tuckova

When Your Train Comes In

ARRIVING 17:45 RJ TRAIN TO BRNO, said his text. LOVE YOU.

“When your train comes in, I’ll be standing on the platform,” I texted back. I didn’t want to sound overly eager, but I felt like a part of me was missing when he was gone. It was the first time we’d been apart for more than a few hours since March. Not like we were obsessive! Just that right after I’d moved in, there’d been the lockdown and we’d both started working from home. Our home. The way we slid into such a comfortable rhythm seemed like some kind of sign. When we had a conflict, we would briefly retreat to our corners of the cozy apartment. After a few hours he somehow always knew exactly what to say. I’d relax, the tension melting from me as I folded myself back into his arms. “We fit like two hands,” he’d say, and we did.

That August morning he’d left early for Prague for an important meeting. I wanted to go with him but he said he’d be back in time for a romantic dinner. “Just the two of us,” he’d said, which was funny because it had been just the two of us for months. I’d been in touch with my friends of course, but mostly by text. And some of them had seemed to evaporate after the first month – replying to my messages only sporadically, or not at all. Well, who needed them? Somehow things with Joe... we had a little world. Insular, warm, secure. Just the two of us.

I wanted to clean the apartment before he came home, a surprise for him. I hated housework and Joe found it relaxing, so I really hadn’t cleaned much at all since we moved in together. Plus he was kind of fussy about how things got done, and any time I tried to do much beyond loading the dishwasher, he would take the broom or the sponge from my hands. I appreciated finally living with a guy who liked to clean, and he kept things a lot tidier than I would. Still, I wanted to pull my weight! As soon as he was out the door, I stripped the bed and put the sheets in the wash, opened all the windows for some fresh air, and started on the bathroom. By noon I had moved to the kitchen. Blasting Missy Elliot’s most recent album, which I hadn’t listened to yet properly, and thinking about dancing with my friends, I felt a pang of longing for them, but it wasn’t like being lonely. I’d been lonely, and this was just… nostalgia. I didn’t need them, not now that I had Joe.

I stopped for lunch, a quick sandwich that I ate over the sink, the hum of the dishwasher just below me, now on the rinse cycle. Hang up the last laundry load, I said to myself, making a mental checklist. Put clean sheets on the bed. Then empty the dishwasher. Then it will be time to go to the station and get Joe.

The hot summer sun was the best clothes dryer, the crisp smell of sunshine on cotton, but it was clear the sheets wouldn’t be dry in time for me to make the bed before I went to the station. I knew there were two sets of sheets, but Joe had always made the bed and I wasn’t sure where they were. I started opening drawers, surprised at how well I knew my way around the apartment, how much it felt like mine. Previous boyfriends I’d lived with had cleared out a drawer or given me a few bent hangers. Joe had immediately made me feel like I belonged with him, in our castle, together. I just didn’t know where the sheets were!

Finally I found a box under the bed. Aha! A bright pattern I recognized from our trip to IKEA in February, when we were just starting to sleep together, before he’d asked me to move in. As I pulled them from the box and shook out the folds, the smell of lavender drifted through the air. And then something fell onto the floor, something that had been hidden in the folds. Setting the sheets on the bed, I knelt down to find what I’d dropped. A cell phone! How… my old cell phone. I held it in my hands, completely confused. It was certainly my phone; the spiderweb crack across the screen from when I’d dropped it last year was as familiar as the lines on my hand. But I’d lost that phone on New Year’s, eight months ago. I remember still how oddly disconnected I felt the whole day, waiting for the restaurants to open on the 2nd so I could ask if I’d left it there; standing in the long line at the store to buy a new phone with my new tech-savvy maybe-boyfriend Joe helping me re-install all my accounts and make sure that everything was secure. Why was my old phone under the bed? Why was it fully charged? And why was it still logged into my old accounts?

I sat on the floor with my back against the bed, my mind reeling. It was 4 o’clock. I couldn’t think. Had he been reading the messages I’d been sending my friends for the last eight months? What if we didn’t get along at all, and he was just… constructing himself based on private thoughts I’d expressed elsewhere?

When your train comes in, I started to text. When your train comes in… what? Where could I go? I found a blue IKEA bag in a drawer in the kitchen, tore open the wardrobe and started to shove my clothes into it, but there was too much. I looked helplessly around the room. My perfumes lined up on the dresser top. My favorite coffee mug in the dishwasher, waiting to be put back in the cupboard. My life already entangled with his.

