Healing a wound

The external symptoms pointed to collapse, although the collapse directed itself inward, and thankfully space and time allowed for the containment of the festering. For it did fester, indeed, for some time, who could expect otherwise? The surprise came not from the pain, welling up repeatedly and in the most inconvenient circumstances, but rather from the moment of relief, the day when, peering into the crux of the matter, they found forgiveness.

Because of some video I watched last night

His dilemma presented itself as follows: to trust in his own soul, accepting his own power -- or to spend the time fretting and sweating over the nothingness that he felt certain was creeping along behind him, threatening to overtake him with its breathless murmurings. At these moments, it seemed to him that the universe would collapse on itself, its vastness contained on the head of a pin, the instant of intersection between his own fate and the infinite now of creation held for a stifling moment, after which one of two things inevitably happened: the he who was he before he was born would break through to the other side, run like hell for the border, and make something kick-ass out of the agony of the preceding hours (usually followed by a shot of whiskey); or he would succumb to the pounding rhythm of mortality and the imagined limits of our meager lives, and lose the rest of the day to a haze of doubt and confusion (usually followed by a shot of whiskey).

Motherhood

It's not uncommon to think of death and taxes at these moments, when they present their certitudes to solicit my surrender, or my enlistment. Don't tell me that an good idea cannot be lost -- a thousand brilliant drops of insight and beauty disappear each day with the bang of a screen door.

And do I love them any less because the darkness feels dark? Because I feel a separate pull to know them, to know myself, and to struggle like a warrior who, at the pivotal moment of battle yields to the pull of the Valkyries, knows the righteousness of his sacrifice, and yet weeps at his own death.

Perfect

After so many years, he finally stopped her one morning as she rearranged the dishes he had loaded into the dishwasher the night before. When will you cease this habit of creating your own prisons? he wanted to know. Perfection is a concept who's usefulness is limited to mathematicians and bees.

I walked away

I walked away. Yes. For you, for your false attachments, for your dreams of going deeper into the dream, for your hopes of connecting to undercurrent, for your aspiration to sell your soul, for this I crossed the bridge and burned it behind me, cut the rope and set adrift. No oars, no life preservers, just the dingy and damn if sometimes I don't want to jump out and make a desperate swim for the dock.

But the days of fair sailing keep me at it, keep me in it, keep me adjusting the sail to the pressure of the winds, keep me blessing the currents that I battle in my restless, sleepless sleep. Yes. The currents carry me, fuck the motors. I'll have no more of that folly.

USPS

It wasn't until weeks later, when the letter from the library arrived via the US Postal Service, that she realized exactly her error. As unconsciously as she had executed the act of misplacement, still, when she saw that the books, now six weeks overdue, were considered permanently lost, she recalled that afternoon, the turning into the Post Office with Hildilid's Night and The Mitten and then turning out of the drive-by drop-off without them.

She had been thinking of something else, of course, as usual, as something else is infinitely more interesting than the downtown traffic at 3:47 pm on a Tuesday afternoon. That is how it came to be that the library books, rather than ending up in the library drop box, as they properly should have, and as was her every intention, landed in the drop box of the US Postal Service post office just two blocks south of the library.

Milk and honey

The other day she visited my house. We sat on the couch while the kids played in the next room, sat cross-legged and comfortable, and she said, you know, I am just constantly irritated. And I wonder, is this the new me? Is the new me an irritable mother? Because I don't really like to be this way.

I knew what she meant. We laughed and I made some tea, tea with cinnamon and lemongrass and a hint of chocolate, and we drank it iced, with milk and honey.

Matthew 17:20

Mustard seed conjured up images of fields, fields of yellow flowers like the surface of the sea on a windy day, stretching end to end across the basin of a valley, while the mountains emerged grey and sheer, capped with white, forming a container for the undulating masses of flora. The sky hovered over all, threatening rain.

The train rolled on through, disturbing the quiet communion of earth and sky, breaking the continuum of nature with its harsh angles and stark linearity. The desire for a shred of faith defined her whole journey, had eluded and indeed tormented her, yet here it was, laid out before her, as far as the eye's witnessing could reach: a field of mustard seed.

First day

He woke up that morning, planted his two feet firmly on the ground where they touched the cold of the naked floor and transferred their warmth, receiving the strength of the earth beneath the air beneath the wood under him. Today was the day -- just one day -- but in fact a series of days, weeks, minutes, instants had accumulated until this day was inevitable.

His stomach protested. As firm as his feet on the ground dangled his head in the haze that had developed in the middle space of the room, a wave of grey pressure that seemed to originate near the back of his head but which had floated forward and was now hovering like a pulse of static over his line of sight. Oxygen. Coffee. He propelled himself off the bed and into a standing position, taking his phone as an accomplice to the whole ordeal.

Wind shift

The air hung so very still, still like the moment of dawn, still like time had slowed to a crawl, as though everything had reverted to a hibernation of self-preservation, and they were left, the two of them, alone in a slumbering world.

There was nothing more to do, really, except wait it out. The humming buzzing of a bee wafted through the scene like a brief moment of static on a silent radio station, weaving in and out, settling finally on her hand, a point of life in the desert, a tiny vortex of energy, and they both watched it as though it were the last living thing on earth, a miracle of survival in the suspended animation that surrounded them.

