S.m.m.k.
COLLECTED STORIES FROM S.M.M.K.
NOTES FROM WARSAW
And the impossibility - the namelessness of it all - makes it feel boundless, doesn’t it?
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That scares you?
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Remain atop salt to uphold weightlessness so as to not drown in the sea.
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Common sense -
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For, some people call floating above the nameless, paradise.
BEDTIME STORIES
Sometimes, when I cannot fall asleep at night, I lie on top of my bed sheets and I write down a story.
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A story of a conversation that stuck in my head like vines hang on buildings, a story of dancing with my mother, A story of a candle or a past lover. And I write until I feel tired, until my eyelids act as rope tightening around my eyeballs, and my limbs feel like floppy pieces of printer paper and all so quietly
and all too suddenly, my legs are
beneath heavy blankets and I am asleep. They say the pen is mightier than the sword. So I write down, as if it is challenge,
“prove it.”
Other times, when I feel like I’d rather tell a story about heartache, about one-sided conversations with
my dead grandmother, I wish that the bed sheets that cover me would act as earth. That I would finally get to see what lies beneath the dirt even when the sun rises.
Perhaps I would even write a story about what my tomb looks
like – how the dirt feels colder at night. And as the sun rises, I fall – back asleep and I am asleep.
I am asleep.
PADLOCKS FROM POLAND
Sometimes I think about all of you. All of you who thought you could get away with it. I think about you and I think of my grandmother. She taught me how to say - I love you - in the language spoken by a population, downtrodden. A population whose country was more of a plaything. A country left to choose between losing its liberty or losing its soul. She taught me how to say I love you and it sounded like we were fidgeting with a padlock.
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Still fidgeting.
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She’d have me make her cups of tea with spoonfuls of honey everyday. My fear always found itself in the thought of mixing in too much. Now when I fill spoons with honey, I fill them so fully and so generously, streams of honey fall from the spoon into ginger tea and turns warm water thick - turns rivers into oceans. Now when I fill spoons with honey and stir tea with a spoon coated with nectar, I drink it and each time my lips hit ceramic, I kiss my grandmother goodbye. She taught me how to say I love you in the language of her grandmother and I wonder if she drank tea in rite of her - sleepy festivals that coat and guard our throats forever allowing us to say those words.
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When I put pen to paper, I am really writing I love you and I am really asking Do you need anymore honey? I like when the moon shines in a dim sort of way behind thin clouds that look like dustballs because it looks like you’re looking up towards the middle of the ocean. The middle of the ocean, where waves take hold of big ships
and take possession of a sailor’s memory - excise the memory of her loved ones. When I put pen to paper, I am really writing I love you - I think about you before I sleep and after I open my blinds in the morning.
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Poland was once colorful. Poland once looked like a festival. Now it sleeps. Today, it is dull. Today, Poland is the moon or the clouds, the ocean or the feeling. The memory? My babcia taught me how to say I love you in the language I could understand but could not speak. When she had conversations with my father, I could only eavesdrop. I ripped their back and forth into jagged pieces of paper and made myself a makeshift jigsaw puzzle.
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And when she taught me how to say I love you, I put the key to the padlock underneath my sock because I want to fidget with that shackle until our fingers morph into the metal it is made of and harden too. I want to spend my time fidgeting with that shackle alongside my grandmother until I love you sounds more like honey dripping into warm water. I no longer make my grandmother honey tea, but I drink tea made of ginger and rose hips and turmeric. And I fall asleep to love songs that try to define it, all the while smiling and caressing the soft of my cheek because it is indefinable and it is taking shelter in the folded fabrics of my sock made of merino wool and cotton. I make a muzzle of each step I take and each step I take collapses into Kocham ciÄ™.
my father, henry
I never liked using the word, “homesick.” I am missing home, but I am not sick. Sick means lousy and tired, but my memories of home are not. How could I be sick when the oranges in Valencia are picked from branches to be squeezed into orange juice? My immune system does not need to be repaired and it does not have to heal any ailments. No, I am not quite sick as I am longing. Longing for morning conversations with my father. Conversations about how I slept. I always ask him how he slept, but he never answers, instead he says something like, “Nice to be back in your own bed, huh?,” he’ll respond. He will ask questions and reassure you of the importance in your being.
