Mabon

On University Avenue, overlooking 42nd Street. It’s light evening. From my window, I can only see the bottom half of new students checking maps, of bar humpers lumoxxing in meandered footfalls, of coeds and Chinese herbalists, of bike messengers and policemen. I see breasts and waists and moving feet and the occasional glance upward through the crack, the occasional iris against glass.

The way the buildings are aligned reminds me of perspective drawings in high school, the soft whish of carbon pencils across manila. This is how I would draw them even now, I think. High, low, high. Little windows up top, bigger ones below. Throw in a steeple or an awning and pepper it with landscaping or sidewalk fencing or hash-table doors.

And in my city, the people would have stick legs and arms of uneven lengths. The women would wear triangle dresses and bows in their hair and the men would wear bowler hats. All feet would turn outward and nobody would have a face, just a lopsided circle for a head and perhaps some spiky hair. And they’d keep walking one after the other, on and on without tiring, without end.

There are empty tables around me and muted music over the speakers. Indian sauces mix in the near-between and pester my nose. The chai is spicy and thick and it comes up to my lips to rest there in an eggshell mug. There are no humans outside my window now, only sketch marks and noise. I start counting cadences, making up stories.

The darkness has begun to spread across Seattle and the rains have returned. At night, the refrigerator-breath comes down from the mountains and the spiders curl into the corners and the ravens curl into their feathers and we are single-digit weeks until the end of the year.

There is an exhalation of ghosts.

The white flesh of a faded scar shines across my arm.

I am tired.

I ran it through a plate glass door when I was young because I couldn’t wait to see cartoons. I cried and bled on the stoop in midsummer, in the heat burst of windshields, in the pungency of tomato plants, in the honey bees bedecking melted shafts of half-eaten orange sherbet. And it’s these scars that are visible again, the same ones I move gently with my finger imagining glass claws and tardy animation.

If we are tired, it is because we have been beaten by meat fists and laid into dirt grooves. If we are frightened, it is because we have been given artificial teeth and asked to chew through cornfields. If we are angry, it is because we are angry.

Me, I’m still here.

As he comes in the door, smiling, wet with mist, I start laughing immediately. The lights go up in the restaurant and the window blackens to reveal nothing in reflection but our conversation, white tablecloths, and folded hands.

As If

The doorbell rang around 3 or 4 in the morning. I sat bolt upright in the bed to the wind outside the windows, to the creaking of the porch in the late winter heaviness. I lay there, listening to the sound fade, a low ringing echo down the hallway.

It’s one of the scariest things I can imagine, knowing that somebody is standing outside the door in the pitch-black blackness, finger poised above the button. I’d imagine him leaning toward the eye piece, pressed against the frame, ready for me to let it fall inward. I’d see him smile slightly and move his greasy, unshaven cheek lower. I’d imagine his knuckles on the wood and the smell of him as he whispered “yes…. Yes….”

I’d wait for the doorbell to ring again. It never did.

This was back when I was alone again for the first time. I remember those nights in chilling detail. They happened once a week and stretched over a period of a few months. In hindsight, I’m pretty sure I dreamt the whole thing. But there is still a part of me that can hear the chime diminishing into silence, a hollow sound of a single tone caught between glossy white-paint walls, the hollow sound of my breath catching as my body left the bed.

In this scene, I am naked and pink and spread out over every inch of the mattress, unsuspecting. I’m defenseless and not prepared. I am revealed. It terrifies me.

Maybe this has to do with plucking out some small grey hairs in my sideburns recently. Maybe it’s just time catching up with me. Maybe I’m done exhaling and starting to inhale again. But increasingly, this is how I feel as I go about my days, easily bombarded by gamma rays, walking on oatmeal, a gecko tacked to the wall by one leg and dangling. Revealed.

