The Endless

One need not be a Chamber—to be Haunted— Emily Dickinson (poem 670)

M. Brogan

It’s snowing here where I am and I’ve gone out to stand between the red spruce and Pennsylvania pines to smoke a cigarette. I can hear the snow fall and the Allegheny whisper down below as it passes old towns and forgotten campfires. I could really be anywhere, but I am here, dug into the snow with a shovel, and a wool blanket wrapped around my back. I pretend you put it there, but the fire has long gone out and now mud stands where ashes once were. The scent of burnt leaves and wool and breath circle around my nose. I have come here to bury superstitions.

My glasses begin to fog up so I take them off. It reminds me of the time we were hiking in the Carpathians and I couldn’t see you any longer in front of me, so I stopped for a moment to try and dry my lenses off, but my sweater was soaked with sweat. When I looked up, you were a moving blur up ahead on the trail, slowly yet steadily going away, and I thought about calling out to you, but let the moment pass and took a long swig from my canteen instead. That night we became friends with a stray dog and drank mulled wine in a hut with a mountain man of few words. The memory of it makes me smile. It is a series of clips with no words, as if the sound were turned off. I can’t remember what we said to one another. I can only feel my feet unwilling to thaw, smell the wood splitting open in the stove and cloves and cinnamon in the hot wine, and see the fog as it settled over the dark forested mountains, meaning colder weather was coming in. It is a story I want to write down, but I can never write the first word.

Now I stand in snow, the wool blanket around me catching flakes on its fuzz. There is house behind me, one I had built and we always come back to. It’s small with a cobblestone fire place and a creaking porch, it has only one floor and two rooms, and the kitchen can’t fit a table. It is hidden high up in these mountains, in the highlands of Appalachia, where mining and drilling for oil were lifelines, but now are abandoned holes in the earth. This is what the first settlers once called the “frontier,” and you and I called a “small wilderness.” You’re back inside the house now, cooking something on the gas stove. I think I can hear the whistle of the tea pot, and you moving around swiftly, wasting no time, no space; you were always good at that sort of thing: doing, making, moving. The sound of your movement is comfort. The familiarity stretches out towards me like open arms and I forget that I am cold. You are always putting things away and I am always standing somewhere, like now, looking up at a darkening sky.

I close my eyes as if I can sleep out here and suddenly we’re in a bar, hiding from a torrential thunderstorm, in some small town, in some obscure place we’ll later call one of our homes

and look back on fondly, where they call us “honey” and the old boys play pool and laugh at our dancing. We are in the heartland, where food is the essential way of celebrating, of giving thanks, a way of life. The bar is a place cast out of one of those road-trip movies where several young people decide to cut through the Midwest on their way to New York City or Los Angeles. They all wear tall boots here, wading boots or cowboy boots or work boots and they keep saying we are “out-of-towners,” but our towns aren’t that far apart. This is where we came from, these are our roots: old industrial towns that have turned into strip malls and Chinese take-out; where farming used to be a vocation and now is a gambling game, where people shake your hand like their name depends on it, names that go back generations and carry certain weight, names that are painted on mailboxes at the heads of long, gravel, driveways.

You are whiskey and I am beer and we’re dancing to an unfamiliar country song. The bartender says, “That’s bluegrass, sweetheart. Real Americana,” and without looking up, she pours another shot for you. The fiddle has a sound of longing, the singer’s voice the sound of angst. No one knows us here and I take comfort in this, but you are good with strangers. They tell tall tales. You listen and smile and politely call them out on their bullshit as I play another song on the juke box that means something. It’s the song that was playing on a juke box, in a bar, on that Army base before we shipped out to the mountains, after we laughed about body bags and called ourselves “too sensitive.”

But maybe I do feel too much or maybe I am a coward. I confessed this to you one time at four in the morning, because neither of us could sleep. That night you were in a burning truck and I could not get to you. It was a dream that I started having over there. But, now I fear I’m going to lose you. It is a never ending aching. I have not told you this. I wanted to, the night you cried in that hotel room, in that northern city where everyone wore flannel. It was the dead of winter there and we were on one of our journeys, trying to reach some precipice just to say we were somewhere else, just to be somewhere else. You’d had too much to drink when you said our times together were tragic because “we never know which one is going to be the last,” because we did something bad by living, by not suffering enough over there. We got off too easy. But I pleaded; I said you were the best thing that ever happened to me as if this meant we deserved some kind of peace. You said we spent too much time in shoe-boxes together, that all those shacks we lived in made us restless.

