Bleary and Blind then Blam
May 6th 2020 — Carlisle, Massachusetts
5/6/2020 — Carlisle, Massachusetts
You’re in a room for one. You’re in a house for a few. You’re in a cabin in the mountains where your only company are trees as slender and silent as women in fashion illustrations. You’re in a city in a box stacked and arranged like Jenga with countless other city boxes. Your view is an empty sidewalk in the suburbs that now seems more prison than escape from the city box you came from. You watch a field fringed with a green that’s so slow moving it seems frightened, as if the emerging vegetation will decide, we’re done. Let’s shelter in the damp and dark.
Vacancy has come to define you more than your personality, because what use is personality when you’re alone?
You’re with people related or legally bound to you whom you’ve now seen so often and so exclusively they have become like water on the stone of your heart. Their tics and utterances and demands are the drip drip drip that the vacancy has become on those of us who are truly alone. What had felt like a meaningless pleasant waterfall of time to yourself or time with those you love most is now an erosion. It never ends. You can’t shut if off, it will bore through you until you’re hollow.
But then you remember you’re not with just the kids and partner and parent and roommate and no one. They are not enough. The chambers we live in have slowly begun to fill, like that emerging hesitating spring green. Our rooms are growing crowded with apparitions but they’re not the ghosts from campfires. Specters are no longer limited to the dead, although they’re that too, especially the recently lost. Specters are the dead; they’re also peopled by the gone — still alive yet absent and unreachable. This is what prisoners must know, but with no visiting hours, ever.
In the quiet hours the ghosts — some still alive, some long dead — knock on your door one or two at a time. Then three walk through the threshold. A ex slides up the sash and sneaks through the window; a friend emerges from you don’t know where. Cousins and long forgotten great uncles and your grandparents parents and the girl you first kissed and your friend from college with the huge smile enter the room, as silent untouchable as smoke at midnight. They are united by your longing to see them. They are here in your head or in your room, you can’t tell anymore. You think of them as you look at your phone, you remember them while you open the refrigerator and lose time until you startle yourself and shut the fridge door.
Your ghost land is as crowded as Grand Central and as empty as Grand Canyon. The phantoms are united to form a country of Gone. Gone for good. Gone for now. Beyond reach. Conjured only by cell phones and old photos, by glimpsed scenes they once starred in and songs that beckon memory like a seance.
It’s too much to bear. You put on headphones to flee or you clean your room or open another beer, twist off another wine bottle, have that unneeded last cup of coffee. Sooner than you’re ready you blink and you’re back. Back with your real inmates, they are small and look like you as they slowly, ineluctably emerge like the spring around us; they are fully grown in their fall and winter as you are fully grown in your fall and winter. They ask you a question so absurd it makes you laugh. You notice their scent and feel their hefted presence in the room. They are home. They are not ghosts. They are right here, touchable.
And you, you who are alone in your cabin in the woods, buried in your cul-de-sac, quietly sitting in your city box with the other silent city boxes around you, you brush your teeth and notice yourself in the mirror. The familiar face that changes so slowly it’s only in hindsight that you know you’re not the same. Your eyes catch your eyes and you almost smile to see someone you recognize. You’re beautiful. You’re adorable. You’ve still got it.
Your granite heart that’s lodged and cold and weak with erosion starts to warm with a flicker of candle. The stone ventricles heat and thrum and burn. They glow and ooze until your heart pumps a roiling magma roar. This is life and you’ll live it and love it and grasp it until it’s so hot it’s a glowing bursting flame.
