nothingness

It is a day splintered into minutes and moments and clogged with information and voices and conversations.

It is nighttime when I can dissolve into nothingness.

The weight in the front of my mind still heavy, the eyes increasingly tiring...an odd ache that I never noticed before nor remembered how it may have even occurred.

I reach for a glass and ask it to fill me up...take the liquid and its cold ice and warm me...numb me.  Persuade me to push back the littered contents of my brain and sweep them into a closet...at least for a few minutes...let me become calm.

Let me find a quiet.

Let me descend into a comfort.  Let me block out the world.  Visuals.  Let me erase the colors and leave but the grays...let me allow the fog to swallow me slowly and absorb me in.

Let me unclench my hand.  Let me make my own bed and lie in it.

Let me become salt in a glass of water.  Let me liquify and melt and change the flavor a bit.

Let me strive to find a comfortable state...let me find an exquisite position.

Let me work hard at reminding myself that in all of this nothingness that you quite frankly are an everything...and let me let that secret knowledge pull me into a smile and a find that position that I crave.

Sips

He stirred the colors into his coffee until they went from the color of her eyes to the color of her skin in the height of a summer being bronzed in a tan.

The windows were spotted with condensation, the outside air already humid...the air still cold in his room.  High above the city where he was a stranger.

His travel was a broken wheel, lumbering across the country from place to place, an uneven balance to his hours and time zones...never enough sleep, never enough time.  He sipped from the warm cup, trying to figure out what hour it was where she was sleeping...or maybe awake.

There were times when it was just an ache...other times when it was just a bruise.  He felt plucked.  Pulled away.  Time for them was measured in seconds...rarely hours.  Flip the hour glass over once...that's all we have.  Each time like a perfect eclipse...they aligned, sun and moon and then it was past.

The beauty of such passing is she never changed...she was this constant light.  She was in the full grip of his heart and his many, many thoughts of her.  They widened his day, brightened up the bedside...a slice of art that he could conjure up.  She was mystery and knowledge.  Salt and sweet.  A contradiction at times...impossible to read.  But gentle.  Soft.  Feminine.

He saw her so infrequently, interacted with her occasionally.  Yet as he took these tiny sips of her they both satiated him and made her more addictive.

He finished the last of his coffee, tasting the tiny bits of sugar at the bottom of his cup and he remembered that they reminded him of her.

Autumn

What do you want me to do with...those letters?

She heard her mom from above her, upstairs in her former room...she had returned after graduating from college to the home where she was raised.  And now her mom was dismantling her youth, putting it into one box at a time.

She knew exactly what her mom would be holding...a blue shoebox, with letters written in pencil and pen, a familiar cursive sometimes barely legible addressing her name and home.  Some had been hand delivered, in an afternoon of high school...some had Foreign Post Office stamps from when they had been sent from a far off war.  She knew they were a time-stamp of her life, the last years of high school, the full years of college...and they were efforts.  Efforts or perhaps reminders, she couldn't remember...standing at the foot of the stairs, a box of stuffed animals peering out at her.

She heard her mom's footsteps creaking towards the top of the landing...in her hand she held the shoe box and a question on her face...it was like a bucket of memories in those letters.  She knew she would never re-read them...didn't need to.  The themes were consistent and the same.

Just put them back in my closet Mom.  

Her mom raised an eyebrow and returned back to her dismantling.  She knew she was keeping it as something comforting...and maybe someday she wouldn't need those bit of paper and ink.  But for now she just watched her mom return to her old room and drop the box in her closet with a noise she could feel.

Outside her front door the leaves were just trying to pull out the last greens of color they could muster...the early mornings had been cool, with a little fog.  The James River was the color of the earth, dark and rich and when riding the ferry she had to wear a sweater and a scarf.

Coming home after the final summer semester she knew she had to leave this small southern place, needed to find something besides the flat tones near Waverly.  But she had spent so many autumns here, so many times she had embraced the fall, the start of school, returning to friends...

He had been a little bit of that return each time...she'd see him in the hallways...after that one summer when they had blossomed for a bit and then school and others had intertwined...she hadn't pushed him away...she just didn't pull him along.  He was there like initials in a tree, reminding her but not cloying.  He had started the letters, brief simple notes to just let her know that she looked good in a dress...or had an awesome tan.  They were intimate, but immature...but she kept them.