Living with Yourself

I've been thinking about her this week. Well, thinking about him, and putting myself in his place, in which case I would be thinking about her. What's she like? Like me. Exactly like me. Exactly like me, but better. What would that be like? If she knew everything I knew and had experienced everything I experienced except then somehow ... gotten over some things? Leapt gracefully (gazellelike?) over them, left the shards and tatters behind, not looked back. Or learned helpful lessons from other things, things I blew past too quickly to notice that I could have internalized, cherished, nourished myself with. She'd be nourished. I'm convinced that she is better emotionally, which is funny because most of my conscious self-improvement campaigns involve me being better physically. But for me this is an effort; for her it would be effortless. She would have naturally perfect vision, perfect hearing; nobody loves knowing what I think I saw and what I think I heard, like listening to someone's dreams, filled with unspecified meaning. She would actually enjoy exercise, be flexible, have firmer muscles, greater endurance. Once a man who was dating a better version of me was drunk at a party and held me not-quite briefly, his lips at my ear exclaimed in wonder "You're so soft, so soft" and it sounded good but he'd left me for her and I therefore think the better version of me is hard. She would only say out loud the things she was going to do and then she would do them. She would remember what people said, as I do, and she would remember to water the plants, pay the bills, empty the trash, put away the laundry. She would write letters on paper because they're worth more, and her hands wouldn't cramp after just one, because she'd be in the habit. She would read books instead of the news, because she would know that the news only makes her sad. She'd welcome the seasons as they arrive instead of going into them kicking and screaming, loving them only as they are fading, wasting half of one mourning the loss of the last. She would cook better, but she would eat less because she wouldn't use food as a substitute for affection. She would know how to do things because she wouldn't waste time being angry that she couldn't already; she'd note the ignorance and rectify it. She would have already written this. She would be exactly like me, except more like what you want. She would be so done with pleasing you. 

Naxos

In a way you had to do it the way you did because that’s what the story said, it is what was written down for you like a script you had to follow. It started with a betrayal, yours. You betrayed your mother, already destroyed by her own desires and inaccessible to you in most ways for as long as you could remember. Your brother, his dumb brutish strength always a threat to you; he always apologized, he never meant it, it always left a scar and the scars are the least of it. Your father, his ego, his posturing as he pretended to be the father to you both, the man of the house, king of the tale. It didn’t feel like betrayal because you’d never felt you were on the same side as any of them, but family is blood and blood is thick and flows in one direction, and any other direction makes you a traitor.

The sample sentence for the word “betrayal” in the online dictionary is “the betrayal of the king by his daughter” so like I’m saying, this is the story. Not your story but the one everyone tells, and you were just living it out.

The red rope coiled around your waist is a symbol of something, your virginity or the loss of it, your womanhood or the tricks you learned that came along with it. Tie one end around your own wrist, one around his. Now you are married. Now he will love you and fight for you. He walks away so that he can come back. You’ve told the secret you weren’t supposed to know and now he’ll take the secret and go and find more. Follow the thread. He is lost in his own story for a moment, the tug on your wrist tells you he’s far away, but he can’t come back except to you. Your heart pounds behind your eyelids. If you press your palms against your eyes you can see the blood, bursting blooms, it’s looking past a veil into a future that is the only part of the story that is unclear to you. It’s unclear to me, too, though I know how I want it to end.

He kills your brother. He escapes; that part we all know. He betrays you. There is no version of the story where these things do not happen, no matter how gently told.

The thing is you can’t even be mad. You started it. You have destroyed your home and your family for love and the love was not returned and now you have to destroy yourself. You know this to be true; you know that after you do something so terrible that nobody can forgive you, you have to forgive yourself or destroy yourself, and you don’t know if you can forgive yourself. You spin in circles, madness, despair, the usual. The red rope still tied around your waist and wrist, frayed where you had thought you held him fast to you. Sad torn red rope, wrapping more tightly around you as you spin.

I’m putting myself into your story here. This is where I’m going to show up. Here on a hilltop as you watch the black-sailed ship he came in sail away towards the horizon, the ship that should have carried you away from your shame. Interestingly, both your rope and his ship are logic puzzles. His means: if you replace an element and another element and another element from a whole, when does it stop being a whole. Yours means: try all the available paths.

