You were writing to a loved one— or— maybe yourself,,,,,,
I have no feel for deep-end diving: every swim is a flounder and I never touch the bottom. I have it in me
that abstract expressionism undoes fabrics already fraying— an acceleration forward toward
free-fall speeds, but the morning fog hasn’t cleared, and we can’t see the oncoming headlights. All of my socks
have holes in the ankles, in thinning I am surprised at my own skin feeling hardwood first. Hunched at the desk,
I find the new mole on my thigh. Minutia of altercations, the deterioration of body over time, and my eighty-first birthday
cascade across a cinema screen. I am twelve years old at the theater with friends (?) and a stomach ache. I never get the popcorn
even though I want it. Later I will realize it was nervousness,
that stomach-churner. Freaky
punctuation bothers me unless I am the writer of it then it seems right. It’s like a great joke how I speak of things, largely, as if I am the choreographer or the clockmaker. I spent all afternoon chatting about time passing as if I knew how to feel seconds intentionally. At a point, all of the past sits the same distance away. It happens around the four year mark, the memory lives at arms length, with seven, eight, and fourteen years too. I never understood not asking for help in school but that has changed. “I hate decisions that do not have a right answer to figure out, that are mostly bad both ways. And I just feel like life has been giving us so many of these recently...” my mother told me. She also said, “I suddenly know four women with cancer.” Give me rolling paper, I’ve got no clue what to do with it. Walks where we point at houses and talk— siding and paint color, fire escape placement, the symmetry of it all— those days have weight; I watched my parents do this growing up, it is ritual really. “Home-building is a three legged stool,” my father told me, “but you only ever get two. Legs I mean. It’s cost, character, or square footage.” He also said, “Everybody wants the big house now. It’s all cookie-cutter cubes with the same blueprint.”
By Hailey Carter.
