Ours was a grand and glorious love affair. The fabric of clichés — the pattern from which clichés became threadbare. It began with a toe. Or maybe it ended with a toe. Somewhere in the affair was the incident of the toe in the night. And if you have never heard the phrase Our love is deeper than the cut that severs a toe, perhaps you have never known how exquisitely inexplicable these compulsions of devotion are.
Archive for the 'factual fancies' category
Love does not like cheese
When do we talk about the first boy I loved? From way-back-when love was a shiny pair of shoes that went ka-click-ka-clack in parade over the gymnasium floor. To be fawned over and giggled at and oh-so-grown-up in. I was a brown-haired girl with large brown eyes and her first pair of contact lenses, slender and saucy and testing flirtation one hour at a time. He was a dark-haired boy, sharp-tongued and scintillating, with a squishsome stomach and rasping laugh. Our eyes must have met somewhere — lined up for lunch or crashing through the trees or praying across the chapel. I don’t recall that moment. I don’t recall. But he was shy and pure and hesitant, and I was forward and naive and proud. Or between us we were a mixture of sixteen and singular. I had no time for boys who only offered the present. Love was the future. The always. The ever. And in all of it, the realization that these shoes hurt my ankles and pinched my toes. Way-back-when love could be discarded or given away. With only broken heels.
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Adventures in Iowa
The day I saw my first fireflies was also the day that we drove through the worst thunderstorm I had ever encountered. We had driven down to Cedar Rapids to get a bite to eat. The radio was issuing periodic weather warnings for counties north of us, but we didn’t pay too much attention. That is, until we noticed the sky turning black and looming a little closer than it had on the drive down. The only thought was to get somewhere safe, and the only safe place we knew was the hotel — twenty minutes north of us, dead into that black sky.
We could see lightning bolts here and there at first, then in constantly flickering sheets. The rain started on the windshield in fat, deliberate drops, which quickly became cascades then sheets of water that drowned out the wipers. Martin slowed to match the pace of a semi-truck in front of us with its four-way flashers going so that he wouldn’t lose the road. The sky turned from black to glassy green (a sure sign of a tornado, I thought), and the lightning showed no signs of abating. Thunderclaps mixed with the rain and hail pounding against the car. The emergency weather broadcast system interrupted classic rock to remind us of the counties with tornado and flash flood warnings, listing the one we were in every time. We spoke in tight voices only when necessary.
Was it only thirty minutes? Clocks certainly don’t measure time like the pulse of adrenaline-spiked blood. The steady seconds paced off the storm, ignoring our shallow breaths and pounding hearts. Really, only thirty minutes before the sky shifted from green to light gray and then to hazy blue. We arrived at the hotel, unsettled but intact. Water rushed from the soy fields down the ditches and spilled over the road. The rain lingered and gloated its soggy triumph in the storm’s wake.
The plan was to leave the hotel again for an informal gathering with our friends before their wedding. The thought of getting on the road again was a little intimidating, so we decided to ask the front desk clerk for advice.
“That wasn’t even a bad storm!” she replied. “If it had been really bad, I would have gathered everyone out here in the lobby. You won’t have any problem.”
Not a bad storm? I had brought out prayers I hadn’t said since I was a child and that was not a bad storm? I politely thanked God for getting me through the not-bad storm, and vowed never to move to the Midwest.
By the time we had to leave again, we had calmed our nerves and the rain had stopped entirely. A sliver of sunset made its way over the cornfields that line most roads in Iowa. The sun was catching the moisture on the top of the corn in the prettiest way. Except that light doesn’t reflect like that, and certainly not with a green-yellow bioluminescence stretching away in every direction.
The fireflies had come out in full force, playing around what seemed like every cornstalk in the field. It crossed my mind that a person could watch fireflies and begin to believe in fairies and fairyland, even if the romance of a twilight cornfield may be lost on the locals. They danced and winked us into town that night, and soothed us just a little more with their entirely explicable magic.
On the way home from the gathering, around 1:30 a.m., I almost ran over a gaze of raccoons. But that is an unremarkable story.
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Anonymity Anonymous
I’ll tell you what: I have been having a weird week. I have, in all ways, forgotten my name. The way it attaches to my face in the mirror, the way it sounds pressed against my neck, the way it tastes rolling off a lover’s tongue. I can sequentially assemble the phonemes that (I’m told) form the semantics of my label, but you see, I’ve forgotten how to shape it against my alveolar ridge and let it drop through my teeth to bounce across the air with the musical lilt I like to think accompanies my utterances. My ears no longer register the frequencies needed to translate meaning into the pattern of comprehension that would allow anyone to address me directly by name. My eyes lose focus and fill in optical illusions where the graphemes of me would be.
But I suppose, in this, there is a culmination. Perhaps I was stripping away the layers of paint that held my skin in place. Rotted wooden frame where bone should have held the etchings of a person. A life. Events and activities. Passivities and beliefs. The usual senseless sensations that coil around joints and pretend to be memory. The trippings of the throat that pretend to be utterly thinkable, unutterable thoughts. They cling like shiny new scars inside my elbow.
The body still exists, of course. Cannot, in any way, stop interpreting, misinterpreting, misleading, impeding. Freeing. The nameless step of a size-seven shoe. All symbolic all the way down. From toe to heel and back again. The slip on snow-over-ice of a moniker melting into slush and freezing overnight. Re-shaping and creating every sun-stroked morning.
Wherever it was, it caught my meaning. And there I doubled back into origami folds. Until I was this paper me bent into unnatural shapes that never mean exactly what you tell them to.
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