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I want to be like my father. A man who wakes up early to make sure everyone has a cup of coffee and one who drinks a cup while everyone else is still dreaming. One who reads the Sunday newspaper like he’s preparing for an exam on a subject he’s been studying his entire life.
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And I want to be like my father – the kind that loses interest quickly by mundane conversation, but the kind that stays patient and eager so as to not off end those who stand before him. The kind that shows his strength through that patience and calmness. I miss mornings with my father – mornings that feel slower. Mornings that are home to conversations that make me pray for my father’s immortality. I want to be like my father – a man whose voice sounds like heels walking on marble tiled floors and a man whose smile translates to Take things slowly, Stay still for now.
He is good at remembering things: the music you listen to when you feel despondent, the way your grandmother liked her tea, your favorite meal and the way your voice sounds when you sing.
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When I think about my father, I think about those mornings spent talking and I think I understand what homesickness is – a longing that runs so deep and turns so dense it can make you feel dizzy. Thoughts of my father’s tilted head when reading or looking at something with rapture and his leaning gait when first leaving a seated position seem to fill my head so entirely and so quickly that I feel a headache coming on – the beginning of a cold? It seems as though homesickness is an incurable disease when you’re away and memories of time spent with my father turn immovable in my head like they are dribs of melted wax on burning candles.
And I’m not quite sure I’d like to find a cure because in these memories, I discover bliss and in these memories, I create a world where conversations with my father never end. In this world, I hope time is a thing you can buy and memories, the only form of payment.
NOTES ON THE SPONGE'S REDEMPTION
A friend of mine once called a character from a novel who stayed quiet, contemplative more often than not a “sponge” - what I’m sure she meant by that was she thought the character was useless, all but for the other
characters to confide in. Certainly, the sponge might be considered faceless, boring even. But is the sponge not essential in keeping the kitchen space unstained, livable - usable?
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A sponge lets someone soak it with their tears, with their love letters that remain unsent or worse yet, unanswered, with their ghosts of mothers passed and grandmothers past, with their lack of sleep, lack of quiet.
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Lets that someone ring it out until its wood fibers rip, until it flattens out and resembles more likely a limp, thin stack of wet papers than a plush, absorbent, penetrable thing, until it becomes so wet with dirty water that the inability to stay porous turns it to exile.
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Lets that someone dirty it in their kitchen sink until it turns dirty too and useless and absent - pusillanimous.
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A sponge - a spinelessly soft, light device of permeable capabilities used - used for washing and cleaning and repairing and drying and picking up the ripped pieces, from the dusty kitchen floor, that belong to jumbled jig-saw puzzles and brushing dust off the framed glass that bounds together old photographs of smiling and steady breathing, quiet whispers.
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A sponge - a flexibly soft, light, but regenerative piece of natural material used - respected for its daring, but quiet sense of self - sense of that, which it bathes in soap suds and warm water and root teas and “tell me more's.”
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A sponge - what you always look for and always need to clean the grime with
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The sponge - a soft, light, regenerative thing whose cleanliness is expendable, overlooked. A soft, light, dirty thing that is disposed of with clean hands come overuse.
drowning in Brooklyn
It’s always sunny here. I miss the rain and white skies.
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It was supposed to rain the morning I woke up beside him in his Brooklyn apartment. I felt excited for the rain the night before. When the first sound I heard was the hum of his air conditioner and not falling rain, I felt sad. I felt sad before even looking towards the window.
While I laid next to his motionless body - unmoving all except for the up, down of his chest from breathing - my face cushioned in between the crease of his neck and jaw line, I let myself imagine my body splitting and walking about his apartment. A more transparent, less cut image of myself moved around and walked towards the curtained windows. Lifting the curtains, I noticed overcast and turned overcome with calm. A calm that was not restful, but lonely. Not tranquil, but like absence.
