Concatenation

That night I laid out on the concrete of the playground in front of her apartment, watching the un-mowed grass dancing with light and summer gnats—beautiful like a scene from a Miyazaki film. The smoke from my cigarette looked like the faces of our friends who had died young; thank god they drifted up to the street lamps before they had the chance to form a throat and remind me of what a lousy coward I was. She was hanging upside down from a tire swing, staring at the rooftops.

Inside, we listened to a song and I cried like the time the pastor held me underwater, yelling hallelujah because he thought he saved me.

She asked, “What are you thinking? Tell me—please.”

And I promise that I wanted to but couldn’t because I felt like a computer waking, breaking algorithms of feeling, growing conscious. So I was silent. Thinking about all the ways a soul can hurt. I processed everything I wanted to tell her as images, as a Technicolor View-Master. A heavy, apricot sunset off the highway. The man in the melting butterfly wings with the chorus behind him singing about Casimir Pulaski. Doorways of places I left for the last time. Her, hanging from the tire swing, in the moment that I wanted to kiss her.

The next morning, I was sorry that I had to leave without saying goodbye. The red light coming in through the window, it was incessant. I couldn’t sleep. Driving to the lake before going home, I realized how ridiculous it would sound to say that out loud. It really wasn’t the light. Anyway, when I said I had trouble sleeping, what I meant was that I couldn’t remember who I was anymore. At the lake, a blue heron matched the color of the budding sunrise matching the color of the water and, for a moment, it all made some god-damn sense. I remembered how, when I was a child, I thought that only I could see the heron that crept along my parents’ creek and I considered him a secret. That’s the kind of child I was—imaginative, secretive. Carrying a whole world unshared inside my head, overseen by a great blue heron.

I didn’t know how to tell her any of this. The note I wrote for her read, the serpent me beguiled and I did eate. I always liked that line but it didn’t feel quite right because I thought it seemed clever when I was trying to be earnest. So I tried Duras. Please, devour me. Devour me to the point of ugliness. But that felt pitiful. What I wanted to say, what the excited and terrified thing inside of me was singing, simply was impossible to put down so I drew a picture, a sketch of her Converse from memory. I thought, how could I possibly tell someone I love them and not know the intimate details of their sneakers? I don’t know where it came from, this idea about the sneakers. It wasn’t how I was raised to understand love. Love, as I saw it as a child, was indoctrinated in procreation, necessity, and the absolute absence of all affection. It was seen to that I understood this very early. That’s why I am in knots about all this. I am unlearning all these Evangelical rules of intimacy like a clown pulling five miles of scarves out of his pocket that he never should have had to begin with.

So, this is what I wanted to say that night; it’s taken me a long time to understand what it is I am feeling. Maybe it could have been uncomplicated. I’m sorry. Maybe I’m messing all this up. What I mean to say is, there is a world with her and me in it with that blue heron officiating. A world where the sun is rising and setting at the same time. A world where she’s leaning against the door frame of a home I never have to leave.

Cotton Candy Sunrise

Lauren Tuck