August, ending.

Maybe August is the time for endings. Some of the worst things in my life have happened in August. No, that’s untrue- they just feel like they happened in August.  Endings tend to have a similar quality:  a slowness that’s not the same as a bleak, cold, February. Then your blood seems like it will never be warm again, sluggish through your veins, now, it just feels like it’s gone underground. It’s not the lethargy of a hot, humid, summer, with the sun merciless on your face, turning your skin from brown to burnt, when you can’t make the effort to even reach out to that cool glass of lemonade that your Mom has placed on your table. No, this is the hushed, sticky quality of the air before the rain suddenly falls in a sheet, and you’re drenched head to toe; your umbrella dripping uselessly onto your shoes, as the “road” underneath turns to a muddy river in two minutes flat. What just happened, you ask, even as you sigh and think “August”.

Afterward, you try to pick it apart: loop the past on scratchy rewind, like those tapes you played over and over until they became skippy, static bursts between the snatches of familiar love song. Where is it, you think, that moment, the turning point when it all started coming undone. You’re looking for the sign, the dark cloud in the distance, the flash of lightning- but sometimes all you’re left with is the clear sky and the thickening air.

One morning I wake up to find a baby lizard has crawled into the folds of my fading blue bean bag plonked on the balcony. It had been unexpectedly cold the previous night and the little tyke had probably sought out the warmth of the faux blue leather. I flap my hands at the mottled dark green intruder: unsurprisingly, it moves not an inch. I’m giving you ten minutes while I brew the tea, I tell it solemnly: after that, you’re out.  When I step out again, my hands slowly warmed by my steaming mug of tea, it’s gone. I feel both smug and guilty; like I’ve won a battle and lost a more important war; like I’ve missed the forest for the trees, like I have once again, failed to read the signs.

How are you feeling, N asks me. “Okay”, I say - she accepts it for what it is: a barefaced lie. We are, neither of us, strangers to this; when all the stuff inside is so tangled that the only possible answer is- “Okay”. 

There’s a dissonance that leaves me tongue tied; the inexplicable chasm between what I know I should feel, and what I do feel; akin to letting yourself in with the key and finding yourself in a stranger’s house. This is familiar territory, I remind myself. You’ve been here before, you know how this goes. Endings are not an undiscovered land. And yet. I look up The 5 Steps again; try to see what I’ve missed. Everything, it looks like; no progression, no gradual climb down- I’m just here. But there must be, I think, increasingly desperate for something, anything that feels familiar.  But no, this is the funhouse mirror version of myself, everything in its place and just that bit distorted, rendered unrecognizable.

I imagine what a therapist would ask me: how are you sleeping, are you eating regularly, do you shower, do you make the bed, do you change your clothes, do you exercise? Answer: Well, yes, yes, yes, yes, no, but I never did, it’s not unusual.  I still hate work the usual amount, not more or less. You should date, D tells me, I’m not saying marriage, babe, just, dating. I tell her a long and involved story about how I have the cow next door to keep me company. This is not a euphemism: my neighbours keep a cow, a huge white-and-brown speckled beast. It moos at odd times and reminds me that life goes on; that August, in fact, can be great for some species: plentiful green grass, the air ripe with smells; pleasant, if slightly unpredictable weather, cool nights.

I lie in bed and listen to the night sounds- the creak of the fan, the occasional drunken song from two streets away, a faint honking from a truck, some kind of chirping insect. A moth wanders in, flirts with the dazzling white light and then wanders out. It’s not hard to fall asleep on these days, when my thoughts seem to have no particular direction. When I wake up, I don’t remember my dreams.

Fact: time moves forward.

Fact: August seems to last forever.

It’s sticky-cool, lumbering, everything muted, life travelling to you from a faraway planet, immediate but also a couple of million light years behind, already over before it even began.

How are you feeling, I used to ask, inside-inside; and now I ask myself- how are you feeling, inside-inside.

Like August, I answer, like an ending.   

The Restaurant Owner's Wife/ Part II

Part 1

It’s alright, she supposes. Not so different from the last, or the one before that.

All the ones before.

All cities look the same these days: glass, neon, brown air congealing, concealing.

She’d suggested moving further west, but he’d only laughed, and the next day, they’d been standing in front of the new place- the new new place. 

The tiles may have once been white, she imagines, as also the walls. She will not speculate about the narrow stairs. They don’t creak, which is probably the most positive sign about this whole enterprise. The single long window in the kitchen lets in the shuffling of feet and wheels from the narrow alley beneath, a child's wailing. 

It needs a little work, he says, running his finger along the wall.

He wipes it on his trousers, leaving a streak of black that she’ll have to figure out how to get rid of.

 “Méi huā”, he murmurs. “You will like it.”

She wrenches the shutter of the window so that it’s fully open, and a blast of cold air follows.

She breathes in deep: stale oil, cigarette smoke, damp, and somewhere beneath it, so far beneath, that only she can find it, because she knows where to look for it, the first thaw of spring.

“Yě xǔ”

Marginalia

Last evening, N gifted me a book.

It isn’t the one she wants to get me, but later she sits staring at the flyleaf for a long time because she feels the needs for words, and then finds she has none, at that moment.

I picked that book- Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing- because when I flipped it open to a random page, it was to find words jumping at me through fading yellow-green highlights.

That was the feeling I had all the time I was married; in the air, going down, waiting for the smash at the bottom.

told her about the baby;

pictures of it

                                                it doesn’t exist

                                    was taken away from me, exported, deported.

                                                                                    Lapse, relapse, I have to forget.