A gust of wind struck them, its force more in the element of surprise than in the collected strength of air particles, and the bee stumbled, and they all turned their entire beings towards it, as though towards the morning star. The moment broke apart, as though the earth, realizing the futility of waiting, had resumed breathing.

New blog about bees

If anyone is following this blog :-) you may be interested to check out my new space on Tumblr. Enjoy!

Love,
chelsea

Mind games

These four walls, they were close, in a way that alternately prevented vision and allowed the most prescient discoveries. And so it is the former today, she realized, and she abandoned her guitar for a bicycle, set out in the chill of the morning for something and nothing.

How to find the focus to do what needed to be done, and how to find the patience! The doubts weighed heavy around her, and disturbed her concentration with their whispers, no, their shouts. This whole muddy life could be lost to those doubts, she knew, and yet. The discipline to filter the water, every moment, every moment! To watch and notice, to allow and yet transform, this was the work of living, yes, of course, and yet.

She glanced at her watch. 8:15 and she was already exhausted from these mind games.

Ava Maria

The truly horrifying nature of the situation did not occur to them until much later, when they had children of their own. Then, thinking of that little girl pained them almost beyond bearing, almost to the point of exterminating the thought. If memories could be erased like a mistaken tattoo, well.

But every now and again, something would remind them of her, a word, a photo, the surfacing of the copy of Alice in Wonderland they had purchased to entertain her the night that they babysat her. And then they would say, she must be 16 years old now, and, I wonder how she is doing -- not in a tone of curiosity, but with a shudder of grief for the childhood lost to neglect and paranoia, a shudder of grief for the inadequacy of their presence, so close as to almost touch her life, yet still, in the end, completely apart from her.

Death of a chicken

The day was salty, salty like the residue left after evaporation, salty like the beach at low tide. The ocean. So far away, so conspicuously missing. She laid her head on his chest as though holding a seashell to her ear, heard the thush-whoosh of his blood in his heart, the air in his lungs.

Then again, the weather was the least of their concerns today. Yesterday the rain had come up so suddenly, taken them by surprise, and they had scrambled to contain their work under the cover of porch roofs. But now it was contained, nothing left but to do it, to silence the thush-whoosh of 30 beating hearts. There was no more research to be done, phone calls to be made, equipment to be gathered, no more chance of putting it off.

Death. Such a natural thing, she thought. A Nature thing. Beginnings and endings. I've focused on the middle for too long. She sat up in bed, turned the light on, and began her morning routine.

And so on

The worlds jumbled around inside her, colliding with each other and brushing up against the remembered guilt, embarrassment, awkwardness of another time and place. As though I could live that all over again and do it differently, she thought. And then what? Because each moment of the past had aligned precisely to bring her to this manifestation of her life, all the steps and missteps, the glorious senior recital and the time she broke her nose walking into the glass door.

And so this moment had arrived, just as each moment before it, filled with potential, yet somehow unique. And she thought, I've burned every bridge. But perhaps that isn't a bad thing. Her jaw relaxed. Past worlds receded and the cafe came back into focus, her laptop sleeping idle on the table in front of her, a couple engaged in low conversation, the metallic chunk chunk of espresso grounds wrenched from compression. And so on, and so on.

Floating

When she thought of all the jobs she had worked in her life, it amazed her how she had wasted so much time, how so much effort could add up to so much nothing. At 25 she held her eclectic, free-spirit resume as a badge of honor, a sign of her anti-establishment, populist leanings. Now it felt debilitating, and each day of her third pregnancy brought with it the continued growth of a vague, queasy fear that she could end up, after years of allowing her children's needs to walk all over her dreams, with grey hair and a job unpacking socks in a backroom of Nordstroms.

Stop. Focus on the dream, she thought. What dream? another part of her replied seamlessly. So many, so scattered, started and explored to the point of fear, then abandoned as too ambitious, too marginal, too irrelevant, too expensive, too boring, too risky, too inconvenient. Too difficult. Ouch. That was the key, wasn't it? The avoidance, it all came down to a fear of failure, a desperate hope that maybe in her next life, she'd learn better earlier faster more completely how to be a good person mother artist. But what if this is it?

Before she could begin to address the terrifying nature of that thought, the light changed and she cursed inwardly, realizing that she had just missed the turn-off for the preschool. Late again. She sighed and swung the car around.

Gardening

Really, at the root of it all was a lack of patience. She extracted herself from the wreckage of her garden and marched back towards the house to rinse off her muddy boots, taking her regrets with her. The tomato plants had failed to bear fruit once again, the squash was anemic, the loan surviving pepper plant could have been mistaken for a weed. Too easy to blame the drought, or the soil, she thought. No, it's me.

After all, the stalls at the farmer's market were full of tomatoes, cucumbers, basil...but they are professionals, she thought, trying to let herself off the hook. She sighed, turned the water to a trickle and stuck one caked boot underneath. How hard could it be, really, to grow a little food? But she needed instructions! Step 1, Step 2, Step 3, starting with soil -- what kind, how much -- and ending with exactly when and how to harvest the plants.

Maybe those instructions do exist, she thought, rinsing her second boot clean, but I'm just too lazy to find them and read them, let alone follow them. It was a depressing thought, but, she felt, the most honest one she had had all day.

