This time last ____

These empty rooms. Their echoing smells, the half-light, and the sleep. It's as if they've forgotten us already, and maybe they have, but we are still there-- the fullness, the nervousness, the meals we cooked but never ate. They linger in our minds, haunting our exhales.

For days we awoke to soft-lidded dawns, telling time by the sunlight on the trees outside. The cold had put all the butterflies to sleep, the tea calmed the ones in my stomach. Repleta. Fingertips stroking arms in conversation, smoothing them over.

The clock stopped soon after, and the phones went, too-- wrapped in a world of blankets, we crossed into waking reveries, the softness of lips, sleeping in knots on trains. But this universe is not our own. Though we created it, we cannot stay here. The clouds and sky grow heavy with the oncoming storm, the weight of all our possible lives collapsing upon us, filling the air with the humid electricity of tears, and the inability to breathe after a night of hollowed-out restless dreams.

Next time, I kept telling you.

Your whispers were always inhales.

déjà vu / jamais plus /

Cicada crescendo

August always blurs.  And I feel my mind betraying me, spilling out around the edges and into the ground.  The weather has changed, and revolving around in this chair, spinning in circles outside the sun, I sleep.  At last, things are what I'd almost liked them to be, and all the wasted time vanishes with the summer.  

Who will water the plants while I'm away?  This garden might never dry up, much as I want it to, because I never leave.  How many faces will float before me as I sit here, as if I'd already been to every country, restless in dreams and lethargic in life?

So why search for stale words to describe the lingering light, the way the shadows are getting longer? They're right here in front of us.  Sidewalks splinter in the fading heat, and there's not much left to say, anyway.

Except that the way time has slowed reminds us of when we were children, our apprehension gathering with the leaves beneath the trees.  But that was when each day was separate. Now we attach so much to passing time, which has become so heavy that it barely moves at all.  Rather, drifting soundlessly through houses, it floats in between the shifting particles of dust in the sunlight.

And the air inside has become stifling, the creaking beams of this house exude months of stored-up heat.  Outside, the sun vanishes earlier than usual, sweeping back curtains of clouds to reveal a slow-motion encore: two full moons in the month of August.

Goodbye, Gram.

Just before we sent you back into the world, there was a lot of standing around.  Broken conversatins re-strung themselves around me, and I didn't bother to introduce myself.  Instead I watched.

Your family portrait reminded me of my own, and I said so, but only to the children.  They told me, I bet your father is here walking right next to you.  I swept my arm through the air.

Sensing the strangeness, the tension like some high-pitched cello string, the children splintered off into another world; perhaps this is where you would have wanted to be.  I followed them, for you or with you, to be your eyes, or my father's, or my own.  

Finally, the moment arrived, though it had already been broken open somewhere by the swingset.

We watched you drift away, only it wasn't you.

This leftover dust lingered, as you both had, not clinging but rather fading; thickening and then dissipating like a breath of steam on a cold morning.

We left that world behind, a few tears dropped into the creek, and in some other atemporal realm we shared a meal, with strangers who were somehow family, in a restaurant you went to (the only one you ever went to) when you were younger, and before I was even a thought.  

I saw why you fled that universe, the stale nature of its wide highways and flat sky.  And I wondered if you were happy to be brought back there, in the end, if only to vanish.

That's that

Days into August

After Sunset Park