LIT

dead bird,I love you

I have never owned a cat, but my childhood neighbors had a particularly active one named Fuki. As a kitten, he would deposit dead birds in our backyard or on our porch—right at the foot of the door, so it was the first thing we’d see when we went outside. It was usually a clean job, but sometimes there’d be a trail of dripping blood left on the porch and traces of dried blood in his whiskers and on his black and white paws. He was breathless, victorious, and proud, always oblivious to the repulsion that would ensue.

Even then, I felt ashamed of my own disgust—I recognized that the birds were his gift, as if to say, “Look how much I love you!” I wondered if he realized that he became an animal instead of a pet in those moments, and if he could ever understand the reaction his welcome-mat murder scenes received, whether he might be a little embarrassed.

When I think about him now, I’m reminded of Julia Kristeva’s Approaching Abjection. The essay explores what it means to exist outside of the symbolic, or rather, outside a realm in which language can make distinctions between self and other. Her term “abjection” loosely refers to our response to this breakdown between everything I deem to represent myself and everything I reject—a phenomenon which “indicates to me what I keep permanently at a distance in order to live.” She references the idea of seeing a corpse: the way it reminds us of the limits of our constructed boundaries, “death infesting life.”

I think I will always be in love with you, you said at the beginning of August. The first time I heard any combination of those words directed to me in real life, inviting déjà vu for something I’d only imagined.

We were sitting behind the tennis courts in that park near my house. You told me you had cried recently. I was yanking blades of brown grass up from the mud by their roots, weaving them one at a time through the laces of my shoes. I knew you never cried, which I always thought was funny, and that a few minutes ago, my stomach had started feeling like the grass stains on my shoelaces. I still asked you why, because I wanted to confirm I was wrong. It could have been that some part of me wanted to hear the words that came next. Maybe part of me needed to make you say them.

That you regretted how you’d treated me. That you hadn’t realized it was wrong at the time. That you were sorry, and that you had been thinking about us a lot. That you had had these realizations while getting high. With the final confession, I wondered if the apology actually counted and if drugs made people more thoughtful. I wondered if that’s where the term guilt-trip comes from or if I was the one who’d gotten high and was still imagining the entire conversation.

I had no idea how to hold these possibilities. We had barely spoken in over a year, and I was pretty sure you didn’t believe in love, since you reminded me so often that the words love or relationship don’t mean anything at all.

A little less than two years ago, you and I had spent the day at a bookstore in Downtown LA, where we had watched from behind a stack on the second floor a man publicly propose to his girlfriend on a couch on the first.

A few hours later, I found myself choking out the words I think I have feelings for you as you told me I looked like I was about to pass out. We ended up sitting cross-legged on that very same panopticonic couch in the center of rows of books on that first floor as we attempted to work out the details of our new “togetherness.” All I remember is hearing us fall into a book metaphor, something about this part of our relationship being a sequel and having multiple volumes, with writers who couldn’t stop making typos and editors who never caught them. Back in the park two years later, I dug my fingernails into my thigh, remembering our conversation as I drove you home from the bookstore––how deep I’d had to dig to make myself laugh when you said you were still taking this really hot girl in your class to prom instead of me. Just to see what it was like.

I am trying to love urgently, and I love you, one of my closest and longest-held friends said to me when I picked up the phone.

She then confessed that she was worried she had told her boyfriend she loved him too soon. That she had deflated the words by saying them out loud.

She started crying, but I was kind of impressed. She has always known how to tell people exactly what she thinks, when she thinks it. Meanwhile, even asking for a library book I wanted to read took weeks of practice in elementary school—maintaining a steady voice, eye contact, and the confidence to say that I needed something.

I love you’s were even harder than things like no and I don’t want to, which required years of practicing assertion in my grandma’s living room. All the words were bulky coming out of my mouth, bones lodging themselves in the back of my throat. Everything was always somehow too much and not enough—the almost-right-but-not-quite translation of a thing that doesn’t have one.

A few years ago at a UCLA art exhibit, I saw the words Language is sexy. Words are precise and sexy written in white on a black wall. I thought you’d like them too, but you weren’t talking to me at the time. I still think about these words a lot, and how conflicted they made me feel—words might be sexy, but they rarely feel precise. If words aren’t precise, then what can be said about language?

Now, the image mostly reminds me of a dining-hall conversation I had with two friends last spring. A professor of German romance novels had once said to them, romance and seduction lie in the space between what we say and what we mean.

That Sunday, in the park, part of me thought you had said exactly what you meant. It wasn’t what I was used to. Snippets of that six-hour conversation outside a coffee shop crawl into my mind every so often. Maybe you remember how we had planned to discuss our relationship itself, but ended up going nowhere near it.