Doubt

If she had known it would come to this, she would never have started down the path. No, she didn't mean that, how could she when her own body had labored for 40 weeks just to manifest the point of beginning. 40 weeks! My god, and it had seemed like 40 weeks in the desert, the uncertainty about the decision, the excruciating doubts concerning her future, her family, her friends, how she would find a place in the world after she arrived on the other side of the waiting.

And then. At first, he had seemed so perfect, so beautiful. But he wasn't! No, he was. Everyone is perfect just as they are, and so with him. She sighed, and wondered how many times her mind would run through these thoughts before she would be able to release their toxic load to the universe, to let him just be without the pity of her doubting. It was just...the torment of his isolation, his suffering, and she just the observer, the beneficent observer, the goddamn observer!

Her lunch arrived and she hid her thoughts behind a polite joke, stuffed the guilt back down where it came from. This is my path, she thought. I have to accept it or I'll never survive what's ahead. She paused, pulled out her Blackberry. One o'clock meeting. Her mind shifted gears and she chewed thoughtfully, reviewing her presentation.

Endings

They sat in stony silence for the remainder of the time, waiting in the company of a cold uncomfortable truce for the evening to reach its completion. The last words that had passed between them hung like the thick grey clouds that gather over a drought-stricken field and then stagnate there, blocking out the warm light of day, yet withholding their rain.

She stared out at the street and felt the dull blanket of apathy envelope her. She offered him a cigarette; he declined. Shaking one out for herself, she tapped the filter end lightly on the table, put it to her lips, and lit a match. As flame ignited tobacco, she tried to let her mind wander, but found instead that she was trapped in the prison of the moment, betrayed by the quicksand of her own thoughts.

Downpour

The rain came as a surprise, not like the rains in Dublin, where one always carried an umbrella and assumed that at any minute, even if the heavens were blue and breezy, grey misty curtains could close in on the theater of the sky, carrying with them another rainshower. No, this rain descended unexpectedly after weeks of dry, hot sun had desiccated the city, and it arrived all at once, delivered on a swift gale that swept in front of the torrents of water, pushing the air in front of it like the gusts that escape an opened oven.

He stood, nose pressed against the window, bouncing up and down in excitement until his mother finally gave her permission. Running out into the downpour, he circled around and around the backyard, raising his arms up to meet the falling drops of water, palms outstretched, reveling in the cool respite from the summer's monotonous heat. He danced as though observing an ancient ritual, passed down through his little body from the collective unconscious: a communion with the element of water, so basic and simple, so axiomatic, so profoundly powerful in its ability both to create and to destroy.

Serpent of fury

She knew that the rage she felt was completely out of proportion to the trigger that released it. Yet this awareness did not change the fact of it: a seething, white-hot serpent of fury lay coiled round her heart, and just when she thought that it had gone back to sleep, her three-year old came waltzing out of her bed again, giggling, and it reared up, injecting its venom into her veins.

The poison took effect instantly, sending a wave of pressure across her chest, down her arms and up her neck, squeezing her temples and grinding its way into her forehead. I don't have time for this bullshit, she said to herself, as she hustled her child unceremoniously back to bed, barking her displeasure all the way. Her actions inflamed her even more, sending her spiraling into despair for her parenting skills, impatience with her own emotions pounding against her skull. She was so ashamed of the anger that reared its head day after day that she could barely speak of it, and she kept it cloistered away, like Mr. Rochester's wife in Jane Eyre, refusing to recognize it or to know it, its ugliness and wildness an self-imposed weight on her already heavy heart.

Culture shock

Their conversation had begun amiably enough, because in Austin, it seemed to him at least, all conversations begin amiably. But even speaking about the weather got under his skin in a gnawing sort of way, like the constant concern that maybe he was sitting right over a colony of fire-ants. I mean, it's like a million and five degrees outside, and it's 11 o'clock at night, he thought to himself, as his new acquaintance expounded on the joys of living in a sub-tropical climate -- but he smiled and nodded all the same.

When the conversation turned to politics, however, his apathy waned and the spirit of righteousness and indignation that had been baked into his very core took the reins. He had a lot to say about Washington DC, not to mention the World Bank's follies and Bono's naivité. As he hit his stride, he noticed a look of -- concern? pity? etched on this near-stranger's face. I get freaked out about that stuff too, but I just try to remember, all of this is part of the way, the path. Everything is working out for our highest good. Everything is gonna be okay, the man said, sympathetically patting him on the shoulder.

His temper flared and he felt his eyes bulging as he strained to keep himself from shouting across the room. In the end he was able to restrain himself to a terse but heartfelt, You know what? No. No, everything is NOT going to be okay. He turned on his heel, deposited his half-drunk bottle of Shiner in the recycle bin, and walked directly back to his apartment, where he bought a plane ticket back to Boston, and gave his landlord 30 days notice.

Mortal birth

It wasn't until after her first child was born that she developed a fear of flying. Before that the risk inherent in launching oneself twenty thousand feet into the air had seemed almost joyous, a liberation, a brush against the breath of god. She would close her eyes in meditative repose and let her fate wash over her, accepting the possibility of death as one of many equally valid potential paths.

