What can I tell you, my sister,
my killer,
What can I possibly say.
I guess that I miss you,
I guess I forgive you,
I’m glad that you stood in my way.
—paraphrasing of
Leonard Cohen’s
Blue Raincoat
A long time ago we were a unit, my two-married friends and I and he that I loved.
We were two of us alike, and two of us alike.
Half were fat and half were thin.
We all had glasses — and two pairs, with points.
Perhaps none of them felt so connected, but I did.
Even in my dreams we, all of us, are together.
They still live so freshly in my subconscious mind that they are there in my heart, doing the mundane and touching dances of life, even in my sleep.
I worried about them.
We shared our drinks.
I worry now about them.
We laughed over things.
I still laugh.
I educated them.
We kvetched about each other.
I was educated by them.
I planned things for them. I cooked for them.
We ate, we shopped.
We travelled together to foreign countries and had adventures.
We had jokes only we knew.
We cared for each other’s animals.
We breathed each other’s perfume and smoke.
We watched our lives sprawl out like wrinkled bedsheets.
We lived side by side.
They were my family, in ways even they would never have imagined, since all of them had families in their pasts, and I not much.
There was a day in which
(and I never thought this would ever happen)
I knew I had reached an apex of my life.
It was the day that I was doing nothing out of the ordinary.
A perfect, not-extraordinary day.
I was carrying my laundry from my little cottage to their part of the main house, a basket in my arms, in late spring. Perhaps it was early summer even.
The sun was late afternoon, not hot. The air a bit dusty and slightly breezey. There were plum blossoms on a huge tree near the driveway blooming at their peak and just starting to scatter flurries in the warm wind.
I was trodding over the stones when I saw the sun in the clouds that were starting to develop a hint of early sunset coloring. Just wisps.
I was thinking about nothing, my pets indoors, my dinner plans, nothing much.
My lover’s music was pouring out my cottage door past the good luck symbol and door chimes and bamboo by each side of the doorway. He was just tinkering with something, as he always was, music washing over the afternoon while he was under the desk with some configuration. I never minded that he did that. It was a little bit cute, my mad scientist.
My friends were in their part of the house a few steps away, two smooth dogs on the dirty carpet, snoozing with a blink here and there. There was a computer game playing, and noises of exploding crafts coming out the door. I knew my dear friend was in there squinting at the screen, he was winning, as he was always. He always seemed to win.
I knew somewhere there, maybe on the couch, she was painting her nails.
I stood in my long dress in the driveway, pausing a moment, breathing in something unfamilliar.
It was rest.
I looked at the day, the shadows on the rocks in the driveway, and the sun getting lower in the west, and the green around the edges of the side of the cottage, and I thought, with no small surprise, that I was probably in the best place that could ever be. Peace was at last in my life. I was sure of things. I was sure of us. I was not alone. I was going to have a life after all. Maybe this was what one waits for. I remember smiling.
Then I tucked up the weight of my laundry and went on, across the yard, to the cellar, where the laundry was and went back to things material.
We lost it all when she threw away the marriage.
At the same time, he left me, for her, and all the things I thought were rosy dissolved into chaos and hurt again and the music was worse and hard and worse.
That moment had simply been a crystal ornament, a facet turned just so, just for a second, in the scheme of all the sunchange a life goes through.
And now, past all the noise, she’s come back. Wayward, frivolous, belle and dark, ephemeral, nightmare, daughter-like, Maya of darkness of our lives.
I am with a different man, chosen in haste, as wisely as could be reckoned, from a far and away country,
and we in a far and away city, alone together,
uglier, not the design once hoped for, but a good enough place at the moment.
He is another story.
And her husband ever winningly wants her back.
My friend, the one piece that never shifted, so hurt once,
him that I nursed through the wreckage, is now taking her back, his muse, and soon, the mother of his child. What soft abyss, what bliss, what storm is that? Where does it go?
What can I say to you, the one who took our lives with you?
Did I waste time hating you? No. Not much.
Did I cry over you? Yes. And the pain you brought us, yes.
Did I cry over the one I had loved, that you took? Yes, twice in great ways, and more in many small ways.
Did I hold you to your promise so much that I would hurt you? No.
Can I trust you?
Can I?
I do not know that still.
My dear, my itching unsainted fool, my sisterful of frills and empty folly,
fragile as a kitten, with claws, where do you climb?
Do I care for you as I did?
Do I want to answer?
Do I rejoice that you are back and want to stay?
The folds of my eyes do not sit high and smiling as they were,
but
my older hands are open on my lap.
Put something there for me.
Bring me red envelopes of your cleansed hopes.
Tell me why
and we will see.
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