“Sit down,” I tell you. As if in a dream you take my presence for granted, thump down on the grass. Why are you spinning, why are you tearing out your hair, why are you sad? Because you thought you had love and you didn’t. But this is not a loss. Loss is something you don’t want to get over, because loss is a sweet pain; in this case you are crying over something you never had. Not from your mother, your father, your brother, and not from this man. Cry for what you’ve never had. You can cry and cry and cry until there’s no tears left in your body to cry, until all the tissues in the world have held all the tears you cried and been turned into tiny tufts of ripped salt-soaked paper. Go ahead and cry, honey. But when you’re done, in the version of the story I want to tell you, in the version of the story I want you to believe, when you are done crying for what you never had, you will have room to accept more than you dared to want.

You can take the rope and hang yourself, if you want. You can find your brother’s body and curl between his dead arms, cold and no longer capable of hurting you. Or you can leave the rope behind, call the puzzle solved, find yourself amazing, laugh instead of cry, step into your name, most holy and older than time. You can dance with me, sparkle with joy, crown yourself with future constellations. You can do whatever you want.

red all over

Poor unloved one, I've been thinking about you this week. Red-headed and unwanted, or rather wanted until. Wanted until you weren't, until the golden child came along, relatively perfect, whereupon you were backstoried into a hatefulness or at least an unlikeableness that extended well before your decision-making ability. Kicking so hard in the womb, she said, as if you'd honestly known what was going on outside and had the agency to respond. She certainly didn't like you very much, did she? You hadn't done anything good or bad, it says so in the story, but still she was set against you. Over the years you learned somehow to forgive the one who took your place. Who wouldn't give you food because you were hungry but traded what you probably thought was hyperbole. A birthright for a bowl of beans, and not even magic beans. Of course you didn't mean it. Clutching at your heels from the start, that one, always trying to squeeze past you or to at least take whatever was rightfully yours from your hands before the shadow even crossed your palms. Not their doing, and so you forgive them. Her doing, you said for years, her justifications, her impersonations, her clever tricks. But in the end it was the loss of the love you thought was yours that stung the most. It should have been yours; the corn, the wine, the blessing, the love. Sorry, he said, I already gave it away. Nothing for me, you wailed, and the answer was nothing. Years of resentment for that, but then you went on to build your own kingdom, if only to prove that you never needed theirs. After all why should you ever have it easy? And this does seem to be the point, that you don't get given what you can get for yourself. My contemporary concept of fair was spun much later, from finer wool. I was telling your story to my friend who looked at me in disbelief. But surely no parent, she said, surely no loving parent. Surely not. I understand her disbelief; after all from such seeds sprang the roots of my own lack of faith. Surely no loving parent, and why be loyal to one who so clearly doesn't love us very much, if at all? Your story continues elsewhere; I hope you found a happier ending than a cave, or that before the cave there was a woman or two who nestled against the soft cushion of you, loved you for the man you became, and helped you put aside the people you were never going to be good enough for, anyway. I'd wish that for anyone. 

for Warren Beatty

This is the one about you, finally, the one you keep waiting for me to write. The one in which I lay bare my heart, the whole story. I begin at the beginning with the richness of detail you've come to expect when wading through all the words that are not about you, and finally the details are delicious to you because finally they are about you, finally you see yourself reflected in the mirror I am holding up to you, again, the mirror of me. And I am invisible when I'm looking at you, which is how you prefer me, as it affords a better view of you. From the beginning we progress forward, chronologically and logically and I'd make a pun about crones but I know this doesn't interest you so never mind. Never never mind. How I do keep creeping in but yes, this is the one about you that you've clearly been so impatiently waiting for. The one where I reveal all the secrets about you, and though the secrets are in my heart which I think makes them mine they are of course yours, about you, these tender dears. Are you paying attention? It's okay, you don't have to pay attention to me, but this is the one I am writing about you, so you should pay attention to this. You should feel like you're going to be rewarded. For all the times I spoke and you listened in the hopes of hearing your own name come from my mouth, all the times I wrote and you read it and hoped to see your name, here it is: your name. A description of your face, your eyes, how the vulnerable spaces near the bone hold the light and naturally my attention. There, doesn't that feel nice. I expect it feels nice to have someone's attention entirely directed at you, their words repeating back what you've said so that you know they were listening, their eyes reflecting back what they see so that you know you've been seen, their hands touching the parts of you that most wish to be touched and asking nothing in return so that you know they were only ever thinking about you. Listen I get greedy too sometimes, I'm not saying it's wrong. I will talk about your skin, the alignment of limbs, the sinew and muscle, the beauty of you, I will even tell the story of how it felt to touch you even if that only or mostly occurred in my imagination. This is the one about you and I want you to have the full experience. I am telling it all, about the nights I woke up weeping or sometimes though less frequently laughing from the middle of dream about you. This is the one where I tell you what that dream was about, how the tears (or, albeit less frequently, the laughs) pulled me from that dream and caught the glinting light of the whole day. In this one, the one you've been waiting for, the one that is all about you, I tell my version of the story of us except it is the story of you to you, and you rest your finger against your chin and read each word and continue to wait to see the whole truth and feel whatever it is you expect to feel when I finally stop fucking around in my own feelings and reflections and get to the very important part that is all about you. That part is coming. It's here. That was it.