I flip to another page.

                                                                        Her artificial face is her natural one.

And facing that

                       

            Dead people’s clothes should be buried with them.

“I’m trying to find a pattern” I say aloud. Although the truth is, I’ve already jumped to conclusions, there’s already a story, and I can see her wrist, slashing through these words.

“Sometimes it’s difficult to tell” says N, and she probably means- not everything is a story. But she’s the one who said last week, every gesture has meaning.

A hand moves across a page leaving trails of ink.

This is not fiction.

Message in a bottle.

SOS in fluorescent yellow instead of Morse.

I want this book.

Later, in the sanctuary of my home, I open it again, this time starting from the beginning. She -I see her wrist, the shell of her ear, the tilt of her foot as she sits with her leg on a windowsill while snow falls softly outside, covering everything over, covering everything up- she’s marked random phrases, sometimes just page numbers, sometimes both the words and the page numbers. I wonder why the page numbers. Did she come back to them? Did she recite the numbers to herself when picking up the paper towels in the supermarket?

50, she says to herself, and that can allow her to make it to the checkout counter.

81, she whispers and she can sign her name on the credit card receipt.

125, and the laundry is neatly folded piles of his and hers.

Everything doesn’t have meaning, everything doesn’t need meaning.

Why do I suspect that if you cut me I’ll bleed blood and alphabets?

I think we’re all just stories we tell ourselves.

Stories that begin with I.

Stories that involve you, we, they, us.

Sometimes we let other people tell those stories for us, because we don’t have the vocabulary.

Maybe that’s what she was doing, watching the bare branches dripping, twisted, as quiet, quiet, winter melts around her into the noise of spring.

 Margaret, be my voice,

sister ,mother, friend, ally ,lover.

This is what Margaret says to her, for her.

Do you have a twin?

                                               

                                                Now we are on my home ground, foreign territory. My throat constricts, as it learned to do when I discovered people could say words that would go into my ears meaning nothing,

Anesthesia; that’s one technique: if it hurts, invent a new pain. I’m all right.

That won’t work, I can’t call them “they” as if they were someone else’s family:

                                    But they’ve cheated, we’re here too soon and I feel deprived of something, as though I can’t really get here unless I’ve suffered; as though the first view of the lake, which we can see now, blue and cool as redemption, should be through tears and a haze of vomit.

Has he come back yet?

I thought there might be something about me

But this isn’t where I live.

  What impressed him at that time, he even mentioned it later, cool he called it, was the way I took off my clothes and put them on again later very smoothly as if I was feeling no emotion. But I really wasn’t.

                                                            If he’s safe I don’t want to see him. There’s no point, they never forgave me, they didn’t understand the divorce

                                               

                                                which wasn’t surprising, since I didn’t understand it myself.

                                                my attractive full-colour magazine illustrations, suitable for framing.

why it wasn’t really mine.

My friends’ pasts are vague to me and to each other also, any one of us could have amnesia for year and the others wouldn’t notice.

                                    The feeling I expected before but failed to have comes now, homesickness, for a place where I never lived, I’m far enough away;

The fence is a reproach, it points to my failure.

                                    I never identified it as mine;

It was my husband’s, he imposed it on me, all the time it was growing in me I felt like an incubator.

                        I couldn’t prove it though; he was clever: he kept saying he loved me.

            It’s turned grayer in nine years too, like hair.

                                    When she died, I was disappointed in her.

                                    It’s unusual for him to ask me anything about myself:

I’d turn into a part of a couple, two people linked together and balancing each other, like the wooden man and woman in the barometer house at Paul’s.

                                                                                                here everything echoes.

I’m trying to decide whether or not I love him.

                                    It wasn’t even a real decision, it was more like buying a goldfish or a potted cactus plant, not because you want one in advance but because you happen to be in the store and you’ve seen them lined up on the counter.

                                                nice if he meant something more to me.

                                               

                                                Impossible to be like my mother.

I can imitate anything.

Everything I value about him seems to be physical: the rest is either unknown, disagreeable, or ridiculous.

“Did you believe that stuff when you were little?” she says. “I did, I thought I was really a princess and I’d end up living in a castle. They shouldn’t let kids have stuff like that.”

                                                            later I became an escape artist of sorts, expert at undoing knots.

Perhaps I’m growing old at last, can that be possible?

I stand there shivering

                                                                        push myself reluctantly into the lake.

I needed

 a different version.

The Gift

They both clung to him, dangling off a cliff, their faces upturned.
He felt the muscles in his hands stretch.
He could save only one.
The blood pounding in his ears, his breath ragged.
Their hands slipping.
He could save only one.
Time slowed down.

She smiled at him.
And let go.

The Restaurant Owner's Wife

It's easy to imagine:
That straight back, on a horse,the shoulders tense,her sword held aloft, gleaming silver in a winter sun.
The world is a carpet of snow.
The jet black hair lifts slightly in the wind, softening the implacable line of her jaw.
One cannot imagine those marble lips smiling.
The horse stamps impatiently. The black eyes glitter.
Men have laid kingdoms waste for the ruinous beauty of her face.

I wonder if he knows this, the jolly little man who offers us free cigarettes, and occasionally, free food- a bad idea, maybe, since this is his livelihood.
She places a bowl of steaming noodle soup on the dirty plastic cover; her fingers long and delicate, the tips slightly calloused.
The cutlery is cheap, the food is delicious. A minion is shirking, and she snaps.
Her voice is the winter wind, and her eyes the bottomless depth of a well.
I wonder if he knows.