Three Cheers for Eve

As the laughter took you (your body helpless to it and falling in on itself) you looked like a flower with petals too heavy to hold up, smiling and shaking your curls.  I couldn't help but want to reach out for you, lay my palm against the bend of your jaw, and see the joy in your eyes closer up.

"...Being in love is something that I will never feel again.  I traded that magic for pragmatism; for adult notions: worrying about 401Ks, picking the right dog food, and if there is enough air in the car tires.  Double checking that the stove is off before I leave the house. Guarding against bounced checks, dead smoke-detector batteries, clogged gutters,

When was my life reduced to the mundane?  When did I wake up in a place that I could no longer find beautiful?  You were the line I crossed to put away childish things (spontaneous weekend trips contrived on a Friday, driving to another city in another state with just a few clothes in the back seat) and now all I talk about are politics and tax breaks and furniture shopping.  And to think, when we met, I was more interested in walking over hot coals for you than picking out a color for the living curtains.  I tell myself this is a new kind of love, a grown-up kind of love, all you can expect over the age of twenty-five with bills to pay.  I tell myself that this is the kind of love that will prepare me to have children with you, to retire with you, to watch you die.

But the longer I go, the less convinced I am of this.  I don't know what to do or think or if I should expect more.  Perhaps even I talked myself into this safe, passionless existence enough times that I finally came to believe it best.

Do I hope I can have the best of both worlds - ardor and domesticity?  Yes.  But I haven't managed to meet anyone who can convince me otherwise..."

Hold onto your secrets with greedy fingers and when your joints tire, let those secrets roll over you like waves of nausea.  Throw your hands over your mouth, pay no attention to their desperate lunges against your cheeks, and avoid setting your secrets loose in the wilderness.  If released into the world, they will starve to death without the magic of silence that keeps them plump and exquisite. Remember this: secrets aren't meant to be freed, but neither will they ever reach a point of safe domestication.  Allow them to simply exist at their most beautiful: wild animals pacing back and forth behind the bars of their cage, sliding their dark eyes over their enclosures looking for escape.
Until we exonerate ourselves from our societal impulses, we won't be able to stand the sight of our secrets with their sharp teeth and magnificent feathers staring out from behind the glass of our own eyes in the mirror.  It took me years of telling myself that I don't owe a thing to the collective conscious to finally believe that I can keep some morsels solely for myself.  The collective conscious can only survive if you feed it and I am mounting sanctions against its tyranny.  Your boyfriend lies when he tells you that the only way to truly love him is to turn your inner world inside out and shake its contents onto the floor for him to scrutinize.  The tell-all exposes of celebrity gossip magazines are fallacies; there is nothing wrong with the solitary space of the mind if we simply allow it to remain uninhabited, uncomfortable as it may be at first.
Cultivate your secrets like your Nana's beloved garden; they are the color of hydrangeas (either the pink of torn flesh or the mournful shade the sky turns once the sun walks away from it).  They are a silent riot of bougainvillea burning down buildings with their anarchy of color.  They are the hostile yellow of the forsythia from which a mother cuts switches to punish her children.  Conjure your secrets up out of the ground and then care for them as you would an infant, but cut every one of their vines from your fences.

Samson,

I crave the feeling of your hair slowly getting tangled in my fingers.  You'll never know how good to it is to push it from your face so that it doesn't get trapped between our mouths when we kiss... the sweet ache as it fell to the tiled floor last night in the gentle desert midnight, the vulnerable skin it revealed.

I whisper against your neck, too quietly to hear "what will I do with my hands now that there is nothing to fill them?"

That I was capable of cruelties and you loved me not in spite of it, but because of it.  You can’t suddenly pretend that my sharp-toothed words were never a thing of beauty, or that Back Then I was not the creature I am now.

I've always been this same snarling girl-lion with light in her eyes.

The first time we had a conversation about my degree in religion, your features gathered themselves into a look both perplexed and troubled. But why? you asked me. But you’re not a believer. But there is no God or power in prayer or hellfire and you know it.