Now she sat, her back rigid against the narrow seat, her sleeping baby cradled across her chest, ignoring FDA regulations, because really, if they crashed, would that subtle difference in position save him? It was the same logic she had used in high school to justify hurtling down the country roads around her home in her vintage VW bug, wearing no seat belt. At that time, however, her decision was motivated by a cavalier trust in benevolence of the universe. With the birth of herself as a mother that shell of trust had been shed, leaving her raw, vulnerable to the searing pain of mortality.

Palm Sunday

When they woke, sun was pouring through the window of their compartment, and they realized that the train was standing quietly at the end of the line. How long they had been there was anyone's guess; as they scrambled out onto the deserted platform, she wondered if anyone ever would have bothered to wake them, or if they would have been allowed to drift on, unconscious, to the next destination.

Getting a room was more difficult than they had imagined it would be, but they didn't put it together until they boarded a bus headed towards the Vatican, packed with dozens of people carrying large branches of palm. It was strange to find herself on the outside of a metaphor so central to her culture, like a teetotaler arriving in Dublin on St. Patrick's Day, awkward and displaced, intrigued but not really curious, suspicious that she had never really woken that morning, but had instead accidentally fallen into someone else's dream.

Escape

The dry heat that had reigned over the city for months had given way to a steaming humidity as the previous night's rain evaporated from the streets. He sat in his car at the stoplight, and, delayed by the queue of rush hour vehicles in front of him, was fiddling with his iPod when a figure on the sidewalk caught the corner of his eye.

The man was working the horizontal grate of a metal-framed trash barrel; now he was deftly, expertly swinging it open and pulling it out to examine its contents. His face was not unattractive, and he was tall and gaunt, his matted dreadlocks spilling out over his shoulders like the mane of an underfed lion. Despite the heat, his clothing hung in layers of ragged folds down the length of his arms and legs, enveloping his body in its volumes. His movements were confident and directed as he swooped into the barrel, recovering a bag with a half-eaten sandwich and half-empty bottle of Coke, remnants of another's excesses.

As he sat there in his car, he felt a captive audience to this man's private moment, and a wave of empathy welled up from deep in his gut. He thought of the nights, years before, when he too had longed to escape the shackles of modern living. Unable to sleep, he had fled into the inhospitable urban wilderness, wandering in the cold until finally finding refuge under a fire escape, where looking up, the stars had appeared, dimly reaching out from the heavens, obscured by the glow of the city but dignified nonetheless.

Spiral staircase

He just couldn't get over the stairs in the place, spiraling up into the ceiling, the shiny wood steps guarded by a graceful banister of brushed steel. Who can afford an apartment like this at our age? Six years of graduate school had taken a toll on his finances and his morale, and he sighed to himself as he wondered why he had started the program in the first place. Art History? So I could get a job? The webs of delusion that he could spin to justify a decision knew no limit in their density and reach.

Of course now that he was almost finished, there was no point in quitting, or analyzing, or standing here in this goddamn corner of this swanky apartment when he could be networking, or at least enjoying himself. His wife was chatting animatedly to a stranger across the room, and his drink was empty. He could get a refill and then casually join her conversation...yes, that was a plan. Uprooting himself from his misery, he headed to the kitchen for another Tanqueray and tonic.

Danube

She paused in her walk across the bridge to have a good long stare at the river below, feeling like shattered glass, the pieces scattered in all directions from the point of impact, and she left to gather the chards from crevices and underbellies. It wasn't her heart that was broken -- she'd felt that before, the suffocating knot in the pit of the soul, the despair...no, this was a blow to the shell, an invitation to expand.

Still, it was painful. The white anger that constricted her wrists and ankles was not directed at him so much as at herself, her own self-imagined shortcomings, and her inability to accept her own reaction, drop it and move on. Brown with mud and swift in its journey through the city, this river was no longer the gentle, innocent waters that tumbled playfully through quaint German villages. She breathed its energy into the depths of her lungs then broke her communion and continued on her way.

East Village

It had seemed like a lot of money at the time, but looking back on it, the one-bedroom apartment they had shared with three other people seemed like a bargain for the location. Of course the view was the brick backside of another building and the black metal fire escape from their own; the light filtered down through this narrow urban canyon in hazy wafts of grey and gold. But it wasn't like they spent any time there, anyway, other than to sleep or cook the occasional pot of pasta.

How silly to get all sentimental over that ridiculous apartment, like pining for a can of sardines! She snapped out of her recollection and back into their current debate, deciding on two olive trees for the front yard, but her heart wasn't in it. It was wandering the crowded, grimy streets around that apartment, ducking into the cupcake boutique, arguing for classicism at the modernist gallery, and ordering beer by the pitcher to wash down the packs of cigarettes they smoked to fuel their long, sleepless nights.

Bender II

What none of them could figure out was how he had gotten into the apartment. Even he was vague on the details, insisting that he had come in through a locked window a good eight feet above the ground. Still, the fact remained that sometime in the wee hours of the morning, he had appeared in the wrong bed, sending its rightful occupant shuffling through the hallway and out to the refuge of the couch.

His phone had vanished at some point in the evening's revelry, the only clue to its whereabouts a series of charges for calls made to Paraguay near dawn on a Sunday. The Polaroids, however, were intact, a linear series of snapshots that gave structure and meaning to the blurred thread of a memory that formed the foundation of his tale of mirth and woe: himself, the quixotic hero adventuring on the high seas of Wicker Park, consorting with the locals and ultimately triumphing over a misdirected cabby and a slumbering, fastened garden apartment.

