birthday girl today you’ve rounded a corner where suddenly everything is different and while on the surface of things it all appears the same, some intangible mark has been crossed and you are all things suddenly to me. suddenly bigger, suddenly clearer, suddenly smarter, suddenly kinder.
at one point i saw you get into the toy car your grandfather bought you next to your cousin and you both looked at each other and without saying a word, something passed between you and you each nodded and smiled and looked ahead through an imaginary window.
everyday, suddenly, everything is different now.
Category Archives: internals
thoughts, musings, life, etc
are you sure what side of the glass you are on?
the looking glass, the seeing glass, i no longer see you, some distant memory of a thought of a fragment of a voice through a muffled wall in the dark just before sleep.
i remember the staircase, bounding down it, two at a time, i could not wait to get out. i belonged out there man, in the streets, in the day, the night, anywhere like some stray animal that did not want to find a home. roaming, hunting, looking for play, looking for more room to move around.
and when i remember it’s as if it’s through the eyes of someone else, i’ve possessed some body, neither boy nor man, something ageless or imagined, or perhaps a bit of both, all of both. an imagined past that still lives within me. oh, how squandered that little bit of freedom. how truly beautiful.
A little too soon
He placed the muzzle underneath his chin. It felt comfortable there, snug. A good fit, a good place to light up the night, turn the town red. A little too comfortable actually and frankly a little too soon. He had other business to look forward to. He put the gun down, put his head in his hands, staring at it some more.
How much longer would he need to think about it, muster the courage to go ahead and just do it? How much more would he have to tolerate their smugness? Dante did not mind people smarter than him, actually admired those who were. But they weren’t, they weren’t enough and it grated on his nerves. But soon, soon it would change and he would end it, their taunting and his suffering. All in one fell swoop, like a cannonball through a set of precisely placed pins.
And he knew where each one was and going to be. He’d get to them all and pay his final respects.
they’re a little slured, but they’re there
and she’s she there, everywhere, all the time. the words coming out of her mouth, half formed, not lazy exactly, just too new, struggling. she used to spend a lot of time pointing, one delicate finger shot out in a direction that should have been obvious.
most of the time i think i frustrate her because it should be all so suddenly obvious when it isn’t.
but now words and make believe. she’s into the fairy tale princesses now. i alternate being the Duke from Cinderella, the Huntsman from Snow White and, even Snow White herself. and she plays the witch, or the prince, or as expected Cinderella.
and lately, weddings. she’s married my wife at least seven times a day, and me another handful. she never officiates, but she’ll hold the rabbit figurine that acts as the priest. she likes setting up the stage and then watching, correcting us when we go wrong, but doesn’t mind if ad-lib the scene. as long as it works apparently.
so she’s either going to be a director of some sorts, or just one very bossy individual.
she says, “6 weeks 4 days…”
and i am ravaged, she clicks around the mouse, right there, toying with it, moving under the screen, along the sonogram’s image. she says it like she’s disappointed, fidgets with her glasses, like she expected more, like we were wasting her time.
“come back again 2 weeks from now…”, frowning, “you know, so we can track the development, before I send you for bloodwork.”
and then it all freezes, like some pause button’s been pressed and my wife sits there with a thin piece cheap of tissue covering her legs, looking at the doctor like she knows as well, how hopeless this all is.
then it starts up again, and the doctor presses another button, snaps off a tongue of a black and white image from the machine, turns to us, grins and sighs, “congratulations…”
and she says something about meeting her in her office after my wife gets dressed and I’m looking at the image of yet one more child that we are hoping for. I know I saw its heart beating this time. I know I saw it as I put my finger on where I believed it to be.
i seem to have written this
in order to forget it. but writing it brings it back. just the thought of it, here on the page, perhaps this too will not turn out well.
she’s reading books on pregnancy and only reads the appendices of failures, of statistical nightmares, the cold hard numbering of it all, cross referencing age with history with circumstance. she digs herself deeper.
