Barretta

It’s the good ones who always get you in the end, a friend said to me the other day, laughing, as we finished our beers and threw a few dollars’ tip on the patio table and left. I smiled, nodded, laughed, saluted my goodbye as I picked my way through the lot to my car, but I didn’t really know what he meant to say.

Were you one of the good ones? I think I remember, in passing, your voice— you had an awkward way with words, a way of stopping and restarting your thoughts midstream as if each statement had to encapsulate, whole, a profound depth of feeling that was suppressed, boiling, seething under the surface of Hello. and Goodbye. and Are you well?

It is years later and you are lost beyond all reckoning to me. I have heard, distantly, that you are now engaged to a man I have never met.

The first time you met me for drinks you kissed me three times. First on the cheek, during a picture, to make it cute, I suppose, and I said nothing. Later I wanted to see your driver’s license— the reason now I can’t recall— and you said you hated the picture, it was awful, there was no way you would let me see it. I said you’d have to stop me and we wrestled for your floral-patterned pocketbook, giggling, while the bartender watched us disdainfully. You offered to kiss me if I stopped. There was a pause and then I carefully let go of your hands and put my hands in my pockets and I said: Fine. Then you began to laugh, a little hysterically, and kissed me again on the cheek, briefly. I said it wasn’t enough, that you had already kissed me on the cheek during the picture: we were smiling at each other intently.

Your eyes were too blue and I knew then that by the end of the night I would know about your tongue and your lips. I was right. It was inevitable.

If the truth is told when I held you later, by your car, your keys in one hand, forgotten, your other hand tangled in my hair fiercely and your mouth on mine, seeking inwards and through, there was nowhere else for me. It’s a hard fact because I am supposed to be a hard man, or that’s what they tell me: a little cold, a little abrupt, the cynical and unengaged kind— but I was not, not with you— I was with you entirely. My passion for you unmixed with regret or happenstance, unadulterated by doubt or question.

Time and distance from you are all the sweeter then, now that you got someone in the end. Only I can’t tell if you’re one of the good ones, because it wasn’t me you got.

He watched her go by that day for the first time in years. She seemed smaller somehow than she was in his memories, but in his memories she was a body, singular unto herself: a simultaneous series of impressions superimposed upon one another. She sips coffee in a sundress, squinting against the bright fall afternoon; she plays Monopoly with him and his nephew and tries to sneak crisp $500 bills into the eight-year-old’s hands; she bites her lips and shudders quietly beneath him in his jersey sheets; she rolls her eyes and smiles sardonically at the blockbuster they paid ten each to see; she is wrapped in a white hotel towel, shaving her long pale leg stretched across the lip of the tub and swearing when she nicks her knee.

Through the shop window, he watched her linger on the corner, waiting for the crosswalk light. Her hair was longer, pulled to the side in an undisciplined ponytail, and her lips were pursed with concentration as she examined the screen of her cell phone. He was surprised by how anonymous she was; if he hadn’t seen her face, the subtle curve of her jaw, the aquiline nose, he would have looked right past her. The dress is new, something blue and diaphanous, unlike her. But what is like her? It’s been too long to say.

He asked himself, later, if it was the same woman he saw or another. And if she was the same, why didn’t he call out? But now they are no one to each other. So he says to himself: to me she is the shell. The wandering reminder of a shared time that exists now only in the ideal. A living mnemonic that summons knowledge now more useless to him than the college trigonometry they studied together in the irrelevant past.

He watched her go by, and didn’t step into the street. Later that night he couldn’t sleep, and as the hours stalked ahead to dawn he couldn’t convince himself that he missed her and their time together with such fervor. Then he looked in the mirror, and saw himself, and realized of course he could not miss her: he had changed too much.

But he could miss the man he was when he was with her, and he knew that was his grief: that all that was important then— her eyes, her hands, her heart that he longed then with all his being to possess— was nothing to him now. He is a different person now, and he misses himself, the one person he can never again say hello to in the street, for he and his youth never again will meet.

Never let anyone take your memory from you. If you were friends once, you are friends for all time; if you were lovers once, you are lovers for all time. When they say no, it was not so, I never loved you— trust your memory. Never let anyone take your memory from you.

We are surrounded by too many ghosts.

In the fields the ghosts of flowers drying and dead. Grasses withered and trampled underfoot. In the forests, the specters of aged oaks, beeches and elms converge and whisper with one another. The rutted paths they pace, freed in the afterlife to roam hill and dale alike. They speak to their seedlings. They tell them softly of the winters to come and the hoarfrost that will turn sap to crystal and brown their resplendent leaves. They carry stories, each to each.

