softlyglowing

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here’s another cryptic poem i wrote

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i been thinkin about TIME

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on faith

window-panes have a way of dividing things: here, evening mounts in twelve congruent rectangles. this is important because, in Voskresensk, it stretches itself forward in only one (and sometimes none, when the season calls for the annual removal of the glass and summer vaults itself up with the help of our apple tree and enters gracefully through the window-made-hole in the attic of the dacha). my grandfather says this has certain healing qualities. he does not clarify when i ask for the particularities of “this.” he has spent fifty years a doctor treating reflexes and my grandmother says that he wrote poetry earlier, maybe in Vladivostok or Leningrad, a word- smith she says he was (and is?), but time silences or perhaps slims our words, so now he does not answer. instead, he does hand me a plastic yogurt container, repurposed as a vessel for the treacherous journey from garden to attic to out-stretched palm, which he has filled with fresh-picked raspberries: this, i’m told, has healing qualities, too.

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the last voicemail from my shadow (transcribed)

i cannot rage against the dying of the light: my coffers for chaos are empty, spent, spilt into the watery lines i ceaselessly cast (and i mean cast in the past tense) upon your tired piece of earth. what of it, if you’d only noticed me perhaps! no, tonight i’m leaving for good. the sun will slip behind that collection of rectangular prisms you call a “skyline,” darkness will crawl out from behind it (blooming above and below at once) and you’ll be here without me. do you understand? it’s over. it makes sense i suppose: we’re moving in different directions and i cannot (will not) follow you into the dark. fuck. i know i’m turning all the lyrics on their head, but break ups are hard. even in our best moments together, you barely noticed me. that night when the rain unfolded in thick, velvet sheets from the sky, i stood with you under the street-light, lifted your Marlboro (fuck you for that, by the way, you know i prefer American Spirits because of our time in Japan) to my shadowy lips, the drops relentless in their assault of my flat figure. you barely noticed me; your gaze only gliding over my contours before returning to your thoughts, my presence forgotten! or our hot summer days when chlorine soaked the strands of your wet hair: you eyed the life-guards across the pool and hardly saw the elaborate mimesis i performed next to you! just think, in those 100-degree days, the concrete is much hotter, but still i scalded and stretched myself before you, till, satiated with sadism, you let me loose in the deep end. you don’t care, don’t see me even now. god, you still think you fashion me! let me tell you: i am molded to your form, but appearances are deceiving. if you knew me at all, you’d know though i am like you, i am nothing like you.

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self

i am breaking the light.

the trees are, too. sometimes

(like today),

in early autumn,

they lengthen their gnarled trunks

and raise their branches to the sky

with all of summer’s sweetness

stuck still in their sap.

September’s slanted rays

accept this profession of love,

kiss their edges gold and,

in rapture,

project the trees onto the earth below,

a relief in shadow and sun.

if you were behind me

and very small,

perhaps you’d see my broad shoulders

also halo-ed by the afternoon.

if you were willing to be decieved

(a twenty-first century romantic like me),

you would forget the sun a moment

and see draped around those shoulders

the soft sheet of the sky,

all of Heaven resting on a shelf

forged of bone, southern summer,

DNA, the unrelenting weight of backpack straps…

i am found and fractured in these shadows.

somewhere, ants are discussing

the apocalyptic image of my shoulders,

but i am watching the trees

as the ants are watching me.

so, i think little of them,

flinch when they blaze trails

on my bare thighs

and forget a moment later.

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inside n out

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my grandparents’ kitchen :-)

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On some days, my skin is a bit thinner than it is on others. It’s as though there’s an acidity hidden behind the humidity in the air and as the day wears on, whatever layer of defenses there is that normally shields me gradually wears off.

