Tessellate

I was balancing on the tipping point of having too much to drink (shamefully remembering the message that Angela had scrawled on her apartment wall all those years ago and how we'd laughed about it then) and sat alone, bass tones of the haunting waltz I was listening to reverberating into the dark of the living room. The song always makes me think of him in this sad what-more-could-I-have-done way, as though the book has ended, as though any action I take would change anything anyhow. We are increasingly becoming islands, the distance too much for anything more than the occasional stop-over and the unfamiliar air that entails. “I wish things could be different,” I would say, and he would nod, and we would both look at our feet and shift in our chairs and sip from our cups and that would be the end of the conversation. 

Distill this situation down into the pieces that you have control over, and the pieces that are totally out of your control. The only thing you can do with the latter is let it go or let it make you crazy. Focus your efforts on what you can control, and work to change those pieces into something that you can be OK with.

That’s what I would say to any of my students. It’s good advice. The difficulty is in the doing.

[The dark of the living room
a familiar voice, invited by the drink and the solitude
One of them will bury two
and one of them will bury none.
Howl your melancholy question
And tell me
which you dread more
the echo
or the answer]

I have to find a balance, there is too much rage involved, a blinding effulgence that is too unpredictable in its timing. When you’re an adult, you’re supposed to be responsible. You’re supposed to understand that all of your choices have consequences, and you’re supposed to be beholden to that. Everything is upside down and nothing makes sense and there’s just nothing to do about it. The supposed to is too great a weight to bear and has been removed and in its place, a prevailing narrative of madness. Control and its opposite. I hear him take a breath in and the sound of horsehair over steel snaps me back to the present moment and my face is wet. There are these small moments encased in amber that I carry with me -- a perfect November Day, his awe at the old Cleveland Trust and how it was the first trip there in its new iteration. I have amber enough for a thousand days and maybe this is the way that I make things different, part the seas between islands long enough to remember a time that wasn't dictated by the death of all those supposed tos. There is no vengeance for that death. And that is the part that you either cast off or let it tear you asunder.