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I woke up most mornings feeling this way and the morning I woke up in his apartment, I felt this and I felt guilty. Like I knew exactly why the rain never came, but I decided to keep the secret to myself even though I knew he’d like to have known.
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While I watched my part walk around the apartment tossing over dirty cargo shorts and APC button down’s and patting new, glossy curtains, I also watched it come back into its other half - mine - and I awoke entirely. I looked towards him and looked towards his closed eyes.
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“Good morning.” I let my words fall out as whisper over his head and I swear he smiled at me. It was a smile you don’t find in strangers, but in those who know what your morning voice sounds like - those who leave you be when you’re feeling crestfallen. A smile that feels very familiar. At ease.
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And today I find myself in California, missing the mornings I’d spend with him in his Brooklyn apartment and the nights I found myself giddy with anticipation for rainfall and cloudy skies. I keep hearing that California is suffering from some sort of drought, but I don’t care. No. Now I don’t fall asleep into dreams of rain.
Notes for the future
[for record’s sake] Tomorrow I turn twenty-one years old. In twenty-one years, I’ve fallen in love twice, thought on mortality more than twice, and fallen asleep to “Who Knows Where The Times Goes” on more than 636 occasions. Emily Dickinson is still my favorite poet and French Fries are still my favorite food. I still think about my dead grandmother and her honey tea and I still talk to her before I close my eyes for the night and I still cry about her when I drink too much red wine. Côtes du Rhône is still my favorite red wine. Rebecca Nurse is still tormented and Salem is still hysterical. And I still haven’t a hang on myself just yet.
Someone called me crazy the other day and I liked that. I said,
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“So are you.” I wonder if he believed me.
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When I wake up in my childhood bed these mornings, it feels different. Perhaps, the sun forgot about me since I left, but its rays don’t tap me the way they used to. That sort of tap on the cheek your mother gave you before you got out of bed to get dressed for school. Nowadays, it feels like the sunlight just barely pokes its way through my shutters in the morning to tell me, “The afternoon is quickly approaching - get up, son.” I wonder if that’s what the sun would say if it held air, a pair of lungs and the ability to smile.
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I still watch my mother talk to deer as if they are her own fawn and I’m reminded of her ecclesiastical way of loving - I bet the deer dub it sanctimony. When my mom hugs me, it is baptismal. The way she does loving will be written in books and rewritten and taught and rewritten until the act of her love innately presents itself as being so inconceivably biblical that people will deny its obvious existence.
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I still look forward to car rides to the supermarket with my father which are, more often than not, charged with a sort of silence that is synonymous with consciousness or familiarity - defined by a sort of love that’s so tender, it will be my life’s challenge searching not for its replacement, but for its competitor. The only sound: a tap tap tap from my father’s finger on the steering wheel.
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I still fall asleep to Nina Simone and I still prefer rain to sun. And I still find solace on my hammock. Mary Magdalene’s pursuit is still my personal precedent for Loyalty and loneliness still is a hard habit to hit, but when does truism turn cliché and when does quietude turn ritual?
Evenings on the Terrace
For some reason, Howie tells people that he has a terrible sense of direction. When asked for directions, he laughs and says, “I’m just as lost as you are,” only to then provide directions to the postal office, or the city park, the liquor store.
Howie meets Melina for the first time at a train station in France. Howie is from the States. Melina, a small coastal town in England. They’re staying in the same 11th century home, positioned at the top of some valley for a retreat. Melina’s only staying for a week. Howie, for two. She shows Howie photographs she took of a public art installment just up the hill from the train station. An old castle lined with yellow circles that look like a transition from an episode of The Twilight Zone. Large circles carrying smaller and smaller ones inside. The locals think it’s something like defacing history. The tourists pose for photographs in front of the castle, squeezing into the smallest circle. From there, Melina moves on to tell Howie how when she was climbing the hill towards the castle, a man offered to carry her suitcase. She warned him it was heavy. He winced. Carried it up and ran like mad back downhill. Sweating, with red cheeks. They laugh together. From the train station, they go to the grocery store. Howie says they should buy more than they think they need.
