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February, 2007
Warm.
I stand in the sunshine.
I remember some of the times that I have stood in the sunshine, light everywhere, throwing the growing shadows against the ground, and the wind blowing them around as if it could pick them up and carry them away.
I touch the cold brick with my bare palm. A surface so rough it threatens to cut my hand if I don’t hold absolutely still.
Delicate touch.
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She walks down the median of an empty street, a ghost in a ghost town. No one left to listen to her footsteps tapping at the asphalt, but me. The buildings, when empty, grow features and faces. They hold still. Don’t move. But they watch as she passes.
They see her. She sees them.
She begins to dance.
Her hips sway.
They are bony hips. Her elbows float up, dragging her hands behind them. The heat of the pavement rises up from beneath her, gently lifting her foot off the ground. A pulse of steam up her thigh, lifting her hip, tilting her pelvis, curving her back, dropping her shoulder, pulling at the arm. Steam rises through her ribcage, spilling around her collarbone and escaping into the air in front of her face.
Like tissue paper, delicate.
Dancing.
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Look out the window into the snowstorm in time to see two kids running as fast as they can, trying to escape being buried by the snow or carried off by the wind, but eventually succumbing to both. The wind is sandpaper against your cheeks, abrading away cognizant thought. Your eyes are fixed straight ahead, though they’re practically shut tight against the blowing snow.
We only know forward.
The snow swallows us up.
Peace. Drowned in ice.
The world is small. The soft touch of warm snow on all sides. The crush of feathers piled above. Close your eyes at last. Breathe in the powdered ice. Snow-filled lungs. Snow-filled blood vessels. Snow-filled bones. Every cell, one by one, replaced by snow. Two children disappeared in the snow. When it all melted away, they melted with it, turned into a puddle that rolled down the street and into the gutter.
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Nothing left of Winter.
I feel her little hips rock. Torn jeans. Threadbare sweatshirt. Rags of cloth, bleached by the sun of unbreakable, youthfully invincible summers.
The curve of skin bridging belly button to thigh.
A small skeleton.
Little hips.
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The hot summer sun.
The sunset sun.
Burning through shut eyelids, moving in past the eyes, filling the skull with warm red light. Breath on my face, short and shallow. Shade falls across my eyelids, slides along my face, colder than it should be, sliding past my cheek, sliding away. Gone before you know it.
A shadow of a woman melting into the wall.
An emaciated silhouette of a girl, slowly engulfed by backlight.
Young flesh turning back into the dust that drifts through the living room. She was visible for a passing second, hanging in the cube of light delicately placed by a west-facing window. Gone.
The room is empty.
The silence tears.
This is the road
traveled by the snow,
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seeping down through the dirt, past the artifices of the city’s lower layer, into the gentle abandon of the aquifer. Thick colorless water, listening intently to the rhythm of the earth, pulsing,
pushing,
from deep down below.
The good things in life.
Chocolate dessert and hand-tied white tea. A skirt and a skateboard. The burn behind my eyeballs from buildings lit too strongly by the sun. Mama Lucy’s cooking for four ninety-five, including the jasmine flower. Measuring the length of your shadow – six paces long. Fishnet stockings on greedy teenage thighs. Sneaking into a carnival yard after closing. Standing in the plaza with the cherry blossoms swirling around like in a dream, lifting up into the air above, hovering for an instant before being sucked down the alleyways into the city. Knowing that Summer is the youth that cannot last.
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Dear Jesse,
I remembered you today.
Your thin fingers collapsing into the shape of an imaginary glass of water.
Blinking.
I remember you dancing
in a circle with your hand upturned on your hip, moving with a brittle grace.
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I remember you walking
down the isle, arm in arm with father time, lead away,
a memory,
to have and to hold,
as long as we both shall live.
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