Look, I said, this is true, but it is irrelevant. We both study the heavens. You look to the stars to read the past and the future and what I do is not so different. I ask man to tell me where the stars come from while you ask the stars to tell you where man comes from. The thing that most separates the two of us is that you supply answers and I only study them. Really, Mr. Scientist, you are the proselytizer. He nodded slowly, put his drink to his lips and drew in a slow mouthful.

I explained to him that unlike like a believer, I could do without the Adam of Eden or Egypt awash with blood and locusts; I’d always loved, yet never believed in an immaculate Son… but I still wanted to know all about God’s creation.

From that point on, he told me black hole bedtime stories every night. Once upon a time, he said, there was a supernova and an event horizon around which time curled itself…
When I finally nodded off, my sleep was so dense with his words, it pulled in and swallowed every bit of light in the room.

The universe doesn't care whether you've spoken or kept silent.  It drowns out our din with its still-hot infant planets and the slow death of white dwarfs.  Aloof neutrinos pass indifferently between the protons of our bodies, between molecules of blue ink, between the thickened skin of scars.  Memory is just a bit of energy in transit, to live or die without a blink from the cosmos.

Art means nothing to the laws of physics and it never will.  Art is simply a human parasite; its life cycle is like that of the blood fluke.  Art, like memory, enters our bodies without our permission; feeds quietly on our insides; creates more of its own kind; and then impotent, withers and dies.  But math, unlike memories, words, love, or art, lives and breathes with or without the bodies of humans; it contains its own heartbeat.  It is the DNA of stars.

This is what matters.

You appeared in front of me and without looking up, I wrapped my fingers around you, drew your soft, fragrant flesh across my cheek, put you to my lips, but never bit down.

We all must learn to forget.  We cannot remember forever or our memories will push up against our skin and eventaully come pouring out of our mouths.  You must sit quietly, reject every thought, and wait until your ghosts of Christmas past become faceless.  But even so, there are times when I wake up and there you are, a tiny mark on my body.  Just to the right of my heart, a scar more supple and white than my history ever will be.  I may have forgotten my past, but the spaces between my cells remember.

I've burned all my bridges in Boston...

But there is only one I regret.

Yesterday it rained in the desert and it tapped the dust back into the ground and brought the smell of spring dancing up into the air.  The smell reminded me of home.  I expected to close and my eyes and open them again to green maples growing up against the shore of the Genesee instead of barrel cactus and tumble weeds.

The rain in Tucson was as cold as the rain that warm spring night walking home.  We stripped out of our heavy sweatshirts and jeans and jumped in puddles like children.  Soaked through with water and the beautiful darkness, I shivered with cold and laughter.  We saved the fat earth worms that littered the sidewalks like confetti during the storm; cradling them in our hands, we whispered promises to their wet flesh, and gave them new life back into the grass--life they never would have seen without us.

I remember cooking at midnight--layering sauce and fresh cheese with my hands, doing dishes while it cooked, and smiling at the happiness of that oven-warmed kitchen.  Later, making love with candles around the room, darkness in only the corners, the sweet slide of your hand up my body.  Wine on the desk and rose petals lying sweet and cliche on the ground.  My nails and fingertips biting into the soft skin of your back while the sound of of our breath and the rustle of sheets filled the room.

I remember that terrible, clear morning, collapsing into your arms, which were always open, and crying hot tears onto the shoulder of your t-shirt.  Life that year had edges that had been torn ragged, and you smoothed them down for me.  You whispered into my hair, rocked me slowly back and forth until I was quiet and life had gathered itself together again.  You saved me from myself and those unkind six months.  You made up for all of the ugliness with unfaltering tenderness and your steady presence in my life.

And I remember walking out onto the decrepit railroad bridge that stretched across the river. Terror and joy mingled as we inched out onto the planks of wood and steel. You held my hand (and I held yours back, far tighter) as the sun dipped low over the world and threw that evening into gold, then orange, then rose, then plum-colored light, until finally the world grew dark.  We drank beers in brown bottles, my head on your shoulder, and watched as the sun sank into the horizon.

Do not be mistaken, I think about these things every day and all the time ask the awful question of myself "Did I make the right choice?"