Sometimes, the space between what is said and what is meant is not seductive at all. Once you had asked, Does anyone know we hook up sometimes? I had responded, a few friends. What I had wanted to say was, I’m sorry if I embarrass you. Maybe your refusal to hold my hand or put your arm around me in public should have told me everything.

We didn’t just know what the other person wanted to say, and the notion that we did only fed the fantasy of complete mutual understanding without communication. That Sunday, though, I wished I had asked why you got to break the rules of the “relationship” two years too late, when your voice in my head is still so good at talking me out of saying what I mean. Still reminds me that phrases like I love you are also questions.

Do you love me, too?

After my friend described her I love you, she asked if I had ever said it myself. I remembered sitting in the mud behind the tennis courts and how I stopped breathing a little when I heard the words for the first time.

I thought I might have been in love with someone else at the time, but I knew as soon as you and I left the park that I should not tell this other person. Even the thought of saying the words out loud seemed more like a question of whether they could expose everything I needed them to, and whether or not I was allowed to have those feelings in the first place.

I started seeing someone, he texted me in November. Anyway, hope you’re doing well.

I wanted to respond, but it hurt a little more each time I started typing. The text hadn’t left very much room for emotion, anyway. I tried, thank you for telling me and stopped thinking how the first letter he wrote me has spent the

last eight months on my bedside table. It was only a few sentences long, which made it so much easier for me to simagine every word appearing below his pen. He ended, here’s to the future!, and I hate the sound the phrase makes in my head when I think about it now. What future?

I told a few friends about the text, hoping someone would validate my need to feel something more than his business-casual tone. To tell me I wasn’t crazy or needy or hadn’t misinterpreted every conversation that had led to that moment.

At least he told you.

You and I always bonded over death, which has been more upsetting to me than it used to since our last conversation. Every once in a while, you’d send me a photo of something dead on the road, and I’d joke, I’m so glad that made you think of me (even though I really did feel lucky).

Once, we walked beside a railroad track and you said, we should just tell people we’re dating. I fixated on a bloody bird blending into the gravel while you explained that it was so much more convenient that way. The next day, a friend called me at school to say she heard that you broke up with me. I hadn’t known.

After I told you I needed to take a break from talking last fall, I started running up the same hill every day. There was a small curve on the road where I’d find a different dead mouse each time I ran. I had a mouse infestation in my house at the time––I heard them slipping between invisible slides and staircases at night while I tried to fall asleep. Some nights, it was comforting. Other nights, I lay awake preoccupied by the sound of my heartbeat, which amplified the scuffles and convinced me I wouldn’t wake up the next morning.

The last time I saw a dead bird, it was covered in fresh snow. I happened to be walking next to a different set of railroad tracks and heard our conversation again––the one about convenience.

RACHEL CARLSON B’23 is testing the limits of her constructed boundaries.

here and now

here, we squeeze minutes into minutes, sandwiching ourselves between people on the MBTA, or any warm corner of our three-century-old abode — the heater ever boiling; the AC sorely missing.

i’m starting to realize why people never leave california. the sunset melts sticky on the horizon; scatters its golden flecks across the glimmering Pacific; shiny glimpses as rare and common as everyday eclipses.

here, love settles into the dips we trip into, makes its home in the sand beneath our toes, sends a gentle breeze caressing with familiar ease; a momentary safe haven.

it’s pretty close to Heaven minus the traffic, but the freeway music makes up for it anyways, filling gaps between the sun-baked yellow-spotted highway from san diego to joan didion’s sacramento.

in manhattan beach, the rules and steel of manhattan, new york city, are taken out to rust, welded into docked boats, taken out to sea, and hooked with live bait to see what this ocean brings.

this time; this vastness; this “last-ness” of sunset behind smog, signaling bigger realities of burning and climate and borrowed time —

My Valentine Is A Missouri Homeowner

The girl I love is buying a house on Route 66

Sometime around mid-February, a girl will get the keys to the house she has bought in Waynesville, Missouri. She’ll unlock the front door, perch crisscrossed on cheap gray carpeting, and sigh, relieved to have made it out of her cramped apartment a few miles down the highway in St. Robert. I will stare out my window in Providence, smile and shake my head, marveling at the absurdity of past expectations. For Valentine’s Day this year, the girl I love gets a house, and I join the proud ranks of poor souls in love with Missouri homeowners.

It’s a funny house. One-story, three-bedroom, one bath. It probably was originally built so its photograph could shine on the glossy pages of a 1970’s suburban real estate catalogue, but five decades of erratic Missouri winters have beaten down the exterior. The purportedly beige paint job seems to blend into the pale and blotchy yellows, browns, and greens of the overgrown yard in wintertime. Leaning over the rails of the back porch, you can see and hear where the backyard dips down towards a little creek, faintly gurgling.

