I wish that you could see things the way that I do, leaving the house this morning in genesis. Before moving in a year ago, I’d never been to this thirty square miles, and now, I’m not sure how much, if anything, has been learned during my occupation of it. The surroundings carry a plain guise, one perhaps not even desirable, because some days it seems as though there is not another soul available—someone to offer up proof of humankind.
“We are here. We are living here.”
Even imagining someone saying that, or believing that they believe it, in this place, is challenging. From breath to next breath, the living, here, crawl like vectors from one piece of trivia to the next. Nothing they do matters beyond the granular satisfaction they tell themselves they have won, once the wasteful whatever-task has been completed.
Today, I engage in that same thing, moving to move, for there is an abundance of my being that wants to know this place—why anyone ever has to get out—why I wound up getting in.
Just outside my door is a drizzling Saturday morning, with a welcoming committee of pinpricks that feel cooler on my face than September should. Instead, these tiny packages seem like November—just before the rain goes to snow, before we all give in to that transformation—the carefree liquidity of summer season into the meat grinder of what autumn can sometimes mean. Changing clocks, school buses, afternoons that morph into evenings before you can leave the grocery store. Through my eyebrows and atop the high part of my cheeks, the rain sprinkles reality. And I’m never really ready for reality. It’s dark, more like dusk than dawn, which is a sensation that always creates the same emotional tug in my stomach—the idea that I should be mixing a cocktail instead of searching for coffee. Luckily, I’m young enough to remember last night, and the night before that. I’ll trust my wristwatch and the way my bones felt when their collective ache forced opened my eyes only minutes ago.
Glancing at the pool in the backyard, I lock the door in automative process—proof again that I have been here for a year. The pool liner is in good shape, projecting aquamarine and royal blue through the still water, save for the splintering raindrops that fall silently into their dim blue Mecca. There is a shyness to the aging oasis, and my eyes search the water for any promise of light, though there is nothing, aside from the waning evening hours. In my hand, the key rolls over a half-turn. The lock clicks.
My Jeep looks clean enough in the driveway—I fancy the cab on four wheels as some kind of a battlewagon, or a chariot, though I’m not sure why there isn’t more contentment (ever) in my wrinkled mess of a brain, simple as a voice that tells me recognizing a car as just a car, is okay. A branch is a branch, a bird only a bird, and yet, I can’t help but lick the bottom of the pudding cup of wonderment, of life, because doing things with difficulty seems to provide a sweeter reward.
Inside the car, the warmer roars, pushing a comforting dry air into my face and along my forearms—the engine quick to soothe my bones, which somehow have managed to grow cold in the five minutes it took for me to roll from bed, yank up a pair of jeans, and slide my shoes on. I’m grateful for the safety of the car, and for the black and blue morning that is, in fact, so blue and so black, that trees and pavement hold tight to their own bluish shades—unable to remember the June romance that came with the color green, or the finite demand of black, that is, the tar beneath the tires. Now, everything is decayed in color, if only for a moment while the world turns.
When I’ve collected my coffee from the mottled hand extending from the drive-thru window, the tires are soon crunching pebbles at the exit onto the main thoroughfare of whatever this place is, this New Hampshire town. And while it’s been a year, I’m using navigation to get wherever I’m supposed to be—wherever it is I’ve told myself I should be on this morning. The electric green of the traffic signals is playing with the streaking water on the windshield, bending the colors onto the leather seat next to me—a spot occupied by so many, but most often, no one. There is a Walmart truck. There is a gas station canopy. Both are still in this American photograph. There is piano. There is mood. Leo Svirsky, River Without Banks.
The roads are collecting the same blue that found the edges of my own property, though darker out here in the open. A newly paved main drag has brought me almost as far as it can before Chester, a place just beyond where you sleep, where I sleep—home—an inescapable home. Orange mist falls from street lamps onto the asphalt, the product being a damn good imitation of gouache—trees line the roadway, begging me to stop, to allow them some time to share just how old they’ve grown, like the seemingly last conscious thing our grandparents, elderly aunts, and uncles, can do. Time has ravished them, despite the dedication of their middle years and futile attempt to thwart the effects of The Great Conqueror, the only fate there is for any Earthling, trees included. I can’t stop to speak with the trees today. Not this morning.
When I’ve reached my destination, my turnaround on a dead-end street, it is the darkest it is going to be. There is a monopoly on the mediocre here, busted dreams that were weaved with a hope that maybe, someday, those people could claim upper-middle class. That’s a lie, and will always be a lie. We’ll all fall into it, the cavern our parents made, a place between taking a chance and the taxes we’ll never shake. But go we all do, still, and willingly, hoping to outlast everybody else.
You never liked this game. I’m sure of it.
Soon, I’m back tracking toward my selected gravity, through the center of town, where the roads are pitted in a random pattern—snap-ups from plow trucks last winter, corrosion from the dosing of salt, weakened patches from the shrugs of the Earth—producing a cacophony of thumps and thuds, quick galloping noises that force me to think of horse-drawn carriages and the tight skin of everybody that came before me on this Main Street. The garbage in the back of my Jeep rattles like a collection of bones, and there are sympathies and guilt I’m willing to carry in my hearse, reconciling all my choices for a brief couple of moments. I’m sorry that some have, while most others (including you), do not.
But you can always try and go home.
One day, you will discover your specific inheritance and, not surprisingly, notice it awfully familiar. The cyclical nature of our lives, round and round, is the means only to an end. There is no stopping. Your parents could not stop. You cannot stop. There will be fires, friendships, flings, and fuck-ups. There will be fleeting moments of pause, but never a full stop. This action of not only doing, but repeating, will eventually cause each of us to summon the irrational and unreasonable, hoping that it doesn’t hurt us. We will mortgage everything for another opportunity, only delaying the inevitable.
I know only what I know, and I know that you and I were cut from the same cloth. One draped over the razor sharp corner of success and emotional bankruptcy.
I’m almost home now, for whatever it’s worth.
“Obtain for us strength and consolation in the unending warfare of this life…” —Novena to St. James the Great