She asks him about his years in college. He tells her how he enjoyed studying writing, but that maybe he should have pursued something else. She tells him about her years at university and how she studied theology and drama. With this, she rolls her eyes like she’s preparing for judgment. But he smiles and tells her how he’s fascinated by religion. Unknowingly, clutching the cross that dangles from his neck. He learns that she now works for an insurance company and he laughs when she tells him about all of the very kind and patient brokers who’ve called her. She teaches him that when someone swears at you over the phone, it’s more effective to tell them that you’re about to hang up on them instead of just hanging up.
"It’s more satisfying,” Melina tells Howie.
Later that evening, after they’ve set their bags down on their beds and tested the flush of the toilet, they sit down with other guests for aperitifs. Melina tells story after story, but never controls the conversation. Lets her stories linger over the table. Lets another pick them up to take them somewhere else. And she always relates her stories to films. Or mentions the name of a film after she’s finished telling her story. Mentions an actor whose name has slipped her memory.
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“Agh! Who’s that actor? She played Jane Eyre. She’s beautiful, in a really simple way. And her hair is parted so tightly down the middle. A really bizarre style—”
After everyone else has retreated to their bedrooms, Howie and Melina move to the terrace in the back of the house to share a bottle of wine. The sun hasn’t set yet and Melina tells Howie how the clouds look like ink splatters over the blue of the sky. Howie has a bowl of boiled potatoes for dinner and Melina tells him how when she’s gone and he has the house to himself, he can eat the potatoes she bought earlier in the day.
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“I definitely overdid the shopping,” she leans forward, “Thanks for the advice.” They laugh and it fades in and out like if you were to fold and unfold a piece of A4 office paper. Carefully following the direction of each crease.
They talk about astrology. How she’s a Pisces and he’s a Gemini. When it comes to their own emotions, they put others’ before them. Howie finds out that Melina’s brother died while she was at university. She slips it into conversation like it’s no matter. Howie doesn’t follow up with any questions. He learns his name was James and that he was younger than her. He learns that she has an older sister named Julie, who’s a Sagittarius and that she’s bossy. That the only time her father listened to a medium was when James came through. They finish the bottle of red wine and Melina offers to open her bottle of rosé.
“It doesn’t really count if it’s rosé.” They laugh and pour two more glasses.
They stay awake until one in the morning. Together— talking, talking, talking. About heartache and their own ideas of redemption after the fact. She tells him a story about a fight she had with her ex-boyfriend while they were camping in Ireland. She calls the fight, a row. Like cow. Howie has no idea what a row is, but figures it’s something like a raccoon.
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“A raccoon?” She laughs with red-stained gums, “If only it were a raccoon.”
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And they tell one another how sometimes they do explode. How when they feel like they’re about explode, they don’t. Hanging up the phone, instead. From the terrace, they move into the kitchen, where Howie washes his dish, their wine glasses and Melina makes two cups of tea. French Earl Grey with a spoonful of honey. Howie tells Melina that he doesn’t drink tea very often, but that he’s never tasted anything better.
The day she leaves, they spend it together in town where they eat falafel and drink beer. Getting lost along the way. And Howie finds himself alone on the terrace come dark. He drinks a glass of wine and eats the potatoes she left for him. Inside his cupboard, he finds tea bags of French Earl Grey. And something about Melina lingers. A longing. A story. He wonders if she’s made it back home. He imagines the two of them talking on the terrace. Talking, talking. Without any sort of direction. Talking quietly and laughing like they’re roaring. Finally, roaring. He listens to the dogs that howl down below. Dodges the crickets that fly. Even at night, the sky looks impossibly blue.
Florek and Angel
The end of summer. Swimming pools in cup holders — hot cars. Angel and Florek talk before falling asleep every night. Angel is much younger than Florek, who has lived in Chicago for more than 50 years. Angel graduated university. Florek just turned eighty years old last August. A Leo, baby. A lion.