Bender I

When he finally resurfaced, he looked like a tom cat who had been on a round of the neighborhood. Still, this time he only had a black eye; the rest of the effect came mostly from the dirt and the torn cuff that dangled down from the sleeve of his leather pea coat. On a tip from a source at the Mitte Bar, his friend had found him near Tacheles and, relieved and irritated, had brought him straightaway to their apartment.

Now it was phone calls to cover his shift at the bar, to reassure their other friends that he had, as usual, turned up, and he was, as usual, okay, or would be after a good sleep. Meanwhile, unwilling or unable to answer any questions about the gaping hole in time since they last saw him whole and unblemished, he sat dreamily in the corner of the living room, on a plush, ancient wood-framed chair, mumbling incoherently about the origin of the term "beyond the pale".

First date

From where she was working, she could see across the yard of trees and glimpse the row of dignified brick buildings through the fog. She picked this place particularly because of the view, and because of the probability of interruption. Reading mathematics on a Friday afternoon could easily turn into a soporific chore.

A glass door swung open, and as she glimpsed him entering the space, she dropped her eyes to her work and tried to look industrious. He strode past her and across the room, his hair pulled back into a burnished orange ponytail, thick and wavy against the crimson of his sweater, his hands stuffed into the pockets of his paint-spattered corduroys. She lost herself in an exercise concerning open sets, so that she really was surprised when he appeared at her table.

He sat down and as they chatted, she struggled internally to work up the gumption to ask him to meet for coffee, as though that simple suggestion would expose every vulnerability of her psyche, as though speaking those words were tantamount to confessing a hidden corner of her soul. As he got up to leave, she heard her own voice betraying her as if she were observing it from afar, spilling the request out onto the surface between them. Sure, he replied. How about Thursday?
 
He left her to her books and disappeared into the misty yard of trees. Now that the moment had passed, she felt as though it had always existed, a singularity in an infinite sea of potential, waiting in the wings for her to manifest it.

Army of bees

Zipped into the white cotton armor of the trade, she took a breath of anticipation, pried the cover from the beehive and slowly, slowly set it aside. The bees, anxious of the disruption in their home, issued forth from the frames of wax and honey, then retreated under the pillow of smoke that followed.

She proceeded checking the frames for signs of good health, observing the gathering masses of fuzz and wings, each individual insect simultaneously independent and integral. As she sprinkled the antibiotics around the edge of the hive, she saw their common plight. The illness itself was not the problem, but only the symptom of a darkness, a deep-seated yearning of an injured soul, trying with all its might to externalize the wound. The illness was not the end but the beginning, a call for help and attention, a call to arms in a war against the pain and bliss of the modern world.

Still life with cappucino

Once upon a time he had known how to deal with this situation. So when he entered into it, it was with an illusion of control, an illusion that he had meticulously maintained up until this breaking point, this shattering of the protective layer of ice-cold emotion that he wore underneath his charming southern irony.

And so he sat in the cafe, bleary-eyed and confused. His hand rested unsteadily on a perfect cup of cappucino, complete and undisturbed with eddies of creamy foam meandering through swirls of umber. As his mind strayed from the previous evening and into communion with his coffee, he recognized the emptiness of the moment. A cylinder of ash crumbled from his neglected cigarette onto the table, a pigeon alighted on the opposite chair, and the clock tower chimed half past the hour, marking the passing of the dawn into day.

Routine

It was hard to make herself care, but perhaps even harder to make herself not care. Standing in front of the mirror, she leaned in close so that her nose was almost touching the glass, then plucked a stray strand of eyebrow out of its follicle. Maybe if I put on some make-up, she thought. It had been so long since she had had time for make-up she could barely remember whether she had ever worn it on a regular basis.

Her phone buzzed impatiently and she broke her concentration to look at the message. Opening the phone, she skimmed the message and noticed the time; she was running late. Again. Shoving her feet into her shoes, she felt a pinching annoyance at her feet, at her eyebrows, at the color of her shirt, and she noticed her breathing constricting. It is definitely harder not to care, she thought, and she slammed the door behind her.

January in Cadiz

Cadiz rolled itself up like an armadillo during the last of the winter months. Of course the weather cooperated by providing a warm yellow sun during the day, and at night it was still most pleasant to sit outside in the moonlight for hours on end. But she noticed that her heavily accented Spanish was less welcome than usual in the few local shops and restaurants where she was not yet recognized as part of the community.

They gathered in small groups at this time of year, and as always she was at the center of one of them, like the eye of a hurricane, calm and still and barely audible but to the people directly beside her, who would lean towards her to catch her confidences. Another pack of children, laughing and breathless, hurtled out of the darkness and past their little corner of the town. The conversation continued, but all eyes at the table followed the herd as though taking inventory: Pablo, Irene, Alvaro...

She pulled out her zig zag and peppered the crease with tobacco, then proceeded to roll the whole thing up into a toothpick imitation of a cigarette. She paused in her story to light the thing, then let it dangle absently until it had expired. The stone walls of the buildings blended into the cobbled stone of the street, and a salty breeze settled into her nose. Perhaps it's time to go home, she thought.