our daughter knows nothing of this. she plays with dolls while we debate how informed should we really be.
i compare notes secretely, in the dead of night, i don’t want her to know, i don’t want to know-know (but i have to know, i have to be ready) and i pour over website over website. faqs, blogs, doctors, mid-wives, support groups. i’m getting sucked in: i’m asking her, everyday now, how are you feeling? any cramps? any bleeding? etc, etc.
but during the day i think nothing of it. i think nothing. i play legos with our daughter. we play out Cinderella and Snow White, exchanging roles, 2, 3 times a day. i tie her hair back as she eats, to keep it out of her food. we watch tv, we nap together. and in my dreams, with our little one on my chest, i find some rest, i find some hope, i dare to dream of another one, of some other one, maybe another one.
at least one more, please. at least one more.
a grand ole fear
Cannot sleep, afraid of it, afraid of being alone in the dark, of being alone infinitely, of this moment with nothing but your thoughts stretching forward like this, days into nights, night upon night, growing, everything you love dying around you, first your father, then your mother, then your wife, without her, child or children gone, night upon you every where, always hours before the dawn, locked in, time a snail’s pace, it was always this bad, even in albany, a child has changed nothing, losing a child has changed nothing.
she says, “really? For me it’s like, you thought you knew suffering before…”
I need to hear some sounds that recognize the pain in me
i cannot demarcate for you the line that i crossed. i cannot find it. i’ve looked and looked and i cannot tell you where i went over, when i lost myself completely, when i became hard and intolerable and impatient.
i cannot tell you when it happened, i cannot even tell what brief series of events eroded that last piece of me that i used to look on with such pride and remorse and longing.
i’d like to believe that it’s some sort of nostalgia, some sort of experiment in masochism that will eventually end and i could gather and analyze all the evidence and draw a conclusion and somehow be better off for it.
but i think, even then, i’d still feel swindled, that i was still missing something vital and pure and true.
i sometimes think i’m not even broken anymore. that this is what i am supposed to be when i’m all put back together. this is me, whole. this is me, cruel and unfeeling, sealed and complete.
this is me, nothing that i ever was.
lazy time in the fall
we’ve been redoing the kitchen. i’ve redone nothing. i’m good at tearing things down, breaking them, demolition. i’m good at giving it everything i got, going all out to take it apart.
i’m even good at cleaning it all up. the sweeping, the dust, the settling and sweeping up again. i’m good at making piles that seem insurmountable and steadily picking and shoveling the rubble until it is all bare. until there is nothing but the shell of whatever it once was. i’m good at stripping things away and making them disappear.
it’s never pretty but i’m good at it. i find it elegant, the void that it leaves.
i do not however have the patience to make anymore, to create to plan, to build. i never had the discipline for it, the forethought. i was never a chess player, more a checkers man. one, two maybe even three moves ahead and that’s more or less it, the end of it, endgame or game over.
so here i am in a perpetual stay of deconstruction/reconstruction, as much as i tear it down, i find others putting it all back together again, sometimes better, always different. different enough for me to keep it that way for awhile, to keep me distracted enough.
until i have to tear myself down all over again.
if you were to begin to write
if you were begin to write, what would you do? where would you begin? would you start with the years in albany, where you first felt the beginnings of your life realized? out there between graduate classes and talking long walks with her through the park?
or would you begin with him, with him and his hands on your mother, ripping the phone out of the wall? would you begin with that, with watching Columbo and confusing him with Beretta?
or would you begin with 9/11 that all but shut the door on making writing a life? would you begin with the end of that dream?
or would you begin with how losing one unborn child was not enough, that you’ve lost another? would you begin with how the pain still ebbs and flows and nothing quite feels like it and it persists like it will never go away?
or would you begin with the little one that runs throughout the house and says how big her house is, how this is her big house and when her mother can’t get the channels on the tv to work right, she picks up the phone and says, call daddy, my daddy can fix it