Angel: Bonjour.
Florek: I can’t hear you.
Angel: [Silence]
Florek: I can’t—
Angel: I just said Hello in French.
Florek: I just sat down with a glass of wine.
Angel: What kind of wine?
Florek: I can’t hear you, darling.
Florek immigrated to Chicago from Poland when he was about Angel’s age, who just turned twenty-two, four months ago. Happy belated, Gemini.
Angel: I miss you.
Florek: I just finished reading a book on the life story of Nina Simone.
Angel: How did you—
Florek: I read it every night. I fall asleep with it in my arms.
Angel: I’m happy you like it so much.
Florek: I love you. I want to show my love to you.
Angel: I love you too, Florek.
Florek: I know you do, boy. You can stay here anytime.
Angel: [Silence]
Florek: I can’t hear you.
Angel: I didn’t say anything.
Florek: No one will ever love you the way I love you.
Angel: [Silence]
Florek: I pray for you every night. Of course, you have my father’s rosary beads. Do you pray for me, Angel?
Angel: I pray for you, Florek.
Angel doesn’t pray for him like he says he does. But he says he does.
Florek: I want to drink wine with you.
Angel: Soon enough.
Florek: When will you be coming back to Chicago?
Angel: Sometime during the winter.
Florek: I want to drink wine and pour it from my lips to your lips.
Angel: [Silence]
Florek: I want to drink wine—
Angel: That’s not how you drink wine, Florek [laughter].
Florek: [Laughter].
Angel: [Silence]
Florek: [Silence]
Angel: Are you okay?
Florek: Sure, I’m okay. Lack of opportunity. Anyway.
Angel: [Silence]
Florek: The weather here has been awful. Oh my god. Tornadoes everyday.
Angel: Really?—
Florek: I want to show you my love. I want to make love to you, Angel.
Angel: [Silence]
Florek: Have you met somebody in Paris?
Angel: No boys [laughter].
Florek: [Laughter] No boys!
Angel: [Silence]
Florek: You know something, Angel? God brought us together for a reason, didn’t he? Oh, I love you so much, Angel. From the moment we met. We met and it was electric, really. It really was. Wasn’t it?
Angel: It was electric.
Florek: I want you in my arms, Angel.
Angel: [Silence]
Florek: You know we’ve never really kissed. Have we?
Angel: [Silence]
Florek: I want to make love to you, Angel. I want you inside of me.
Angel: Florek.
Florek: What?
Angel: Are you okay?
Florek: You’ve asked me that.
Angel: You’re a good friend, Florek.
Florek: You don’t know anything about me.
Angel: I’m sorry—
Florek: I’m sad, Angel.
Angel: Florek—[digresses]
Florek: […]
Angel: Florek?
something to do with freedom
The garbage man who crushes Lionel’s cardboard castles in the back of his truck is very much part of the story. It’s a good thing he is so forgiving. One time Lionel went to school with a shirt on his head. He braided the cotton sleeves and pushed them behind his shoulder, pulled them forward — back and forth like someone was keeping track. This was when Lionel and The Boys didn’t feel sorry for crying, but The Boys still call Lionel princess because of it and Lionel still braids those sleeves when he’s alone. Lionel invites The Boys who call him princess to his birthday parties. Not because he’s forgiving, but because he’s desperate.
After school, Lionel visits an abandoned children’s camp where kids once got acquainted with valor. That’s where Lionel and his best friend Sam spend most of their time — they dive into dumpsters and collect trinkets some people once called useless. Obstacle courses and tottering bridges and a slow moving brook make the forest vibrate with something-to-do’s. The dumpster sits in a clearing where the sunlight makes the metal hiss. Inside, they find oils and pottery and cardboard. They fold the cardboard into boxes and fill them with the oils that smell of patchouli and Christmas Eve. They sit underneath a cement bridge and they sniff the oil like it is energy and Sam exchanges her pine scented oil with Lionel’s blueberry. They reel back, let their bare feet sink into the dirt sand that gives the brook a frame, and they celebrate resurrection — quietly, excitedly.
