I hope that reading my writing makes you feel like I've just given you a hug. If it doesn't, e-mail me, and I'll have to give you one in person.

In the bath, my knees are the first part of my body to turn red. I don’t know why, but it’s always been this way. My feet hit first, the veins blue and papery, the bottoms waxed and beginning to take on the color of salmon. But it’s my knees that change the quickest, turning bright red the second they break the surface. I tell this to David.

“Why is that?” I ask. “Why are my knees so quick to turn red?”
“Because they’re embarrassed,” he replies.

*

This weekend I did little but lay in bed, trying to stave off the willowy feeling of crying that pressed like a jewel against my ribcage. I dreamed all night of my Grandmother’s old farmhouse, its delicate china and billowing curtains, the puke-green carpet she traded up for white just before selling the house and moving to a retirement community in New Jersey. We weren’t allowed to wear our shoes inside after that.

In my dream I saw the reflection of my 10-year-old self in her oak vanity, dripping in her jewelry, the elegant scarves she used to wear tied sloppily around my prepubescent waist like a tiered apron. I open the drawers and lift up her silks, her perfume bottles lined neatly in a row. Everything in her bedroom smells like baby powder. On the piano in the living room I taught myself to play chopsticks. She had an antenna TV and a couch wrapped in plastic. It was ritual that at least once each visit she would scold me for rifling through the glass box of potpourri that sat on the living room coffee table.

This weekend I dreamed my mother drove the car off the PCH, that I got lost at the Susquehanna Valley Mall with no cell phone. During the day I kept all the lights in my bedroom off, except for the one above my bed, which I kept on so I could read too much Lorrie Moore. The only person I spoke to was the man in the library who asked for my phone number. On the stairs we passed each other and I said, “Oh, I see you on the BART!” and he replied, “Yeah, you must live around here.” I kept climbing the stairs and turned back to say, “I looked for you last week, but you weren’t there.” His face grew creased with desperation, like he was trying to summon the courage to say something he was scared to say. “I have to run,” he said, chasing me up the stairs, “But can I have your number?”

I blushed, then—my cheeks, not my knees. He was so earnest, like a kid who had just learned his first curse word. I gave my number to him, because I wasn’t wearing any makeup and he didn’t care at all. I gave it to him because he is a person who still goes to the public library, who makes an endearing face when attempting fearlessness, and who looks at me in the morning on the train platform with a tenderness that verges on ferocity. Like all of them, he is too old for me.

*

In the coffee shop by the library, I drink so much coffee my wrists start to shake. I come home and eat artichokes with a fork directly from the jar. My roommate, the programmer, beats me by three points in Boggle. “I thought I was supposed to be the wordsmith in this duo!” I retort. I have never been a graceful loser. Between games I tell him my family is coming for Thanksgiving. “In Pennsylvania, we get that Monday off for the first day of deer hunting season,” I say, a note of hickish pride gleaming subtly in my voice. “Have you ever gone hunting?” he asks. “No!” I shriek. He laughs. “My father gave me a rifle for my 16th birthday,” he says. “Of course I never used it.” I want to hug him then, but don’t; how sad it is that it always seems the people closest to us are the ones who don’t know us at all.

*

While reading on the couch, David sends me a text message. “When I was younger I wanted to be a solider,” it says.
“Really?” I ask.
“Yeah,” he says. “Now I’m drawing a snake made of ties.”
I laugh out loud. “Why did you want to be a soldier?”
“I romanticized the idea of going to war, going overseas to defend an ideal I may or may not agree with. It was an excuse to get out, perhaps.”
“Makes sense.”
“I don’t know,” he says, “I’m just sick of drawing these motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane… of paper.”

*

Later, when my knees have stopped blushing, David says, “It would take me over 39 days to walk to your house.”
I start to cry then, but just a little, the jewel in my ribcage growing shinier, sharper. He is reminding me how far away I am, of the states and roads and deserts that separate us. It is a sweet thing to say.
“Get a bike,” I reply, looking at the Google directions he sent. “Then it will only take you 11.”
“If I had become a soldier, you would never have known me,” he says.
“That would suck. Then I’d have to go looking for you in Iraq.”
“How would you know who to look for?” he asks.
I pause and then say, “I’d know.”
It would take him 1 day and 22 hours to drive to my house.
“Have you ever avoided sleep out of fear you’d never see the people around you again?”
“YES,” I respond emphatically, just like that, in all-caps.

It is a strange fear for people with bodies this young, but both of our hearts are dusty and preciously brittle, the kind of hearts poets might write about, if poets still wrote about such things. We have hearts like dimly-lit parlors, full of lilting, old-fashioned harp music, hearts that are so crowded with the guests of our lives that sometimes they feel like a jewel pressing against our ribcages. When that happens we sleep for days, just to stave off the feeling of crying.

Leave a Reply