Morning coffee

A tangled mess of fig ivy had overgrown the yard, creeping along the fence and up the ancient tree trunks, and sprawling over the ground. In the mornings, coming down the stairs on the side of the house they would often comment on the uselessness of the yard, but it didn't matter anyway as they were rarely at home.

Their favorite coffee shop was a five minute walk through the neighborhood, but the yard was forgotten when they reached the end of the driveway. By the time they had ordered their lattes they had captured and released three different projects, and their thoughts were consumed by an endless stream of logistics, strategy, critique and analysis.

Washing clothes

The laundromat where they used to wash their clothes every third Saturday marked the halfway point on his walk home from the train. Now the idea of washing clothes that infrequently seemed quaint, a sort of fairytale existence in which you sat in a cafe and ate delicious raspberry muffins with a sweet and delicate crumb on top, while fluffy white dogs, eminently well-behaved, passed you by without so much as a nod to your existence. Then after a couple hours of pleasant reading, you would people-watch while folding at the laundromat counter, conveniently mounted in a street-side window.

Now, pushing the stroller in front of him as he walked the long blocks home, he pined after those raspberry muffins and wondered to himself why it seemed like such a feat to simply cross the street, enter the bakery and buy a couple for breakfast the next morning. He noticed that the light was fading and picked up his pace. Maybe tomorrow.

New day

She awoke with a jolt that resulted in a pounding head, aching shoulders and a knot underneath her third chakra, as though the alarm itself had injected the events of the previous day back into her head. Immediately her mind was racing with doubt and regret, and grasping for a thought that didn't make her feel like a sinking ship, she rolled onto her side and looked out the window.

The new day glowed green through the grey dawn. From where she lay in the bed she could see the garden, a swath of potential on the verge of bearing fruit. Through the darker greens of leafy growth, the yellow-orange trumpeting squash blossoms and pale, round, firm beginnings of tomatoes winked at her. She swung her legs over the edge of the bed, relieved that yesterday was over.

Tenacity

Setting the guitar aside, she sat staring at the blank white page in front of her. Songwriting had seemed like such a fun idea but when it came down to it, it was hard work like everything else. Now that she had a record deal, the romance was gone, and the relationship between herself and her music felt like it had been stripped down to the sinews, with nothing between her and failure but the thread of confidence extended from the recording studio.

She'd felt this way before, when? Reflecting back, she flipped through memories one by one until she hit upon it. They were sitting on his bed, she and her first boyfriend, after a couple months of dating, when he looked at her and said, I love you. No you don't, she said immediately. She didn't mean it to be rude, it was just honest. You don't even know me. It turned out that it was far easier to share her body than to offer up her soul for inspection.

That was when it occurred to her, a comment Joseph Campbell made about marriage. It's an ordeal. It has nothing to do with being happy. It has to do with being transformed. She picked the guitar back up and dropped her expectations of how the love affair with songwriting would unfold. Here was this moment, the music, herself. She was in this for the long haul.

Visiting

She watched as her friend picked the vegetables out of the Chinese takeout container, leaving the rice like some bird scattering the less desired seeds to the ground in search of the best sunflower kernels. Eating together felt less like an act of communion and more like accidentally opening the door while someone is peeing -- an awkward encounter of an intimate moment not intended to be shared. She wondered when the closeness had been lost.

They used to write each other letters every week, share their darkest thoughts and most ambitious dreams, but after her friend dropped out of school in the middle of the semester, the letters stopped. When they started up again, they were longer than ever but with vacant, endless descriptions of the landscape that read like a Thomas Hardy novel, with a tragic subtext lying under the surface, just out of sight.

Their conversation that evening was no different, and she had to force a smile as she said goodbye. Closing the door behind her for the last time, she walked down to her car alone.

Wasps

Look, it's like this, he said. Andy Warhol never did anything important. In fact, he was responsible for the deterioration of the entire art world into a soulless commodity market for the elite.

I could give a shit about Andy Warhol, she retorted. What is bugging me is those wasps you've been neglecting outside our front door. When are you gonna deal with that?

It was true that he hadn't dealt with the wasps, but neglect wasn't the right word. Truth be told, he liked to let them build for awhile, getting up their hopes that this time they'd really be able to make something happen, then dash their dreams in one fell swoop of pressurized poison. There was something really satisfying about the destruction of weeks worth of nest-building, the carefully constructed paper tubes filled with larvae that would never experience the freedom of flight.

Years of writing scathing indictments of the artists and galleries in Chicago had brought out a sadistic streak in him. As he rummaged around in the garage for his can of Raid, he felt sorry for the wasps for the first time. Still, he couldn't be dodging wasps every time he left his house. He found the can, and with a sigh of resignation, went out to face the enemy.

Jupiter

Driving home from work that evening, the news of the day described the scientific discovery that billions of enormous planets are circulating our galaxy in the vast empty spaces between stars. Not wanting to lose the magnificence of that thought, she switched to the classical station, coincidentally catching the opening bars of Gustav Holst's Jupiter. It's majestic cadences rose in a crescendo as she sailed over the flyway, the stark geometry of the city skyline outlined in the distance.

The miracle of engineering combined with the miracle of astronomy in her thoughts, and everything fell into place. War, natural disaster and the frozen lasagne thawing on her counter at home all took their rightful proportions in the vastness of the universe, each inherently both infinitely important and infinitesimally trivial.