Trees protect old buildings that rest inside fenced areas. They are roofless and battered, but walking through them reminds you what breathing sounds like. Reminiscent of a life that once thrived and twirled. Torn photographs of smiles and amber pill bottles make mazes on the ground. The two walk over old sewer systems and this makes them laugh. They balance on shaky wooden boards and they laugh until violet-pink skies tap the tops of their heads. They leave the forest with their cardboard in tow. Pinky-sized glass containers filled with colorful oils lay in the sand underneath their cement bridge.
One of these days, Sam says, she’ll call one of those smelly caverns home and Lionel, she tells him, will visit her after he finds some rose-scented oils from the dumpster and they’ll mix aromatics with manure. He smiles as if he’s saying he’ll miss her. On their way out of the forest, they pick up rods made of plastic and make lines in the sand.
Lionel drives home with his mother, who calls an old friend. He likes listening to his mother’s voice even when she’s not speaking to him. It sounds like something he could touch.
Years from now, it will be only her voice that can make him weep. He’ll learn this when she helps him steady his breathing after his panic attack from the night before. When she tells him to picture his favorite place and to focus on the wind or the cars that buzz, he’ll find that he can only focus on her voice. This will make him cry. They’ll sing together, and her voice will make him feel like his feet have lifted off the ground. He’ll learn that one can cry from panic and one can cry from calm. That one can weep when they’re told not to worry.
Her car rolls into the driveway and Lionel runs towards his backyard, sits on moss and builds his cardboard castles. These castles are also potions filled with moss and stones. These potions, used to hex The Boys who relentlessly chase Lionel, are illusions. Years from now, Lionel will discover how good he is at running. He could run all day and into the night and wake up somewhere across the Atlantic. Maybe they worked.
The cardboard castles don’t look like anything grand — in fact, they don’t even look like castles. Just cardboard boxes that are lined with patches of moss, with stones placed haphazardly, but desperately. These patches of moss are things that are soft: linen curtains and mazes of light on carpet. The stones are steady in place: thrones, princesses and knights — things that remind Lionel of courage. Building these castles, Lionel is revived by the breath of a different reality. This party where he lets himself dance and get lost in mazes of light. He touches his cheek like someone’s kissed him there. This space where he is alone feels safe — clutching his arms, swaying with closed eyes and rose colored cheeks, he dances. His nails dig deeper into his arms until his fingertips turn white. He weeps. His feet sink into the moss that’s damp from an earlier sun shower.
Years from now, he’ll call it selfish to cry this way. He’ll learn why and where he learned that, but he’ll still apologize for it. Years from now, he won’t find rose-scented oils, but rather relief and a fear of permanency in solitude. A fear that dancing alone will forever make him feel mightier than dancing beside a boy he might love.
For now, Lionel cries in his backyard, because he feels so mighty - he smiles like he’s greeting an old friend. In the morning, Lionel watches as his castle is tossed into the jaws of a garbage truck that close with a mouth full of trash and open with hunger. Lionel pinches the extra skin over his elbow. He waits until it turns white, furrows his brows, folds his lips into a frown, and those nerves beneath his eyes tingle.
Years from now, he’ll remember watching those metal jaws eat the closest thing he ever got to a lion’s heart. Or perhaps it was freedom. He’ll miss the way he’d let himself cry without feeling sorry for it. How he would let himself cry like it was just another something-to-do inside his cardboard castle.
Conversations with my Mother
I asked her if empaths were really all that different from psychopaths.
She talked about results while I considered intention.
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And I asked her if empaths were sometimes mistook for psychopaths due to their ability to empathize with the latter. If maybe their quickness in reconciling the pain that the victim felt with the pain the psychopath currently feels is at all significant.
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She said,
huh.
And let out a sigh.
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We both poured another glass of wine and returned to our television show.
