The Spill

I’m not telling anyone I said. He nodded. Some things should be kept between two people he said.

And for a time, that’s just what I did. I kept it all in a tiny box.

Then it changed. Let me explain.

What happened is not dead. It’s a crisp twenty dollar bill burning a hole in my pocket.

This secret has its own biography. You can barely see it here. But come a time, I don’t know when, where it will get spilled, making the sound of a bottle of whiskey held upside down and poured down the drain. The flood of it will soak this entire page.

From the archives:
Pegboard
The long fade

Rations

Pegboard

First comes the intention.

The place on the wall that will eat up two junk drawers and a broken toolbox. The stuff squirreled away in closets that we keep forgetting we have. The desire to make our home neater, lovelier better. To make ourselves all of these things, too. 

The measuring tape binds us to what can and can never be. We have this much wall space and no more. A hardware store smelling of wood grain and eggshell paint. A slab of hope and ambition in the form of plywood with almost infinite numbers of  tiny holes. A choice not to paint our cut-to-order purchase. A pegboard allowed to be itself.

A level. A drill dusted off and loudly employed. Hardware in five different sizes lined up and waiting. Minimalism will soon become a jumble of sizes, colors, patinas, new, and well-used. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

One by one, we examine what used to live in the dark. Most things go up easily. Like with like, clustered together in more or less sensical fashion. 

One item remains. It won’t hang from a neat loop, it won’t balance between two hooks. It’s too big, unweildly, irregular. It’s not useful. It doesn’t match the array on the pegboard, nor does it belong with anything else. We’d throw it away, but neither one of us can bring ourselves to do it. The reasons are too numerous and complicated to go into now.

Alone on a shelf, unhoused, singleton.
Trash or jewel, not everything fits. 

From the archives:
Five Minutes
Picture Edit
The very second you lost me

Be exacting. Measure. Make that second nature.

Ride the subway from Upper Manhattan to Brooklyn in the morning, then over to Queens in the afternoon. Rush to class on the Upper West Side. Head on home. Board the Metro North to Westchester the next day, ride share to my destination, then reverse the whole thing come evening. Cut quite a figure across the tri-state area for the rest of the week.

Assume that my feet take the brunt of it, but it’s not just them doing the heavy lifting. The bus doesn’t pay any mind to one more. Keep getting on. 

Have shaky standards. Visit with this one and that, combine folks randomly. Never ask who pleases or fills my cup. Wear myself out with volumes of everybody and in-person, no less. 

Seal myself off. Listen to science. Embellish it.

Adapt seamlessly. Surprise myself. Don’t burden the doctors and nurses. Do these things for a long time.

Watch as helpers come with provisions that will one day, at a time and place of my choosing, be my slow ticket out of here. 

Let almost everybody else go first. No destination is benign. 

Make it simple. Say yes to yes places. Maybe means no. 

Never forget what happened while locked up. Eyes that crinkled around the edges, perfectly matching the smile inside the rectangle. Those who asked for help. Those who made old timey phone calls or wrote generous, multisyllabic words in sentences with punctuation. Those who came to find me. Those who left me where I was.

Let the world work harder before getting up from the ground to meet it halfway. Plant the seedlings but when something is dead on the vine, go ahead and compost it. Better yet, put in in the landfill. There’s a time for haste. 

When leaves dazzle in twelve gradients of green. When the answer is either gunshots or fireworks. Garbage strewn about, flies and dank. Fine fresh air with a hint of lilac. A perfectly calibrated air conditioner. 

Have one rule for people. Make ambivalence I can taste and smell a hard no. 

Peripheral vision is a privilege. Use it. Listen to the shift in color. Hope made it all a mystery before. It never was. People tell me what I need to know. 

Whatever it is. Whoever. Allow it to speak. Then rise up and make it mutual. 

From the archives:
Before, now, then wide open
Rending
The sun it did rise again

Zinger

This conversation has taken a turn.
Because you’re working my last nerve, I look at the time.
I say something.
It isn’t diplomatic. True, though.
It lands with a satisfying thud. 
I get up and put some money on the table. 
In one swift move, both literal and symbolic.
I’m leaving you alone with it.

From the archives:

Accelerant 

Five Minutes 

Careful Words

Before, now, then wide open

These are my relics: wallet, backpack, sneakers, backpack, sunscreen. Squeezing into a party, my shoes left at the door, my back pressed up against a wall close to the air conditioner, talking closely, very closely. Rush hour that seemed to last all day, letting one, two subway trains go by, but being packed in anyway. The long Starbucks line where a man my age stares at me and I remember that while I am not everyone’s type some find my arrangement of features and my countenance much to their liking. A well attended memorial service.

You already know what happens next. The hand sanitizer, the homemade bleach solution. We’re all in this together, until we look more closely and realize, no we are not and never were. The science is there but it keeps revealing more and more. There are no good assumptions anymore. The only way to stay ahead of it is to stay inside.

I’m nothing special to this virus. It doesn’t care that I’ve already had unbearable loss. It doesn’t care that I love my husband and children. It is like I can see it. I’m not even stir crazy.

I clap and cheer and then I stop. My mother did me a great service by instituting rules around thank you notes. This got internalized rather than rejected. But even she would not ask you to send the same thank you note again and again.

People outside of my apartment are bored. I don’t understand.

Everything hands can touch is spic and span. I imagine the fragile lipid layer of the virus dissolving as I clean. I take stock at what foods have come into my home, much of it substitutions, whatever was available, or a surprise. Every morsel of it is precious.

I hold and console. I make space for the others to do their work. I ask for protection to do mine and it is granted.

There is one day that I realize that the only person I am not mad at is Andrew Cuomo. I get more sleep and better sleep and that resets me.

Ambulance sounds remind me that I’m lucky.

When other people are assholes I look for the helpers. When I am the asshole, several people decide that it’s better to be kind than to be right.

I had already engaged in a reinvention and now I’m called upon to reinvent the reinvention. I’m going to have to ask perfect to be quiet for a while.

People say, back to normal or new normal. Neither of these things are reasonable. There are times in life where there is an actual dividing line. This is one of them.

Vacations, trips out of town, restaurants, and plans of any kind are for other people. There is a magical space inside their heads that doesn’t need to know where the nearest hospital is. The sense that things are clearing up, getting better, or that the virus is going away is like believing in unicorns. Rainbows happen sometimes but not because we will them to.

I say goodbye to how things used to be. I don’t even know what will be useful or useless after this. When I think of what it could look like for me at some yet to be determined time it looks like a white canvas. A clean, large, brand new blank slate. Like the first day of school, only better.

From the archives:
The Book

Hydration
The High Cost Of Being Me

The Book

Somebody wrote something no one else did. It wasn’t easy to find.

Looking as hard as I did made me question the idea that there is a book for everything.  But I didn’t want to have an orphan for a problem. I didn’t want to think that no one wanted to write about this.

Then it arrives, not just being itself but the newest, latest, updated version of itself. This book makes me a student again.

All of the notetaking skills I perfected in 10th grade come back.

One day I ask myself, what is my truth? My answer is sure and clear. He wrote the book, but the book is nothing without a reader.

I get out my composition book. The first pages are neat, then things go to chicken scrawl. My writing edges out of the margins crawling along them.

If I want to know my truth I look at my notes.



From the archives:
Hard Fall
Careful Words
Hospital Corridor