I really don’t know what I’m doing. I mean, that’s the crux of it. I’ve run out of the luxury of deciding whether I should act or not, of the privilege of playing ‘as if’, of the ease of pretending. I don’t fit into my sense of self anymore. I’ve spent a long, long time pouring energy into things that fizzled before they could provide a return. And what it has garnered me, arguably, is a much higher state of enlightenment and wisdom, a much clearer view of how the world is, a much more flexible acceptance. At the same time, though, it has uprooted my concepts of permanence, of who I am, what I can do, and what I’m going to be in this life. And it has given me narrowing concentric circles in the mundane world of career, love, money, and living.

It is very much like sitting upright in bed and seeing the room around you for what it is. Chair. Dresser. Mirror. Closet. And the intruder is that part of you who knows all the ways that you hide, all the ways that you are naked, all the ways that you’ve deluded yourself about what’s in the room even without realizing you were doing so. That’s a very scary thing. It seeps into all the pores of being and says, “You don’t know”. More than that, it says, “No, you aren’t.” “No, it isn’t.” It hits you smack in the middle of Pride, and it puts you in a position of having to walk familiar roads and roles with the new and humbling notion that you don’t have any clothes on.

We’ve all felt it. That’s the feeling you get when you envy. The 21-year old prize novelist comes on the television, or the world-class musician takes the stage to thousands of appreciative fans, or your friend lands a choice role in a play. You cringe. Your curse. You turn away. In that moment you have to confront yourself in terms of limitation. You have to name your ego (self-image), your past and your potential in the present moment and how that leads to your future. And you have to simultaneously come to terms with all three. You are not what you had thought yourself to be, hoped yourself to be, dreamed of being. You are “diminished” and “lessened” in some intangible way so that even your greatest accomplishments seem a pittance, your greatest talents seem unworthy, your hard-attached self-definition crumbles.

The value in this, of course, is exactly what first seems like the loss in it. The only escape is the admission that you don’t know. The only hope is being illuminated by that. Once you get past the self-abuse or self-hatred and find the real limitation, you can use it. Limitation can be good. Limitation is not necessarily lack. Within it is the possibility of learning, after all. Recognizing that, say, I may not have the ability yet to complete a novel or that I may not yet have the wherewithal to pursue the creation of the things I’m trying to create or that I may not have the skills to be the kind of musician I’d like to be – this can lead to a balancing. It can stop the practice of spending time and energy maintaining a position in the middle, kinda doing this and kinda doing that, and can force you to make the ‘act’ or ‘not act’ decision. It can give you freedom, freedom to see where you are, what you can do, and what you’d like to do, not to mention a clear, unegoed path of how to get there. It can also give you the freedom to let go of the things that don’t provide you a return, maybe those things that you will never be able to do or never do better, maybe those things that lead only to dead-ends, maybe those things that require more energy that you are willing to expend. It makes you as yourself in the purest sense.

That, in a large nutshell, is the shift I’m needing to make and the struggle I’m needing to release. But it’s not easy. It requires riding the edge of who you are, indeed even exploring or finding the edge of who you are. And that requires knowing that you aren’t doing that, despite how much you might like to say it or think it. It requires being extremely honest with yourself at every turn and being present and extended. It requires admitting things to yourself that in no way do you want to speak aloud, not because they are horrible or painful, but because they point directly to ego, self-protection, insecurity, validity, preventing you from going further into the real manifestation of what you now may only pretend to be. In short, they define you by making you human, mortal and not a super being. Nobody wants to admit to that.

As I write this, there is a man outside in the darkness throwing rocks at a street sign. He picks a stone from the road, weighs it thoughtfully in his hand, and tosses it overhead. It never misses. The sound of the rock hitting the metal rings out and he listens to it. Then he calmly picks up another and repeats the process. He stands in a posture not of anger, but almost of desperation, like he has come to the conclusion that the only thing he can do is throw stones at a random street sign on a random corner in Seattle. This is the only thing left to him, the only action possible.

On any other night, this would freak me out. Tonight, in this context, it comforts me. That’s the same three-year-old, don’t-wanna-do-it, not-fair stomping of feet and kicking of walls that I am trying to get at.

He’s much better at this than I am. Curses.