January 2019

1.
At high speeds it can feel like the car is about to come apart. Everything rattles. But closeness can still the clanking bits a little, can make gentle the thrashing tremors.

2.
Night reached the hills first; they cast shadows on themselves below a goldfish sky and we traced the liminality with our little car, puttering between the matte fluorescence of service stations with the plus and super octane buttons blacked out and taped over and the dense woods that have not yet been felled, where the foundation of a new McDonalds will eventually find fertile ground for concrete roots.

I probably wondered out loud about something vacuous; if so it didn’t matter enough to commit to memory; we left the thought on the side of the road, mundane refuse for a boring world to compost, and drove off in silence without use for an explanation.

3.
In darkness, snow leaps from nowhere then disappears again, fireworks dissolving into the hurry we beckoned the gas with. It came on suddenly, God beat an old quilt indoors and commanded the flurries to blow through us; the dull shimmer of a crescent moon; a sunbeam through the window of an empty room; the snow banking and turning in familiar patterns; me remembering again that air is occupied space; thus the air around and between us as a barrier might be.

4.
The intimacy index fell sharply before closing, but no one on the floor could pinpoint the problem. To some it was a mistake, a computational error that scaled quickly; others thought it was a market correction; you can end a date with a soulful exchange of saccharine kisses in a cutely contorted embrace, jockeying with the center console, but only in a bull market would every date end this way—a sure sign of a coming crash. On the days you sit at your desk, sedated into Internet oblivion, you will wish the Fed had raised interest rates earlier to cool the too-hot market, but who has the self-control to hold back when the intimacy is there, beaming like a smile outside of time, like forever, saying your name matter-of-factly and holding out a sure hand. We always say we saw it coming, we always knew better.

5.
By the time we crossed back into Massachusetts we rattled. Perhaps we always rattled. I think it ends there, but it’s unclear. I wonder out loud about what it means to return to how things were, and I conclude that each time you throw a dart it makes a hole; no matter how slow you go; after a thousand bullseyes the red cork will crumble into a coarse turf on the floor, leaving empty space that perversely cannot constitute new holes. Perhaps this is what you meant when you said you couldn’t think about hanging out again just yet. Perhaps the next text will be a small broom to sweep up the turf bits of our bullseye; last call; a reaching finger to shut the lights.

6.
“I don’t want to be strangers again”
is what I said of you, alone in the shower.
Is what I said of a stranger
Off somewhere in her own time
Hanging up tasks in her smokehouse
Laboring over the flavors
And doing the work
Sequential & diligent
Without
pause
Without
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