It’s Father’s Day today. I wouldn’t have known but an endless array of smiling Instagram posts alerted me to its existence and I spent a few minutes lost in the strings of bright faces and loving captions. When I walked into my bedroom, I glanced at one of the pictures I keep on top of the bookshelf — I’m short, so most of the time I hardly notice it at all. It’s grainy, from 2004, and in it, my father and I smile at a Chuck E. Cheese’s camera like we haven’t a problem in the world. For a second, I contemplate posting it. I run a quick tabulation of the likes it would get, the comments, the brief rush of happiness that some online validation of a relationship that never actually existed with my father could bring me. 2004. By then, he’d already started disappearing, coming home late some nights (I knew because I would stay up until I heard the wooden door slam shut under the force of his drunken body) and not at all others. I can’t post it.

I think of my mother next, both my ghost and my God. I don’t know when she started disappearing, but she’s everywhere, too. The house is empty but the house was christened by the blood of her labor. I forgive her. She doesn’t have to be here. She’s given us this and needs to find comfort in her job, in the long hours she spends at her lab seven days of a week. I get out of her way. I pick up my sister unquestioningly. I serve my God. I make her dinner when she comes home for it and smile when talks to me about her day. Still, though, I couldn’t post a picture with her either. Mostly because I wouldn’t be able to find one — my family doesn’t do that. We don’t have pictures with each other. We don’t even hug. Even if we did, though, I don’t think I could post it.

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summer of postcards, lost and found (1/?):

The end of this last academic year came to a rolling stop, the kind where you can see the yellow light turn red a quarter-mile ahead of you and sigh, moving your right foot from the gas pedal and letting it dangle limp in the air above the breaks. Class disappeared into the abyss of reading period, which crept away from me page by page as I wrote one final paper after another. Finally, came the slow fade-out that marked the end of the end: Leah and I sitting in exhausted silence and avoiding uncomfortable goodbyes as we watched Adams dining hall empty from one hour to the next, a half-assed attempt at moving out of our room (that we later paid for in $250 penalties added to each of our term bills), and trying not to cry in cold, gray rain as the Uber driver who was supposed to take us to Cape Cod hit us with a deadpan stare and shake of his head before driving away. You could say that I am quite bad at endings. I think it has something to do with my simultaneous urge to hold my life to my heart in an endless passionate embrace and my absolute devotion to running away. What ends up happening is usually a slightly pathetic mix of the two.

At any rate, our second Uber driver was kinder. He'd stifled his disappointment at having picked up two passengers who wanted to embark on a two hour journey away from Boston into the sparse woods of rural New England because, as he assured to us with a look of stoic (perhaps pained) resignation, "those are the rules of the game." However, his cheerful conversation slowly gave way to a silence of suppressed frustration as the inner city traffic somehow persisted far past Boston's outer limits and all through the small Massachusetts towns that formed a ribcage around the interstate. Finally, though, we pulled up to the winding driveway of Leah's Cape House. Our driver let out a high-pitched wheeze that had to be fueled by a passionate mixture of relief at having the ordeal over with, the overwhelming thought of driving back to Boston, and the desperate urge to pee. Sheepishly, he asked if he could come in for a few seconds to use the bathroom and we graciously acquiesced, so the three of us became a wet, exhausted procession, slowly following Leah's brother Max into the house. Perhaps as compensation for our hospitality, Abdel, our driver (for we were intimate now), did us the kindness of pretending not to notice that the entire house smelled like a dispensary. Max's friends, it turned out, were also stoners.

A string of halcyon days followed. At least I think they did -- I'm not entirely sure what that word actually means because I'm too proud to look it up before using it, but they definitely felt deeply related to that one Bon Iver song. Max's friends, it turned out, were not only stoners but also an incredibly welcoming group of boys. They allowed us wholeheartedly into their antics, becoming our deliverers to a kind of lightly inebriated paradise.