They step through one another with ephemeral chill. There is no space for the living among the dead, for the ages of the earth have yielded a fruitful crop of decedents beyond all count and reckoning. A vine laps its cousin; the grasses layer, one atop another, their blurred outline like a mat of infinite density. They could stray to less crowded places, places where no living thing grew, the high desert plain like a lonesome fugue where the burning afterimages of deceased cacti wander and sorrow their outcast state, but they prefer the places they nestled and grew and died.

We know them. We saw them planted when they were young. These are the ghosts of mountain and forest, snarled amongst each other and atop each other like the canny twists of rusted barb wire, hopelessly melded into one. Some of us worship them, the ancestral spirits of the world that was young. But most of us don’t see them at all.

They are the sentinels of the world’s becoming, all the living things that we forget have lived and died, and there are too many. But the world is not full as the sea is not full, and we cannot forget them. They grew in the ways that we walk. The avenues of arching branches. The coves and hollows. After our souls depart this shelter for the outer darkness the ghosts of all that has grown will dwell yet in the secret places, in the ever-beating heart of the world.

One thing I will never do is ask you to recommend me, because if you didn’t think to do it yourself, what good is it?

I feel I have to say this, but in so saying, I have suggested the idea of recommending me, which defeats the purpose of saying it.

This is why I am posting it late at night: so while I have said it, hopefully no one at all will read it.

Writing is a craft. Not a gift. There is no magic. There are only words in an order chosen, at first hurried, then inspired, then finally necessary. Did you think it was different?

In the world entire there are a countless number of things you could write, could you only stoop to paper and pen, to inkribbon, to keys and screen. In the writing you will lose what you thought to record and if you work you will find it again. A map delineated and drawn through the dying memory of the territory that you first experienced and then remembered and then created.

It is all work. It is all study. There is no magic.

I knew a writer once. She wrote one thing. A sentence. She has never written again with such clarity and power that it threw a dazzling image before my eyes and dissolved again to bare ash. You write to capture that and you can. She did it once and never again because she thought it would be given to her, another sentence, just like that, a gift from the kingdom of heaven. It won’t be. The sentence was the summation, the ultima thule of the twenty years of her life to that point and it came from the work she put into her life and no more.

The genius if there is any is in the hours and days. The labor. Your back will ache and your eyes strain. You will pace back and forth in your rooms and you will not know the time. You will archive words and formulations, the cases and identifiers in a thesaurus, a dictionary, a trove you will carry ever after, between the raw and bleeding memories that you regurgitate to the page. You will record with those eyes you were given what you see. You will store what you hear with the ears you were given. The scent, the action, the denouement, the factors, the fear, the hope, the redemption, the failure, the grossness, the aberration, the triumph, and all that comes with it all, and it will not be easy. It will not come naturally.

When a woman gives birth there is pain. You intend to give birth to a world itself, to make it real from nothing at all. How can there not be pain? Anyone can do it. But there’s a trial— you are on trial now. The verdict will be delivered and there will be no mercy in it for you if you believe you and the select few were born to do it: the land of writing is for those who begin with nothing.

It is not magic, no, it is not a gift. It cannot be treated like one. Because all things must be earned. To every savant his idiocy. To every craftsman his apprenticeship. If you want to write you have to work. If you work you give yourself the gift. You give yourself the ability to write. Let’s go.

The next person I see quote Nicholas fucking Sparks in order to express their romantic feelings— that person I will kill.

I’m all for romance novels. Just go read a real one. A Farewell to Arms, anybody? Love in the Time of Cholera? Get an education, for Chrissake.

Is this adulthood? 

Her body is lithe, yielding, soft in the right places, firm in the right places. You can pick her up with one arm and you did. You could trace figure eights, or the symbol for infinity, on her bare breast— and you did.

Her flesh is still young and her mind is wanton, in the best way that you know. Her hair swirls around her head heedlessly. Her sighs are quiet. Your fingers knew their places and sought them out. Bodies have their furies and they know their ends, though mind and will may not.

The facts are these: you slept with her and then you drove her home.

But why do you feel so far away? This night the stars pinwheel through the sky above like a brocade glittering on the loom. Her mouth is sweet and fine as velvet. But why when she leaves and you lay down alone can you not sleep?

Desire is commonplace and so is its satisfaction. Is there anything more to it?

Last cigarettes burn to ashes as the dawn comes, afire, decked with banners of light as an army. But tomorrow, soon, it will be night again.

In celebration of hitting 101 followers today, I’ll lay down a favorite quote from high school:

If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good, and the very gentle, and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too, but there will be no special hurry.

Thanks for reading.