 

AT-510A, continued

Cinderella's stepsister lowers her feet into a bath of Epsom salts, watches the blood rising in the warm salt water in thin red tendrils, feels the itch of the beginning of healing. Presses her palms against her cried-out eyes, the gray explosions of pressure behind her eyelids. All I wanted was to be what you wanted, she whispers to the empty room. 

elpis

Pandora's box came up three times yesterday in completely different contexts and originally it was my thought to write about that, but it's actually a shitty myth so I don't know. The story I was planning to tell you is a story about a box, and for starters Pandora's box is not a box, it's a jar. Well the box in my story isn't such a fancy thing, I mean it's not a be-jeweled Waterhouse wonder, it's probably closer to a really nice box that you got a Christmas present in one year and then you re-use the box every year because waste not want not. Small tears of the original bright holiday paper are missing where the lid was taped closed and then the tape removed, but it's still perfectly serviceable. Yeah, that box. But I could switch that box out for a jar, sure, I'm not picky, box, jar, bottle, whatever, and I like staying true to the story even when the story isn't true. And the point of this story is not the box itself, but the lid. And whether it's a lid on a box or a jar doesn't matter: the point is, the lid is SUPPOSED to stay on. Lift the lid and all manner of bad things come out. 

This too, a recurring and weird element. If you don't want her to open the box, why put on a removable cover. If you don't want her to open the door, why give her the key. If you don't want me to talk about this, why ask. 

So the lid. On the box or the jar. In both containers, what is inside is a vortex of pain, I would prefer the word maelstrom except it turns out it's not from Latin but Dutch and therefore no more awesomely meaningful than whirlwind. In any case, swirling and danger and destruction. I'm thinking a jar is better, more conducive to swirling type action, so that's fine, good, we're going to talk about Pandora. 

Except Pandora is sort of a combination dingbat and jerk. Created for the purpose of being so, the gift of cruelty and deceit. And this is not the story I want to tell you. So I will tell you a different one.

I will tell you this story of a woman who has a pithos full of pathos, a turmoil of tears, a welter of memory she carries with her everywhere. She has to carry it because she has to, it's part of the story, it's not that she'll die without it but she will cease to be herself, so here it is, tucked under her arm, and there's a lid and what she really wants to do is let the curse of carrying it be the only curse on her. Like most people cursed to carry a burden she wants to give it a good hard look sometimes, take the lid off and really peer inside and find out what's so darned heavy after all, but most of the time she knows better. "What's in the jar?" they ask and she says "Oh, it's nothing really, long boring story" and they go back to talking about themselves or politics or television which is fine. "What's in the jar, though?" asks another. They are standing at the seashore in the middle of a different myth, and for a stupid moment it seems like a good idea. She sits at the water's edge, coaxes the lid off, shows the contents, the damage, the story more true than works and days, watches their feet kick up plumes of sand as they retreat forever. Too much. She catches a cupful of tears and tops off the jar, fixes the lid back in place, the ocean lapping at her feet as warm and salty as blood. 

Some days it's all she can think about. Some days she doesn't think about it at all. Some days or even weeks are taken up with thinking about how unfair it is that she has to carry this stupid jar and be weighted by it if she is silent and defined by it if she opens it. Some days she thinks about how strong she is from carrying it, how a curse that must be carried is borne; she likes wordplay and that makes her smile. Some days she passes other people carrying their own boxes or jars, some bulkier than hers, some heavier, some unbelievably fragile.  