Actually, these antics left some pretty lasting impressions on my life. For example, I discovered that no game stokes the competitive embers that burn in the depths of my soul more than Slap Cup, the only proven way of distinguishing the mortals from the gods. At sunset, we would pull on our sweatshirts and step into the cool air of the outdoor deck where the boys arranged an entire bag of red solo cups filled with cheap wine and cheaper beer at the center of a huge glass table. After explaining the game to us about three and a half times (I promise we were still sober at this point, just incompetent), it would finally begin and I have never before experienced a joy so pure. Between the ping pong balls flying off the grooved glass, the cups being drained and somersaulting off the table, and the rapidly increasing rowdiness of the group, it was bliss. I'm not quite sure what the fact that this was one of the best evenings of my life says about me, but it definitely was. Maybe it's just that I like a good time (I definitely do), but I think it might be a bit deeper. I think it's the abandon, the cognitive radio silence borne of easiness, a simple goal, and unlikely intimacy that can sometimes take the place of all of the words in my head. Win. Laugh. Look at the granulated silhouettes of some Harvard seniors you barely know and see them spending the last week that they may ever have all together and smile from your little corner of their world. You have found as close to immortality as possible in the gold-leafed memory of the best time of somebody else's life. You're lucky.

A few rounds later, whatever ice there'd been left to break melted from the warmth of the now-empty cases of beer that had relocated themselves into our veins. The very picture of those slightly rowdy but well-intentioned teenagers you sometimes saw and shuddered away from when you were twelve, we embarked on a short, slightly stumbling stroll to the beach. That's one of the nice things about being on the Cape in early May, all of the huge summer homes lining the streets sit dark and empty. No pairs of inquiring eyes watch from behind thickly curtained windows and send condemnation into the summer air. So, in the comfort of that vacant night, we walked onto a small stretch of wooded shoreline with our spliffs in tow. Having seated ourselves in a sorry attempt at a line on some logs by the sea, we watched the glowing orange spot of the joints move from person to person, growing quieter as they continued to make their rounds up and down. Eventually, they went out, so our eyes, in lieu of the small circles of light they had lost, fixed themselves on the full moon and its silvery luster collecting in patches on the water and the ridgelines of each other's faces. Leah and I, being the lightweights that we are, were even more entranced by the scene than most, so when the group left to see the dock, we deemed ourselves inept to join their journey. Instead, we silently opted to intertwine our fingers, lay back, and watch the soft lines of our profiles shift with every change in the wind as the stars collected and clustered together in the darkening night.  

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a love letter i suppose:

Tell me: do you suppose you know what love is?

I am unsure myself. I have felt many things within the context of what I believe to be love: power, powerlessness, lust, repulsion, hatred. Are these the components of this compulsion we term love? Are they indicators of its presence?

If they are, I know love only in its absence. I can stare into the eyes of a tender farewell and stand unwavering in my hardened resignation before reality. Leave. I dare you and I believe my own words. After all, it is only in the quiet of a closing door that I begin to ache. If you have ever wondered if the heart is as foolish as it is tender, here is proof.

Sure, the presence of another being within my life feels like a gain of some sort. My reality is undoubtedly augmented; I get to see through another’s eyes and rest in another’s arms. I feel the wind graze the flesh of my exposed skin and watch the same happen to another. Instead of one life, I live two. I am and I watch what I believe “I am” to be on the existential canvas of somebody else. There is no greater threat to loneliness than this confirmation of shared existence.

Loneliness, however, is a vengeful creature and for every absence it asserts itself with renewed cruelty. My room was never once empty before you entered it. When I was there, I filled it with my own presence. With you, however, I entered it twice – through my own body and through the conceptualization of you within it with me. Now, as I stare at the books, the carpet bent on the floor, the cup half-filled with water you left behind, it is permanently empty. It belongs to us and can never more belong to me.

The only proof of love is the emptiness it leaves behind. In making the world big enough for two, it leaves it stretched beyond its earlier boundaries, hollowed out. At any rate, the space once filled by another should not be haphazardly filled anyways, do not forget that it is holy in its pain. Resignation is not an act, but a constant practice. It is only through pain that I come to truly learn my lessons. This is the only religion that I know and the only God that I can serve selflessly.

So, I will practice resignation. I will burn in the pained agoraphobia left by your absence.

Fill me with your emptiness; let me feel that sacred loss,

if only to believe I love(d) you.