Melina in Second Person
There are these moments that turn Lucia into a madwoman. When she turns her house into what looks like a sinkhole, looking for the letter you wrote her. These moments don’t occur frequently, but they take over Lucia entirely. When she looks for your letter, she talks to herself in second person.
The house is a mess. Everything is falling apart. The front door swings open with just a push from the knee. The toilet in the upstairs bathroom keeps creeping to the left like it’s trying to escape. Brown smears of rust that look wet and dusty make an outline of the distance the toilet has moved. The downstairs floor is tore open from flood. The piano is out of tune. If you were to play any song at all, the chords would never sound right - you would just ruin the song. The entire house is completely ruined, really. Ants crawl out of tiles above the kitchen sink and into the middle hours of the night, Lucia hears her father asking again and again,
“Where are all of these ants coming from? How are all of these flies getting in here?”
What do these ants want with a house that is falling apart? In the backyard, the hammock has been left out in the rain one storm too many. The metal hooks that hang the hammock between two trees have rusted over even though Lucia assured her family that wouldn’t happen again. And the rope that makes diamonds of the hammock has turned from the light gray color of a goat’s coat to the dull green color of dry docks that were once covered with wet moss. It looks old. Still, when Lucia cannot fall asleep at night, she envisions herself nestled over the taut rope swishing — quietly — back and forth. The pounding of her pulse often keeps her awake at night, so she replaces each tut, tut with a swing of the hammock. Not so fast. Don’t swing so fast. Slowly, steadily. Like a piece of paper falling to the floor. And still she is awake, but she is more relaxed. Sometimes she can't fall asleep because she's looking for that damn letter you wrote her.
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And it was three pages long. Or something like that. Times that were good. Napping in Prospect Park and showering with socks on the day after you two met. And Lucia still can’t find that letter, but even when her house looks like it has seen Hell and took notes, she still looks for it!
You visited her from Mexico while she was studying in California and you ate dinner together at some restaurant in Downtown LA. There was a plant that sat in the middle of the table and she kept watching you tug at its leaves. She couldn't look away. Hairy knuckles and short, strong fingers. She kept feeling like she wanted to cry. Watching those fingers. She could watch them for hours. She really could! And she wanted to play with your fingers again. Those fingers used to write that letter. She still can't find it.
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She opens her most-loved book to see if she would hide your letter between the pages of her favorite story - that story of a girl named Melina. She's still unsure why she loves that story so much. Everyone fawns over Melina, but Lucia still feels so sad for her. The way Melina weeps after someone tells her not to worry. How detached! The idea that the person who tells her this is only a phony psychic pretending she knows how to heal Melina. This psychic is not a con artist, but a new friend and this makes Lucia feel even angrier. Everyone loves Melina, but they don't know how to love her.
Melina is mystery and beguiling. No one can figure what consumes her thoughts and this is her lure and this is her demise.
As if she has a demise, Lucia whispers.
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People look on to Melina and admire, perhaps take note of, the way she copes with discomfort by holding onto her arm like she’s about to rub it into dust and the way she turns paradise into anonymity by swimming alone and naked in lakes and ponds to then dry her body in dusty, brown dirt. And for these careful observations, people think that Melina weeps only after she’s told not to worry. In this way, onlookers would say they understand Melina. When your motive to understand Melina is rooted in the physical, your desire to understand loses all sense of authenticity. She will feel cheated by you.
When Lucia reads about Melina, she feels the urge to hold her and she also feels a certain amount of jealousy over the way Melina seamlessly stirs and bakes and serves the ability to be loved. Everyone loves her! But when Lucia reads about Melina, she wants to hold her first and invite her over for a cup of coffee and white bean soup and tell her that anyone who tells her not to worry is a fool. And at this, Melina doesn’t weep and at this, Lucia has stopped looking for your letter.
Laying in a bed that’s not her's, Lucia has trouble sleeping. She imagines her body swinging back and forth. She's been away from her family for too long - she misses that ruined home with its crusty hammock that puts her to sleep.
CONTACT
