tothesound

No one is good the way I am good. 

My bones are good. They’re long. The one in my nose is not straight because I broke it with another bone, a knee bone. This is how they prove they are both weak and strong, though, and I do not consider it a betrayal. My bones have not betrayed anyone.  

I imagine how for other people they could be vessels that hold a lot of things– I think my grandmother kept a lot of fear in her bones. When I would go help at the Center it was always so much work to make sure the faucets would not keep running, because they didn’t have strength enough to turn the handles. I would think, what are you keeping in there? What have you made of your bones?

Paul and I walked through the city yesterday where a man stood still with a can at his feet. I said you have to have good bones for that– for standing that still– but Paul kept going, saying that this whole city has good bones and that we are all made of hard parts and soft parts. 

But there are parts that can boil, and run through your fingers, I think. What about those parts. 

I had to stop using water for things like bathing, or coffee, because this weird city made him worry about water and where it’d been and what it’d done. We washed in milk. 

The apartment we lived in had huge doors, beautiful and important like signs of another city. We stepped outside them once and a child had been shot, a tiny body outside our beautiful doors. The blood ran for what seemed like miles, though eventually it all washed away, and he would say things to me about how unnecessary it all was and complain about the smoke from the fires, and then we’d bathe extra often. 

The most beautiful thing is his hair now, numinous, from the milk. Not once did he ever think about the cows while he ran the milky sponge around my knees. What kind of ritual is this, I’d think. What are we doing.

The quickest way to learn the words for things is to not want them.

Over breakfast we’d run our tongues across our teeth after a night spent breathing in ash and the dryness of each other. I had unrecognizable hands, the hands of someone old. He warmed the cups of milk over the stove and I’d hold them in my hands and lean against the wall, watching him blink slowly. Mornings were quiet. To feel violently about your own body, and the body of another, and to be accustomed to it.

Eventually we began to thirst for other things: salt, and oil, and no longer for each other. On Saturday I went down to the ocean to wait.

The stairway is metal and it isn’t safe. The way it is rusted and spiral it isn’t safe. Make it for real. Make what you said real. 

On Tuesday nights they go to this meeting. Every other Tuesday. There’s this girl there, and she looks at him, and she doesn’t brush her hair. She looks at him like an anointing even though he’s not there alone, and the one he’s with, she and him: they’re going to be better. She brushes her hair, and she looks at him everyday. He’s ancient to her.

The meetings are made up of memories, and there are so many memories there she thinks to sometimes bring joss paper to burn. They’re all ancestors of themselves, worshiping.

Being small enough to play under the table. Being small enough to fit under the table and seeing a gun strapped there. Being small enough to play under the stairway. Playing make-believe. One, two: like that. Make, believe. 

The freezer outside, under the stairway: it isn’t safe. If they play hide-and-seek and they hide in the freezer they can’t get out. They’ll suffocate, and freeze. Lock it and remind them to stay away. Tell them to play in the trees, where the air is. 

And Moses said to the people, “Do not be afraid; for God has come in order to test you, and in order that the fear of Him may remain with you, so that you may not sin.” So that you may not chata’: the Hebrew word used here for sin, the Hebrew word for to lose oneself, to miss oneself. They use their sins to remember. One, two, three: like that. Make, believe, never let go of. Stay inside of. Where it isn’t safe.