He had volunteered to go serve in the military at a time when others were raising their hand to join...she had wondered at his decision, had told him of his foolishness...they weren't boyfriend and girlfriend...not since that summer long ago.    But each Halloween they ended up at her porch, a candle burning on a protective plate and they would talk...long into the dark.  They were familiar.  They allowed silence to sit between them like a blanket, comfortable.

She always liked to come out the morning of November 1st and see that plate, a melted candle blotching the whiteness...it reminded her of time.

In one of his first letters from the war he had placed a piece of melted wax in the envelope, about the size of a quarter...the black wick was still in it.  He had merely written If there was a time in my life that I could return to it would be the Halloween nights we spent in quiet.  She knew immediately what he felt.

What about these old concert tickets stuck in your mirror? Her mom yelled again from upstairs.
She stood looking out the front door, the light gray coming in through the windows...her mom tapping her hand against another box in her hand.

You can throw them away.

Monday

She awoke in the cold when the sky was the color of a nickel.

Her head squeezed, like a hammer grip, as she anticipated a day filled with bits of anxiety...colorless pleasures, a stone cold in her throat.  She sniffed, a twinge of an illness was on the verge of making an arrival and she got up out of bed.

Hurriedly putting on jeans and boots, she threw on a sweater, bra-less and took to the closet to get her jacket and gloves.  She thought about a hat, grabbed one from the top shelf and stuffed it in the jacket pocket.

The door complained when opened in the cold air and she walked onto the porch, the footsteps wooden and dull.  The air was inhaled and cool, the morning slightly foggy and absorbing the noises...she pulled on her gloves and walked to the tractor barn.

Some of the puddles were iced over in a thin sheer and easily cracked when stepped on.  The mud had frozen and was jagged and and uneven, making the walk staggering.  She pulled off the chain roped around the door handles and pulled the barn door open, a creaking yawn that opened to a darkened garage.  The tractor, her father's...and her grandfather's was parked in the middle of the room...an old John Deere with fading greens and yellows.  It still ran (nothing runs like a Deere) and she touched one of the large tires...black and flaking a little.  She couldn't afford new ones.

She climbed up into the seat, the springs giving in and reached down to turn the key.  The lights came on and the engine coughed then died.  She glanced at the gauges and saw mostly normal signs.  Gas was fine.  She tried again and the engine clanged to life, a bit of blue smoke coming from the exhaust and the engine wound up and settled in...she engaged the drive and pulled out of the barn.

The wind was starting to pick up and it lit into her ears...her head still a vise, her face cold.  She didn't put on the hat yet and quietly bit at herself for not at least fixing coffee.  But she hadn't eaten anything either and didn't want the hot caffeine on any empty stomach, burning itself while she worked.  So she pulled the jacket collar up against her and kept driving to the side of the field where the brush-cutter attachment waited.

She drove over, bouncing on the dirt and furrows and idled up next to the cutter...it had bits of frost on it from the overnight, and rust was the primary color.  But the blades were relatively new and for that she was thankful.  She backed up the tractor so it was almost touching the cutter's male portion and stopped...she got off, lifted the cutter into the tractor slot and slid home the cotter pin.  She gave it a tug to make sure it was seated...felt the secure assurance and climbed back up onto the tractor.

She made a wide turn and stood at the edge of the field...it was a glimpse into her past...she had played here for years growing up...didn't really work it as much as enjoyed it, her father coming home smelling of hay and a day in the sun.  Why she returned to make it hospitable she didn't know.  Her head hurt and she was cold...but she loved this view...loved working the rows, plowing and cutting...restoring.  Restoring the views back to the ones she remembered.  The sun was an orange spotlight through the trees, the fog lifting...her breath was exhaled in a gray plume and despite the hunger making noise in her stomach all she could hear was the idling of the tractor.  She pushed the side button triggering the turning of the cutter blades and they added more noise to the morning.

She pulled forward, destroying the blades of grass and thicket that threatened to overtake her father's farm.

She wore just the tiniest hints of a smile.