Tipping point

He was standing in the shower one morning when that scene of the writer occurred to him: the writer, sitting at a desk in czarist Russia, opining that it was impossible to write well unless one were truly hungry. And he realized, standing in the shower, that every time he had gotten to that critical point as an artist, that pivotal point between hobby and livelihood, a little voice in the back of his head had recalled that scene and sent a message through his subconscious: you'll never be any good because you are too well-fed. He didn't know which was more maddening, that his whole adult life hung on the thread of a scene from a Dostoevsky novel, or that, as it now dawned on him, all these years he may have taken the use of hunger too literally.

Whatever. It was too late now. He buried the thought as he hurried through the rest of his morning, shuffling the kids out the door and tucking his Wall Street Journal under his arm as he raced to catch his train.

Honeymoon

The older couple who greeted them at the welcome center had been cordial enough, but when they warned him about the fairies, he had guffawed into his coat sleeve at the quaintness of it all. He wondered to himself why on earth he had agreed to come here for his honeymoon.

That evening at dinner they quarreled over how much tip to leave, both of them exhausted from meticulously retracing their hike three times in the dense fog searching for his lost wedding ring. The couple at the welcome center had irritated him further with their suggestion that not only had he brought the loss upon himself, but that there was no chance of recovering the ring. The fairies have surely made off with it. The thought of their earnest sincerity made his blood boil.

Two years later, as he signed the divorce papers, that miserable day flashed into his mind, and regret seized him by the throat. Choking back tears, he finally understood how a million small choices define a life.

Walking and falling

It all happened so fast there was no way to stop it. One moment he was skipping and singing and the next he was face-down on the rock-strewn pavement, red blood streaming from a gash across his eyebrow. The mother rushed over and simultaneously comforted her child while she tried to make her own assessment of the severity of the situation, examining his eyes for signs of concussion and dabbing around the wound with some borrowed kleenex.

Ten minutes later, the child had fully recovered himself and was begging to stay and play some more. But the mother carried the incident around with her for weeks, the knot in her stomach, the flood of anxiety, the feeling of vulnerability replayed again and again, as though the gash on his eyebrow were a wound in the center of her heart.

Saint Patrick's Day

By the time her husband caught up with her, she had reached the point of no return. She had enlisted the support of two American students, who, unlike the locals, had been oblivious to where the revelry was headed, and were now stuck standing awkwardly on the table with her, while she directed a stream of obscenities at an Englishman in the corner. He was at least twice her size in both height and girth and was watching her with a look of mild amusement on his face, as though taking in a second-rate comedienne, and he was just opening his mouth to heckle her when her husband stepped between them.

Let her alone Tom, you know it'll only encourage her, he admonished. Turning to his wife, he tried to talk her down off the table, but she turned her fire on him. Finally the bartender, another Englishman, came over and threatened to physically remove her from the pub. She gave him swift punch in the nose, eliciting uproarious laughter from the crowd before crumpling into a sobbing heap.

Her husband shot a sympathetic glance at the bartender. She's only homesick, you know, he said.

No hard feelings, the man replied. We'll see you on Saturday for the match, then?

He nodded as he led his wife out into the cold sunlight.

Invitation

Although they had not spoken in five years, she had decided she wanted to invite her sister to the wedding. Now, standing there with the unopened reply in her hand, she paused with nervous anticipation, going over in her head the words she had written apologizing for her own thoughtlessness and anger, and explaining how honored she would be to have her at the celebration.

Her sister's initial response had been pleasant, even cordial, and she had been surprised at how deep was her sense of relief at reestablishing contact with the only remaining member of her immediate family. As she looked down at the smooth grey-toned envelope, its plane broken only by the return address label bearing her sister's name, her heart leapt at the thought of seeing her in person.

She opened the envelope, pulled out the response card and stared hard at the X marking her sister's regrets that she could not attend. Her thoughts flew over the landscape of memories of times with her sister, a beautiful montage of moments together, marred by the enormous black cloud of their final confrontation, an event which seemed to drain the other memories of their power. Her longing to resolve this conflict burned hotter than ever as she looked again at the reponse, and she realized that most significantly, she had never forgiven herself for what she had done.

Farewell to the blues

Everything went as planned right up to the very end, at which point his carefully constructed exit began to fall apart. After six years of hosting this radio show with order and professionalism, he lost control of his timing as he delivered his farewell. His voice cracking with emotion, the words spilled out in a mess of sentiment. By the time he pulled himself together, he was at the end of his hour, and his carefully selected final song was cut off in the transition, leaving no time for the legally-required station identification he was supposed to play.

What a way to start to the first day of the rest of my life, he thought to himself. But as his father patted him on the back, he noticed the cheerful grin. He shrugged off his disappointment and turned his mind to breakfast tacos.

Driving west

Driving west through the middle latitudes of the country, she found, was much like watching a scene from an old black-and-white movie, in which the set is a continuous circular strip revolving to give the illusion of linear travel. After a time you began to notice that you were seeing the same landscape go by you again and again. And again.

In this endless stream of gentle hills and waving grasses, however, there is a moment when the mountains appear in front of you. At first they are obscured by the haze of accumulated atmosphere, so far in the distance that even if the sky is clear, the jutting peaks appear as if in a fog. So at first she wasn't entirely sure, after staring so long at an unchanging horizon, whether she was hallucinating.