And oh, now I can feel the restless interior of your thoughts and how they hung over us like broken shards of glass as we sat in the hotel restaurant, waiting for the taxi back to the airport, only mere hours left before starting back to Afghanistan. We stared out the glass windows onto the busy traffic, the food we ate, becoming rocks in our stomachs and I wanted to say it would be okay, but I didn’t know the first word. We had made a home between one place and another, between each other, something that moved us instead of held us still. It felt like being caught in a wave, right as it crashes over you, out of control and all the while thrashing, trying to swim and breathe; moving, moving, moving without any control over yourself, yet somehow I managed to lift the coffee cup to my lips, look over at you, and notice the sadness in your eyes.

Earlier that day I told you I wanted to be alone and walked for a while in the crowded, ancient city, hands in my pockets. I knew where I was going. I went back to that church, the medieval one by the English language bookstore, the one so tiny it’s really just a room and sat on a flimsy bench in the damp air and watched a nun blow out candles. I prayed that we would all come home. And we did, so why does it hurt?

The bad feeling has bored a hole in me that we have tried to fill with long conversations, with jokes, with laughter, but like that time we were lost hiking in a rainforest, as the night crept up and we were encircled by trees, it rises to the surface again, that feeling that something hides and waits for us. It has become the apparition Maybe I do feel too much or maybe I am a coward.

that stands at the foot of my bed, it has become dread, it has become the moments with you before we part and for that, I am sorry.

I hear you now though, as if we never spent time away from each other, moving about and singing to yourself, because you find it hard to be still, a reassuring sound even when the dark was so thick we tasted it, the flares casting shadows on mountains, making monsters out of nothing. My mind, my mind playing tricks on me. You’re dreaming of that night now, when we waited for a firefight that never came and I’m telling myself I don’t need you to sleep. But here you are, it’s raining, it’s raining harder than it ever has and we’re outside that bar again, sleeping in my car.

Our last conversations were the hardest. We were beginning to feel older and all the running had to stop. We both weren’t saying something, what was it? What was it? It’s all in my head, so my tongue won’t work. So now I’m always trying to get back to you, back to you, back to you, with words, with thoughts or by driving miles to nowhere in the middle of the night, as if I’ll come upon you on the side of the road.

You are far away or you are right here next to me. We’re patrolling a village in an Afghan valley where everyone stares. Now they’re trying to kill us and they don’t even know our names. No, we’re home and dancing in a bar, or I’m grabbing your arm to steady myself on a cobbled, narrow street, somewhere in Europe. No, we’re on the side of the road laughing because we are totally lost or we’re on a train cutting through valleys and looming dark forests and there’s no heat, but we’re drinking cold beer anyway. It doesn’t really matter where we are, does it? We’ve made a home of running. We’ve been hundreds of places and we can’t quite grasp them, can we? They are only an endless movement, an endless angst at the end of your words.

I’m driving to see you now, it’s been months, no years, and I’ve written hundreds of letters and none of them I could send. But I keep buying stamps. And I’d break glass, I’d break bone, I’d break promises to get to you, but I can’t quite get there to the burning truck. But that was just a dream. It never happened, not even in those war zones. We have crossed worlds, you and I, and we got out just fine. I want to reassure you of this, maybe myself, but I can’t. Suddenly, I can no longer hear snowflakes falling on pines, or feel the tips of my fingers, so I stand up and turn around, but there is no house. There is only forest. I try to light another cigarette with my lighter, but the fuel must be low. The sound of its scratching echoes through the trees and suddenly I remember the time we fell asleep holding hands. You are my home and I can’t go back. What is this that crawls up inside me and sits at the bottom of my stomach?

I lay down in the waves of snow now cresting high around me. I am tired of being brave. I am a coward. You would hate that I feel this alone. But I enjoy the sound of silence, the way snow rests on the limbs of trees like they’re telling old tales, whispering. I close my eyes to try to hear them, imagining they’re our memories. “You’re the story-teller,” you always used to say. But I don’t know how to tell this; I don’t know the first word.

I came back to find you even though I knew you weren’t here. These limbs are heavy with memory. I think I will lie down and dream, dream, dream we are somewhere together, facing the darkness that thinks it can consume us. But our story is endless, isn’t it? Someone will be telling it long after we are gone and none of it will be how it really was, but that doesn’t matter. It’s not about the wars anyway. It’s about what comes after.