The girl I love wrote her English thesis about being place-confused, or rather, being rooted in half a dozen different spots at the same time. Boise, Providence, Chicago, Denver, she stretches herself across the country, trying to show these places that she loves them all at once. How fitting then, that the United States military—the organization that she’s indebted to in exchange for four years of tuition— recently announced in a neat document that she will, for the foreseeable future, be reporting to a base snugged in the perfect geographic middle of the country, the nexus of all these cherished places.

Google tells me that Waynesville, Missouri is an old Route 66 town with a population of 5,627— come Valentine’s Day, that’ll be 5,628 and better for it. For me, Waynesville represents something of an American nucleus, a place whose narrative is written with all the contradicting joys and uglinesses that embody my conflicted relationship with my country. Pulaski County historical markers around town will tell you how free-wheelin’ travellers stopped here for a night’s rest on the way from Chicago to LA, just like they’ll tell you that dispossessed members of the Cherokee Nation painfully trudged through on their way to Oklahoma. The bold red, white, and blue of a Trump banner adorns the hill overlooking one end of Main Street, while elderly folk strolling along the river at the other end will greet you with indescribable warmth. My love landed in a place where a legacy of hatred and violence faces up noseto-nose with hospitality and kindness, an identity as conflicted as a gentle, empathetic Brown University English major serving in the US Army. Waynesville is becoming my heartland, where all of my American confusions live next door to the girl I love.

For centuries, Waynesville was on the way. On the way of some tragic or blissful American journey–certainly not the destination, but at least in-between. The town can hardly boast that today. Highway I-70 now cuts straight across the flatter parts of Missouri, from St. Louis right to Kansas City, while Waynesville is at best an hour-and-a-half off the interstate. There’s really no reason to risk your life skidding out on winding, icy state highways, only to arrive at a town with more hardware stores than coffee shops.

Unless you’re me, of course. Her assignment and this house have given me a sustained reason to visit Waynesville, get to know it, not just as an inbetween but as an entity unto itself. I have stumbled into the very real possibility of finding belonging in Waynesville, Missouri.

For almost three years now, falling in love with the girl has also been falling in love with the grand, tragic, and complicated human geographies of America. Her deep desire to untangle American contradictions pairs naturally with her inspiring romantic clarity. She speaks about movement and oscillation, soil and roots, land and people, and I drive around the country in little lopsided circles. In my career as a wide-eyed road tripper, I’ve learned how to crack sunflower seeds on the way and play harmonica from high places when I get there. If performed correctly, these little rituals can momentarily melt a little bit of your spirit into a place, make you feel like you were a part of something even if you were only passing through. Road trip sacraments, however, have beginnings and ends.

That is not so with a house, nor is it with love. A house is built for longevity, its foundation cemented in the soil of a place, and a property purchase contract has no expiration date. A house’s perpetuity is material, understood every time you pull into the driveway and walk inside; when a house is knocked down, it ceases to occupy the physical space it once did. Love’s perpetuity is more abstract. It’s a mutually understood energy exchanged between people, maintained with the tenderness of a garden that’s built to last. Love’s endurance is born not out of the fruits harvested from that garden, material gifts that provide a moment of sustenance and pleasure, but from commitment to the garden itself: growth for growth’s sake, life for life’s sake. Love sneaks up on you like a friend who says let’s go somewhere: you can either hop in before you have time to ask where you’re headed, or stay sitting around twiddling your thumbs. When you move in or leave town, that home and that love become your entire world.

Of course, I did not buy this house. I enjoy no VA loan mortgage options. Never in my wildest Americana fantasies did I entertain visiting Missouri before this whole episode, and I certainly don’t have any desire to put my roots down anywhere until I’m at least 30. But I am in love with this girl and hope to continue being in love with this girl. As such, both our love and her house, with all of their strange perpetuities, have molded quite absurdly with our journey. The house is now an object of wonder and uncertainty, intimately connected yet

spatially separate from the love we maintain from a thousand miles away. It seems that I’ve become a magnet being pulled towards the core of America, the charmingly unpredictable home of my love.

The girl I love invited me over to her place a few times after I first met her in the spring of 2018. She lived in a suite with two doubles, the stateliest dorm my wide freshman eyes had ever encountered. She seemed much older, more grounded. Once, when she let me in, a homemade pizza was in the oven and it filled up the common room with an easy warmth. She had pictures on the wall in her room, I studied them hungrily in that blurry season’s spare moments. There was a mutt with a big spot on a bright blue eye, old folks with wide crooked smiles, girls throwing their hands up in front of a lake.

