We Only Have Time Left for Healing

Listen to this next track, this ample supply of nectar. Stick your neck out. Take a long, drawn-out chance in the direction of this awkward kiss and embrace it as you would a dying animal whom you found aching in the middle of your room when you woke up this morning in your soft, warm, wet bed, the window open so perhaps this living being flew in because it was looking for help and it found you and it took a chance and you won’t have to kiss it because it’s a metaphor; at least it started as a metaphor and now it’s literal. It has worked its way up the emotional ladder and now it sits throbbing in the middle of your room and tears are welling up in your eyes because you feel its pain and you want to help but you don’t know how; at least, you don’t believe that you know how or could learn how, but something in you switches, as if the right song, just the right song, has begun to play on the radio to inspire your movement out of bed and towards helping. But there is no radio in the room, so the words must be coming from your own mouth. You must be singing without trying. The animal, the other living being in the room, is certainly not singing. It is quivering more than anything. It feels alone, just as you feel alone, but this situation isn’t as simple as you and the wounded animal being the same. You are different. You didn’t fly through the window. You are not quivering on the floor, though your heart has been shaking like a plastic bag in a wind storm for years. Doesn’t this make sense to you? Doesn’t it want to make sense to you? The man on the corner is singing your song, has been chanting your name for years, and you haven’t noticed. At least, not yet. At least, the weather wants to rain for you in this dark corner of the mind’s museum. Hear those violins, the multitude of violins, the strings like super thin licorice tempting from your ears a particular kind of awareness. Doesn’t this moment reach for your shoulders and shake you until you finally wake up? Because there is at least half a page to go on this screen, this fake, computerized version of paper, and those songs keep coming, and this moment, this moment is full of rich treasure. And the last song, that last song, just like the other ones, finished too quickly, disappeared from the sky like another batch of fireworks you spent your hard-earned summer job money on. And now it’s all gone. All that color. It was beautiful. You watched it. It went up and sprouted like an onion in fast forward, and it burst like a pillow in a pillow fight, except the stitching was bad and the feathers flew out. Doesn’t this beg the question? Haven’t you considered the possibility that those feathers wanted to fly? Isn’t it lovely to know that possibly, just possibly, those feathers wanted to having nothing to do with fighting? They just wanted to be by themselves flying, whether or not you were in the room, whether or not the sun was shining through the window, whether or not the rain had finally fell. So today wasn’t your best day, and neither was yesterday, and that’s okay. The wounded, quivering, loving, tender animal is still there in the middle of the room, sprawled like an unfinished handwritten note on the hardwood floor, and you are getting closer. You are sampling the quality of the air and light, not knowing what to do with any of it. The animal looks up at you as your shadow folds over it, like an invisible bed sheet, like cool hands on a day without shade, and you pick it up gently, careful not to bend the neck, careful not to move too quickly, and you, there, kneeling down and still stiff from a night of long, hard sleeplessness, feel the sudden sensation of snow on your nape. This happens to be that time of the year when snow doesn’t fall, but that matters not to you from now on. Weather forecasts, like emotions, are arbitrary. Better to open the window. Better to listen to this small animal’s heartbeat. Press your ear there. No, not there. Here, yes here. What do you recognize? What do you find before it disappears? Take this sorrow that fills your bones like toothpaste in a wall full of holes where nails where pounded before pictures of lost things, of past things, were hung. Take this sorrow and let it sit there next to you and the wounded animal that doesn’t quiver anymore. Your hands are still two bowls: one of sunlight and one of clouds. One hand folds into the other around the animal, and the sky finally rains after what seems like days of too much dust and dryness. Taste that. Taste this. Slip your mind from the glove compartment. It has been a long time, and the drive was full of bumps that rocked the balance, shook the tires, made the songs skip. But distances were travelled. Long distances full of thunder and moss and creosote and hills and wanting and living and water.

Flood: A Very Short Story About Love

The river water had just begun to sag off from the edges of the sidewalk, and she took my hand like it was the handle for a blob of cotton candy, as if she’d rather not get her mitten sticky.

But it’s too late for that, I told her, not sure if she had read my thoughts. She looked at me, confused.

I trudged on, snow crunching like potato chips beneath my feet, convinced that she was playing a game with me. One of those insidious mind games deciphered in the books of R.D. Laing or Dr. Seuss. I can’t remember which. And that is what I’ve heard, anyway. From someone who had spoken to someone else who knew someone who had read at least a few of the paragraphs by one or both of the aforementioned authors.

None of this has been confirmed, I continued in my monologue. Besides that, there is nothing you can do to stop my sweat from meeting first-hand your sweat. If we touch, it’s all over.

Then it’s over, she said, because we’re touching.

That was logic that I could not refute. I let go of her hand, but we didn’t leave each other’s side. We were like two boats escorting each other through the lighthouse-less night, talking to each other through an imaginary phone of invisible cups and see-through string. Sometimes the connection was a little scratchy, but we tried our best, while the sun and moon argued about who cut in front of whom, while the crickets ticked off the lone box on their to-do list.

7:47am Meditation

Is this as much about hippos as broad hips? Hipsters and Halifax, Canada couldn’t make this anymore interesting if whole populations let down their hair in a manner akin to whatever and whatnot. That’s what the lollipop-shaped girls say, anyway. It was a dream of being above water that started it all, and then thoughts dove, submerged, and the whole island left itself wide open to be embraced without necessarily wanting to be held so tightly, and rightly so, don’t you think? It has been years since the mountain moved one way to the left, and sooner rather than later it will decide to move back in the other direction, or perhaps backwards, with a tiny strut, and a tutt tutt, and then out at an angle, similar to the Electric Slide, but with more danger of losing an ankle. I don’t remember there being another I, another me, but apparently that is how the story goes, that is how the gifts unwrap themselves. Around the wrists, and then the elbows. It is easier that way, we’ve been told, to shimmy through the ever-narrowing passageways of our lives. The walls are tall. Certainly we can both see the sea from the side of a sofa seat. Don’t worry about taking your time. Just close those eyes, squeeze out the mercy, the apology, the foam and rock, the cold sand, the wet weed, the shells and what used to be inside them. Like buses, driving north, in the rain, in the traffic. Like skeletons of stories that haven’t been written and peep relentlessly as we’re sleeping.