As they drew nearer and the majestic outlines resolved out of their ghostly forms, her heart began to quicken its pace, and she felt a sense of belonging to the mountains, as though they were a part of her that she had lost long ago and was now finally recovering. At that moment, everything came into focus. At that moment, she knew she was in love.

Stone fences

Hiking as they were, over this countryside which had inspired the likes of Wordsworth, one could sense the history of the place. Pockets of wooded areas peppered the land, a gentle contrast to the stretches of what once had been a continuous patchwork of pasture and garden, green, grassy and bordered on all sides by the ubiquitous stone fences.

The stones emerged each year out of the hillside as though the earth were trying to purge itself of an irritation. Farmers of yore had spent the first part of each spring clearing their fields of the rubble, and one wondered, hiking as they were, whether the walls were constructed to contain the fields, or simply as the most convenient place to store the never-ending stream of rocky sediment.

There were also boulders, smooth from centuries of being washed by the frequent rain showers of the region, and useful as landmarks. They had identified two of these, carefully matching the dots in the distant landscape to those on the map, and had been picking their way across the ridge and down the grassy slope toward their target, when they paused, noticing the movement, and realizing all in an instant that their supposed landmarks were in fact two dozing sheep. Lost in the English countryside, they folded the errant map and sat down on the stone fence, wondering if they would discover their location before the next rain shower overtook them.

Hidden potential

She noticed the lamppost towards the end of their stay in the city, so the black-and-white photograph that she made of it wasn't developed until after they were long gone from the place. It had been a clear day and the starkness of the scrollwork stood out against the foliage of the surrounding park, defining the trapezoidal space from which light originates.

Contemplating the photograph, the mundanity of it seemed its most remarkable feature. Yet there was something about the potential inherent in it that spoke to her, as though the sculptural qualities, framed in this snapshot, were just an empty framework waiting for the coming night, when its presence would be eclipsed by the glowing illumination emanating from within.

Secret life

He hadn't even known that she played an instrument, yet here she was entirely in her element with a borrowed fiddle and a collection of old friends. They hadn't planned on meeting anyone at the pub, but a little while after they arrived, the band had rolled in, composed of half a dozen local musicians -- all of whom she knew but had not seen in years.

At first they had all chatted pleasantly together, and he joined in politely, though there was not much for him to add to a conversation about the current fate of her former classmates. When they invited her to play with them, however, he retired in shock to a corner of the pub, drinking his beer in large but infrequent quaffs while he stewed over her deception. It seemed a bitter blow to discover that these strangers should know something so fundamental about his wife -- something that she had never shared with him.

Still, as the evening wore on, the beer and the music lulled him. He emerged from his resentment and, as she rejoined him at the table, he noticed how her eyes were sparkling. She smiled and squeezed his hand, and he wondered what other mysteries would be revealed as their life together unfurled.

Redirection

That morning, after a million small defeats, she gathered her courage and pulled out some baking supplies. An hour later, oats, flour and shredded coconut littered the counter and floor, and the two chairs that had crowded the kitchen for the duration of the inter-generational collaboration had been repositioned at the table.

The quiet eating of muffins filled the house and a wave of accomplishment swept over her. 

Common Dream

They stood together in the field, connected not by proximity but rather by the dense fog that embraced them like the breath of the infinite. It was enough that they knew one another's hearts.

They stood together there, that morning, unaware of the wedge of silence and miscommunication that would slowly drive them apart in the coming years, the frustration and resentment that would poison their blood until, rather than attempting reparations, they would agree that demolition was a more prudent option.

In later years, after all was long ago said and done, they would look back at that moment, each alone, and wonder if it could have been salvaged. They would wonder, each alone, if it were possible to reconstruct that moment when they understood that they shared a common dream.

Earthbound

In retrospect, it seemed insane that no one had put a guardrail up there. You could stand on the edge of the cliff, with dozens of people milling about, and stare a good 10 stories worth of height straight down into the Atlantic Ocean. She wanted to do just that, to stand with her toes on the edge and look into the swirling mass of waves breaking against the rock, but the precariousness of the situation pulled her back towards safety.

Instead, she got up at 6 am and hiked back up the well-worn path to the top of the precipice. Now, all alone, she dared to lie on her belly and peer down the sheer verticality, which plunged perpendicular into the plane of the sea. Her pulse quickened and the tips of her fingers tingled with the vertigo. It was exhilarating but also maddening. At a certain level, it was always a disappointment to be reminded that she could not fly.

Leaving Budapest

There is a certain sense that one has of the fleeting nature of things. As she boarded the train, destined to the west with its clean streets and clockwork busses, she had just that fluttering in her heart. Thirty seconds after the train pulled out of the station, she already felt nostalgia for the Villamos and the Turkish coffee and the cramped apartment she had shared with her roommate, stocked with a collection of glasses for every occasion -- tea, wine, Unicum, coffee -- none of them holding more than 0.2 liter.


At that moment, she realized that she was sitting in a rear-facing seat, a direction that always left her feeling slightly nauseous. Pushing her bag across the floor of the compartment to an empty seat, she thought to herself, I'm never going back to that Budapest. That Budapest is gone.