Guest Post, Poetry And Prose, Relationships, Writing

Driving Past Your Home (Guest Poem)

Leave a comment

I hate how I feel driving past your home

But I hate how I hate it even more.

So close but still a million miles away

Like rolling dice in a game I can’t really play.

I’ll keep everything you ever left with me

Wasn’t much – since it was just six weeks-

But you can take all the couldas and shoulda

Because I exhausted my words and my wouldas.

There’s no empty space, but there coulda been.

Everything’s out of place, right where it’s always been.

I filled up on ‘almost’ while you topped up my glass

Till my cup was empty-then I was on my ass.

Could you please move away from here?

Or turn back the clock, close the gap, bring me near?

You were half leaving while still trying to stay.

So close – but a million miles away.

Lemon Moment, Monroe County, Nostalgia, Personal

4 a.m. Meteorites And Memories

Leave a comment

The plants are attracting the wrong crowd.

After working a bit very early this morning, I drove to the flattest open space that was convenient. Sleeping less sometimes has its rewards. I parked near the railroad tracks and access road by Meeks and sat on the hood of my car. It didn’t take long for the meteor showers that peak this weekend night to dazzle me. Though there was more light interference than I liked, the wide view of the night sky provided more than enough vantage for me to watch several brilliant transitory flashes burn across the sky. I’m sure anyone driving by might have looked twice at that hour because I decided to lay flat on the road several feet away from my car, and my eyes turned to the sky. As I lay there, the mass of traffic snarls from yesterday evening seemed like a week ago. The hardness of the ground didn’t bother me. After a few more flashes, I went back to my apartment. The first time I went back out on the landing, I wasn’t thinking about more meteors. But the sky gifted me with a couple as I stood there.

These meteorites are debris related to Haley’s Comet. It staggers me that about 50 tons of this debris hit the Earth’s atmosphere daily.

Though my Grandpa knew nothing about the night sky, some of the sporadic memories I have of him are of him pointing at the Big Dipper, or asking me if I could see the man in the moon. He spent most of his life surrounded by fields and immense night sky views. I spent more than a few seconds thinking about what the meteorites might look like in the fields of Monroe County.

For a brief few moments, the night made me wonder how objects that could be 4.5 billion years old were racing toward their demise only for me, a solitary human being, to witness. And that each of us, in our own way, flies through time exactly like they are.

X

Lemon Moment, Personal

Expect

Leave a comment

If you could swoop up above yourself, rise above the surface of the earth and look doown, would everything carry the same weight of importance and drama? I don’t know about the rest of y’all, but I have moments where I walk out of the mess of activity in commerce. In less than two minutes, I can descend and immerse myself into a place that makes much of it seem foolish. You don’t need a special place to recognize the sheer wastefulness of much of what preoccupies our minds. But the familiarity and routine of what we expect to see and experience comes with the uninvited guest of blindness. What we fail to experience and see is often the consequence of not expecting anything beyond the ordinary. 

X

.

Lemon Moment, Nostalgia, Personal

Leather Memories

Leave a comment

My cousin gave me a leather jacket that belonged to her brother Barry.  Normally, I don’t wear such nice things because, well, I’m me and I often don’t know whether I’ll end up in a branchy tree or a creek. 

As I was paying at the inconvenience store, a woman behind me told me that she loved the leather jacket and missed seeing them. Her husband loved leather jackets. He passed away a few years ago. I asked her what kind of cigarettes he smoked and she brightened up with a smile. She asked me how I knew he smoked. So I told her that it was almost a federal law that such nice leather jackets required the wearer to emulate James Dean or the icons of the past, all of whom smoked. 

As she laughed, I asked her to tell me a funny story about her husband. Her smile grew even wider and I knew my personal question had opened a memory doorway in her head.

She didn’t hesitate:

“He often said that he couldn’t go out without a leather jacket. Whether it was church, a family dinner, or a quick trip to the store, he would often forget his keys or wallet, but never his leather jacket. When one of our nephews got married, the bride-to-be asked him to remove it for a photo after the reception. The nephew laughed and told his new wife that this wasn’t how we do things in the family. The leather jacket was an official member of the family. Luckily, she agreed and said as long as my husband bought her a leather jacket, it was okay with her. She forgot all about it. But a year later, he bought her and his nephew both leather jackets. It became a running joke.”

She told the story with more detail and definitely with more humor. 

When she saw me in the leather jacket, she was not simply looking at a jacket. To her, it was a nostalgic reminder of her one love in life. She was still smiling when I left. I attempted to act cool as I popped up the collar. It made me smile too. 

X

.