Pandora's box is really just a dumb origin story: Men suffer because women can't keep a lid on it. The truth is that everybody's got a jar of some size or another, and that inside of this one, if you're paying attention, you can find hope. That was what I wanted to tell you.

Famishius vulgaris

"Another rough day at work, dear?"

She didn't know the half of it, he thought. Absolutely punishing. It had seemed like such a good idea to switch from freelance to corporate, break free of his father's hand-to-mouth style, have a regular job. And the corporation seemed reasonable: test the new equipment, report back. He was lean and hungry then, ready to make an impression. And she was so supportive, working the swing shift until he got off the ground. World ahead of them. Years ago. And today was just another day of trying his damnedest and coming close and failing. It's like the world is rigged against him. Like it always has been. 

He remembers, she remembers, when they started. My father was a trickster, he'd told her, a con man. Curled together in their cozy den, planning the future in his voice that came from a class above hers, telling her how he was a genius, and he'd use his smarts and cunning to feed the family they would have, instead of to pull the wool over the eyes of sheeple. It seemed like a good plan. But then every evening's dinner was presided over by another long howl about how hard he tried, how he wanted nothing more than to provide for his family, how he just couldn't catch a break. His eyes wild in the way that only a trapped animal's can be. In the beginning she agonized for him, she literally cried for him; it's not fair what is happening to you, she said. It's not fair. You're doing everything right, by the book.

And now years later and nothing has changed. They'd starve if not for her. He's out failing to catch the skinniest bird for the umpteenth year and she's getting plump chickens from the henhouse, lambs from the fields. She's a sleek and lovely hunter, biting their necks before they can even cackle or bleat out a warning, sliding their blood-slick still warm bodies onto the dinner plate that he complains over, how he was passed over for another promotion, another dynamite plan gone wrong. Hmmm, she says, and looks at him thoughtfully. He still calls himself the breadwinner, as if they ever ate or wanted bread. 

When did her empathy turn to pity, when did the pity turn to disgust? At what moment did she understand that he was so deep in the habit of failure that he wouldn't know what to do with success if it caught him. Does it matter? Here they are now; her exhaustion, his endless loop of defeat. Beep beep.

in exchange for ten kisses

Narcissus finally drowns, comes too close to the water one day and instead of kissing his own reflection and drinking, as he says, the sweet nectar from the kiss of this gorgeous guy (this gorgeous sky, gorgeous sky) sucks in a bit of rank lakewater, burbles around in it, and falls in, choking. Echo can't repeat the sounds, not because they are so horrible but because they're just out of her comprehension and vocal range, and she watches the lovely marble-white skin of him sink into the weeds and realizes she finally has her own voice back. No more of that nonsense, then, of reflecting back on his own beauty and begging him to enjoy her body. She barely knows what to do with such freedom. She can see his fingers still fluttering at the surface, not waving but drowning, probably some future lilypad porquoi, but she super doesn't care, and even the knowledge that he will go on with an underwater life, pulling in sweeter and probably younger naiads with what looks like a sorrow they can heal but will turn out to be an excuse to talk about himself forever is no longer her concern. Echo is, finally, too old for this shit. 

neverending

Since we have no bastion against the nothing, we must fight by ourselves, fight against that giant emptiness. Hiding in the attic because you're scared of a bully is a fine start but getting caught in a story that is moving is better. In this story, this fight will not lead us to answers but if we are lucky it will lead us all the way through and out of the swamps of sadness.

The mistake that he made, and by he I mean me, or maybe us, that time before, was that we were afraid we wouldn't be able to save anyone else. That we wept as they died, that they saw our despair and then our cries of love were not enough. All around the world people lose treasures every day: precious belongings, friends, memories, rights, hope. Here's what I think we do, I think we have to acknowledge that loss happens, that we have lost some and we will lose more, forgive ourselves for crying, weep if we want to, but not give in to despair. I think we have to not say: This is too hard for you. I think we have to keep pulling. I think we might have to sing happy songs and put a little pepper in it. 

I'm not trying to be sunshine; it's not my nature. The Rock Biter opens his hands to find his friends gone again and again, we have lost so many more than we should have and more still, already more than any quilt can keep warm, even though they looked like good big strong hands. And yet what can we do but continue to imagine a world where things are better until we have enough hope to work for it. What can we do except tell ourselves stories of triumph, and then come down from the attic and fight back.