I saw her again after a long summer. I remember the nauseating white of her single dorm’s naked walls, and trying to help her put up a few posters one humid September morning. They peeled off the painted cinder blocks as we each tussled with our future in our own heads. By May, I was taking those posters down, folding them haphazardly into cardboard boxes and lugging them to the basement of my childhood home on Wayland Avenue to store for the summer. For a few months, those relic-filled boxes sat in my parent’s basement, waiting for her to bring their contents back to life.

Later that summer, I helped her and her housemates organize their living room on Governor Street. I got a big Yucca plant that stuck around all year, through chaotic late-night study sessions and parties, new hairstyles and changing seasons. When COVID hit, I more or less moved in. I played her guitar, slept in her bed, spent time with her housemates, built and broke things. I livened the house and the house livened me. Then after a few hazy springtime weeks and a Zoom graduation ceremony, I helped her pack it all—photos, posters, rock chick clothes and army gear, earrings and baskets and drawings I’d given over the years —into her Acura. We pushed it across the country to her parent’s home in Denver, so full we could hardly see out the rearview mirror.

This winter break, when I circled back east after five or six thousand miles of driving around, she was with me. We were heading from Denver to Missouri. But this time, when she piled things into the car, they weren’t pillows and shoes, four seasons of clothes or three years of cookware. This time, she loaded the trunk of my Subaru with the books and records she grew up with, tools and cutlery inherited from parents and grandparents, things to make a house a home. She was a girl on her way to fill up a thousand square feet of wood and plaster with glorious clutter, a girl determined to turn a Zillow slideshow into a wild anti-suburban paradise. A place you want to fill up with Lucinda Williams songs and pizza smells and friendly people.

When you fall in love with a person you fall in love with their spot, their stuff, the entire sensory experience of that person and the space they inhabit. I’ve heard it time and time again from my friends. Dude, her room had so much cool shit on the walls, I think I might try to see her again, or conversely, He’s great, but I can’t stand his roommates. If you stick around long enough, you’ll appear in some of the pictures on the wall. If you stick around longer yet, you’ll learn that it’s less about the brick and mortar, more about the people and knick-knacks and stories that get told the morning after nights of drinking. And if you accidentally fall in love with a girl in ROTC, then years of packing and unpacking boxes may even culminate towards trading command strips and string lights for paint rollers and power drills, while you’re still 21. You’ll learn, as I have yet to, how to help the girl build—really build—her home in Missouri.

For the two years and change we’ve been together, I’ve always been there to help her bring her stuff around, between dorms and houses, even crosscountry and back again. I’ve done my best to make myself available during life changes, and she’s done the same for me. Time and time again we’ve shown up with a set of hands strong enough to carry couches and a love continuous enough to absorb the shock of a life in flux. We buy each other Yucca plants to say this’ll stick around long enough to make this living room a place for living. It’s always been each other’s physical presence and the alwaysslightly-changing collection of sentimental clutter that turns the liminal into something beautiful.

Now I’m 1,300 miles away, and I won’t be able to help her move in on Valentine’s Day. In fact, I may not need to help her move in somewhere new for quite awhile—after a few UHaul trips from her St. Robert apartment she’ll be settled for some time. The familiar posters will go up on the wall, and it won’t be her things that are in flux, it’ll be me. For the coming four months, I’ll be at my desk on Williams Street, finishing my degree. And then? I hope to become a man in motion, spanning the geography of this country in unpredictable ways. I may get a job in some coastal metropolis, or go to some forest to clear trails, some desert to teach kids, some hills to write. I hope that my post-pandemic momentum propels me over mountains and rivers, and back again.

How does somebody in motion possibly help the person he loves build a house? I can’t offer any hands to unload her UHaul in a few weeks, or offer physical care like I could when her place was a five minute walk across Fox Point. I figure, maybe I can learn a thing or two from her pictures and posters, records and cookware. They are consistent yet alwayschanging forces in her universe, to be arranged originally in each new place, simultaneously novel and familiar. These things carry a certain ephemeral beauty, reconciling cherished memories with exciting possibilities, past love with love to be made.

When I’m with this girl, the good times unfurl just as effortlessly as smiles captured in pictures on the wall. She makes it easy. We tell each other stories of the past, plan trips for the future, and let the love wash over us in the meantime. And that’s how I’ll help put together her house, I suppose, just by being a part of the love that happens when we’re there, together. When I make it back to Waynesville, I’ll make her squid ink risotto and try to harmonize with her irreplicable soulful voice. We’ll make a brick oven to fill up the yard with pizza smells, paint the bathroom yellow. Build because it’s as fun as being in love.

This Valentine’s Day, a girl I love is moving into a house in the heartland of America, and I’ll get there soon. If you need me, you might find me there, helping to make a house a home.

COLE TRIEDMAN B‘21 is in the market for a bolo tie.