Ancestry, Family, Genealogy, Personal

For Brittany

Leave a comment

Because I was asked to frame my life as an outsider, here’s something I wrote:

“Half of my family beat the gong of appearances, even though the shadows and secrets would inevitably be revealed by anyone dedicated to discovering them. My other half, possessed by similar other demons, revealed their flaws visibly. I came to understand that behavior not concealed by appearances has its own bitter yet revelatory honesty. And that I would choose openly displaying my demons over the betrayal of the insistence of family honor. There is no honor in secrecy or turning one’s head away from the past. A family cannot put to rest its emotional inheritance by denying that it happened.” X

Lemon Moment, Personal

Creek Thoughts

Leave a comment

I’m not the supernatural sort most of the time. Getting to my new place in the creek, I deviated and went through the place I used to live in Johnson. Somehow, it slipped my mind for a while that two of the biggest events in my life took place less than 40 ft apart. Totally unconnected except by location. Both involving death. It’s strange how my mind blurs the mountain of coincidences that resulted from both. When I drove by on my way to the creek, none of that was on my mind. Then the cascade of simultaneous memories and coincidences cloaked me. I’ve mentioned before that I experience odd cycles of coincidences. At times it feels like it was another person living through them. Someone shared a video earlier of a woman who had a particularly bizarre string of coincidences. I know that we all unintentionally string together connections where there aren’t any. But for any of you who have run into a matrix of events, people, and places, maybe you know what I’m talking about. If you do, please share with me what I’m trying to say. (That last part made me laugh.) When I first arrived here, a dad and his young son were fishing upstream. To give them quiet, I went way too far down the road and then cut through the foliage. Even Chuck Norris would have winced at the terrain and the infinite number of sharp, unexpected stones. Even for my tough feet, I let out more than one curse. Sitting on a high bank in the middle of the river with my feet immersed in the cold water and inundated with the loud bubble and sounds of the creek makes me feel like I’m suspended in time. Because I probably am subconsciously. It’s still early enough in fall for there to be butterflies and dragonflies darting about. Every couple of minutes, a random bird will fly over me and below the overhang canopy of trees; if I sit motionless, some of them are within two feet of my head as they pass. I guess my wildly colored dashiki shirt looks natural in the clear water.
X

Personal

November Nightmare

Leave a comment

(a dream that still feels real)

I awoke, my face covered with something itchy and wet. The realization that cold air was blowing across my face confused me. While I wasn’t sure what startled me awake, I could hear a dissonant alarm sounding from far away. Not too unusual for this area. My eyes wouldn’t open properly. I realized that my face was covered with a paste of dusty, sticky, and itchy material of some kind. Using my hands to wipe at my eyes, I fought to open them, knowing that whatever was on my face would impede my vision. With eyes barely open, I scanned the ceiling to find one of the two projection clocks that normally hover over the bed. Raindrops fell on my face. Because of the implausibility of the conclusion, it dawned on me that the roof was missing above me. The alarm that had blared far away now sounded as if it were in the next room. A cat’s painful meow propelled me to lean over to my right. I moved my hands along the bed, and my heart rate skyrocketed when I realized Erika wasn’t next to me on the bed. All I encountered were larger pieces of that same wet pasty material. 

Energy flooded my body. I jumped up on my knees onto the bed and leaned over to feel around in the dark. My hands found Erika on the floor next to the closet. She mumbled incoherently when I shook her. “Stay here!” I told her. 

I realized there was no electricity, night lights, clocks, or anything else powered. As I stood up, I looked up again, seeing clouds race above me. Raindrops still infrequently pelted me as I stood. Without worrying about what I might be stepping on, I walked naked out into the living room and kitchen. The roof was gone across the entire apartment. I heard both cats meowing in distress somewhere in the living room. I ignored them for a moment, knowing that they were still alive.

I reminded myself that I might be in shock. Or dreaming. I pulled on the door, and it popped open without any locks being engaged. It wouldn’t open all the way, so I squeezed through it and out onto the landing. 

I don’t know how to describe what I saw. No lights to be seen. The newly-constructed blue house next to our apartments was gone. All the trees were ripped off or fallen. Cars were upside down, sideways, and thrown at impossible angles. I looked to the right toward the L-shape of my apartment. It was gone; the entire leg of the building ripped off the foundation. Debris and two destroyed vehicles covered the concrete foundation that remained. In my shock, I realized that Güino was gone, as were all my neighbors along my leg of the building. My eyes followed behind the apartment, and all I could see behind the apartments was a path of massive destruction. The light was dim and most of what I saw was crooked silhouettes of oddly upended silhouettes that resembled nothing familiar. The air was filled with a pungent earthy smell.

I turned and pushed back into the apartment and went along the wall to find my phone where I leave it plugged in at night. Unlocking it and glad to see any unnatural light, I saw that I had no signal. It was 1:15 a.m. Opening Messenger, I saw six or seven messages from my cousin, each of them growing in intensity. “X, are y’all okay?” I closed messages, turned on the flashlight of my phone, and pushed my way back outside. At that moment, an emergency siren activated, screeching in the eerie air  Five seconds later, the rain started falling, and I realized that I was bitterly cold. No one else had yet emerged from the remaining portion of the apartment building.

As I pushed back inside the apartment, I realized that hundreds of people might have died. I turned to look toward Gregg Avenue. The road was covered in debris from imploded houses. Ambulances wouldn’t be able to traverse that. Whatever needed to be done needed to happen now by those of us still alive to do so.

…

The dream seemed to last for an hour. And when I woke up, it was one in the morning. I got up, my mind still grappling with the fact that it had been a dream. Even so, I looked up at the clock multiple times to ensure that the red light indicating the time was actually there.