bore into my eye before I managed to pound the side of the car with my fist. I don't even know if I was making a fist. The gears beneath me meshed long enough for my shins to break contact with my bumper. She pulled back quickly, executed a clumsy arc and crashed into the cart stall behind us. The gears scraped together again and she pulled forward, an imprint of me across her grille. The rubber tires had lost their tread but they did their damage when peeling over my splayed hand.

More tires, more rubber, and she was gone. My right hand, the one that had not betrayed me throughout the ordeal, plunged into my pocket for my phone. Empty. The left pocket required more twisting, more scraping of bone. My phone appeared in my head, a glimmering siren beckoning me to it as it lay on my desk, charging. I just wanted batteries and milk. Your preparations always seem to be wherever you are not. All was blackness, then

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biking down hazard

[published July 2009]

He said he wasn’t gay, but when pressed he said he wasn’t straight, either. He had solid white teeth made straight from braces and he snorted when he laughed, and every attempt he made to be less attractive only made him more endearing. He was a magic camp counselor and he refused to sing selections from his days in acapella club, but there wasn’t anything stopping me from falling for him. 

Billy was the first boy I ever kissed, in the driver’s seat of his dad’s old grey Taurus, on a night when he gave me a ride home. I was a little drunk from whiskey and I thought he was feeling the heat between us that I had known since I had first laid eyes on him, waggling his eyebrows like they were in on a joke. After that first kiss he waggled them again.

“What was that?” he asked, a little surprised, a little turned on. I felt his body heat beneath me; saw myself in the streetlight reflected off his eyes.

“Did you like it?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I did.”

We were never together in any sense of the word. We never held hands, but we did go on dates. We both had roommates so we could never stay home; we’d get a burger and then get plastered on cheap Lone Star until it grew dark enough to fool around in my truck. I asked him one night, very early on, what it was we were doing, but he didn’t know. He didn’t know, but he liked it. I liked it too.

We felt like teenagers, neither of us had done anything like this before, and we were both testing the waters ten years after fourteen. “Let’s just see where this goes,” he said, and I agreed.

Where it went, for me, was the ache for a relationship. He hated labels and we didn’t call ourselves anything. I was cool with that, I knew what I was and I hated the names people had given what it was we liked to do. He wasn’t my boyfriend, he wasn’t my companion, and he wasn’t going to be my life partner. I hated those antiseptic pronouns, and I was fine leaving them where they fell. We gave ourselves a month without promises, but before the month was over he was drifting away. He never gave an explanation but I knew it was over, this thing we never named and barely acknowledged.

Privately, we went back to being friends, and publicly, nothing changed. I don’t know what people thought of us when we weren’t anything and I don’t know what they think now, now that we aren’t anything. I bike down Hazard and see his place, I imagine he’s glancing out the window at just the right time, but when I get home and check my phone, nothing has changed but me. 

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ancianos

[pretty sure this is November 2006]

He's mumbling again. I'm sitting on the curb while he paces about, talking to me without even knowing it. He's telling us about how we met, so long ago, our eyes shining. My knees are starting to hurt. I've been sitting here for so long but he is still pacing the little plaza near the choripan vendor where I sit. There's a statue nearby, and a group of boys affixed beneath it, five years but teenagers, are saying things about him. Loudly. I think he hears them but he mumbles nothing new. He's telling me another story, about our trip to the south, as he paces and punches and high-kicks the air. I smile warmly and nod; he was always a good storyteller.

Two more boys, waiting for a taxi, stand by the side of the road near him. He starts to tell them a story but one of the boys cuts him off with English. He snarls, agitated, pacing, and unzips his sweatshirt. The yellow fleece is thrown to me, and I make an attempt to catch it. He's talking about the children now, the kids we'd raise together, the beautiful house with white plaster and a balcony that looks out onto the clean streets below. He knows my knees hurt though I don't say anything, and he reaches for my hand, escorts me to the other side of the statue where I sit on dewy grass. Away from the boys.

He goes back to get our empty bottles, two liter beer bottles we double-bagged for a trip to the supermarket tomorrow. We'll exchange the bottles for the deposit and buy some fruit. The peaches are coming in, and we'll buy a kilogram, a whole bag full, and eat them in the park nearby, the juice running down our fingers as we laugh and tell jokes about the way we lived before.

Some kids get up from the tables nearby and make their way to their cars. He snarls again, withdraws a bottle and stands by the cars. He tells them how we met, how he will protect me to the death. He raises the bottle high, promising to use it; I tell him not to hurt them and he seems to hear me. He throws the bottle in an arc above my head, landing four or five meters away, and it shatters on a stone marker next to the statue. The bronze man on the horse doesn't say anything, but the boys beneath guffaw together. My husband takes off his long-sleeved shirt, throws it at me with more precision, but I don't get close enough. The thin cotton of his tee-shirt hangs loosely in places but taut across his shoulders. His skin is a tanned, deep brown, and the wrinkles we've earned together show on his face.

The boys standing alone try to hail another taxi, but the taxis are all going to better parts of town. The boys under the statue are only getting more excited. I ask if we should go home, though I haven't known where home is for two years. He grumbles more, under his breath like a secret, and takes my hand. The man I love escorts me down the street, as the calloused edge of my foot slaps my worn shoe against the asphalt.

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onboarding

I'm trying to collect stuff I found after a long time away.