A Frame and after

we go on a weekend to a place we've never heard of

I am writing from the air, the map on the back of the seat in front of me says just above the Mississippi, though I can’t see through the grey cloud to whatever is below us; we are passing into Illinois, the nose of the enormous plane as it is depicted on the flight map underlining the first three letters in Milwaukee. Last weekend I went with M&S to an Aframe in Scofield; my psychiatrist says they have an excellent 4th of July Parade and that the lake is beautiful, but mostly we sheltered inside from the 6 degree morning. We were there to write. Each of us spent the blocks we set aside for work (three hour stretches on the agenda I wrote in different colors of metallic ink, often unspooling into four hours, five) making uncertain forward motion in the projects we’ve been trial-and-erroring our way towards for two years, or nearly, though hopefully by that mark in time, late August, we will be in other places, temporally and existentially if not, for me, spatially.

Late in the second evening, after I had made burritos for us, stirring rice on the stove and putting the peppers in with the onions too soon so they came out crunchier than I meant but satisfying against the softer textures, I dissolved entirely, first on the floor upstairs, face pushed into the folded blanket I had put in the corner early that morning, when I collapsed my bed like a tongue back into the mouth of the loveseat and put the linens out of the way; and then continued the tears in M’s lap, S’s hand on my shoulder, both of their arms eventually tight around me, necessary pressure. I am coming into anger, this week, at the long process of healing I have undertaken before and am now facing, for someone who says I should enumerate for them the ways my body did things it didn’t want to. So I’m sorry like this to welcome you, even for a moment, to the seacave of my trauma, flooding with water; I am all on the surface, I will not tell a lie (though I can, Abe, with skill and satisfaction).

Stitching together segments of thesis I found myself with over 16000 words; something like a solid beginning. We drove to a scenic overlook and S got trucks going by to bellow at us and then we ran loose-limbed across the highway, close to a corner, to traipse through snow with big steps to the frozen waterfall M was worried would crack and shatter onto us, which I only wanted to touch. I took photos of them in front of the ripples of the ice, the rooms and sculptural ledges, spaces that were just time caught in stillness; S licked an icicle that tasted like smog; we got snow in our boots so our toes stayed cold for hours. When we got back we shed layers and poured our attention into our various word processors. We had a difficult time keeping all the corners of the house the right temperature, so I shivered through the first night and all the second afternoon we felt stifled by oppressive heat, kept turning knobs a few notches, first one way, then the other, consumed by the busywork inherent in the taking off and putting on again of layers, the movement from space to closely-situated space, tight triangle, looking for a place the air felt different.

Said like that it sounds like we felt trapped inside the uncontrol all weekend when mostly we swayed between movements of adagio satisfaction and an expansive ecstatic, a state of mutual buzz that animated us in whatever task: the retelling of a trashy plot, the mixing of brownie mix, the writing of words or their rearrangement.

Song of the day: Babydoll by Laurie Anderson

Fit of the day: lavender leggings (REI), black mock neck (who knows), Nike sweatshirt (Savers), Under Armor lavender jacket (Savers), cat socks (Target), Blundstones (Mom?)

Color of the day: Pantone 13-3810 TRX (Lavender Fog)

Pain of the day: occasional shot through formerly-broken wrist, arrow towards but not into my thumb

Brag of the day: I’m so good at letterpress can you believe it

On the day after the most recent spate of Bad Things happened, a package arrived from my Mom, full mostly of books but packed with small treasures too, socks and pens and my favorite soap, strong enough that my bedroom begins to smell of black tea and rose, things tucked between to keep the books from sliding. In this box was the Avian Tarot, so I’ve been reading again, something I’ve been lazy about lately. I read last weekend for M&S&myself, three card pulls that gave clear and uncomplicated narratives of past, present, and future. S was overflowing with new achievement, and M&I aglow for her; M&I less certain of ourselves and our third cards but letting them tell us truths all the same.

I brought the big lens because I was hoping for birds, but I didn’t see any, not that I can think of, a silence punctuated not by call and song but by the rev of snowmobiles, the eternal beep of a snowplow backing up in the driveway. My car could not handle the incline under three inches of snow and it was lucky that as I started shovelling a plow drove by and made my afternoon much warmer and simpler by doing the labor for me. I wanted to pay them the ten dollars I had in my wallet and really I wished I had something baked that I could give them, a cake, a miraculous and warm package of sugar and gluten to hold in their hands and eat in the tractor body of their back-saving vehicle, but they were kind and quick and back down the driveway before I could offer the two crumpled bills in gratitude.

We have now passed over Chicago and Lake Michigan, so that the lights I see below might be Grand Rapids or Kalamazoo, even Holland where my mom went to college and where I once purchased, or rather convinced my parents to purchase, a perfect Dutch girl costume for my American Girl doll, a wooden pin in the shape of a clog with her name burned into it. I wanted my name to be Lily so instead I deposited it upon her, long blonde hair picked out to be like mine.

Will anything I make ever be as good as the gold lights from high above, the neural structure of the lights reaching from city to city to suburb to the seam of the faraway sky, indistinguishable in the dark from the unlit ground? I mean, no it won’t be, but by what measure can I approach it, the perfect contentment it gives me, the calm and slightly sad sense of….I really don’t know, I couldn’t say, this echo in my chest.

And now a grid, cut through by long diagonal, one column of unit squares filled in bright but the others only traced, grid paper of city light.

It’s Valentine’s Day, my Valentine is the sky. Nevermind who I am thinking of, or if they think of me.

Suddenly the lights disperse and we are over Lake Erie, pointed ESE, 472 miles from home. At the airport having reclaimed the Osprey backpack I’ve taken into the outdoors only once and the gate-checked Patagonia bag with one strap gently tearing from its body (a detachment begun on a long delay in Denver, bag overstuffed with a weight of books too heavy for either it or me), I will find my way to a Lyft and thence through traffic from Jamaica to my parents’ apartment, which it no longer feels right to call mine. I will wonder all week if my parents know how distant I feel from them, from these 1400 square feet, inclusive of the small room my brother used to sleep in that now houses our reunited bunkbeds, where I lay on my back, raise my feet and push against the slats above me the same way I did as a child, feel the pressure push my back into the mattress. Sometimes, when we still shared a room, my brother would reach a hand down between the bed and the wall and I would reach a hand up and we would intend again the secret handshake we never really settled on. Once I dreamed a creature like Golem but all green, and another all pink; one crawled out from the space between my bed and the wall and I can’t remember if that was the good one or the evil one from which the other strove to protect me that emerged this way, from a slim space too close to me.

My nightmares go on dispersing, one milligram at a time, and I am interested in the plane that will open, shifted from the terrors I am accustomed to, but still a place I want to explore, when I am willing to sacrifice the scant hours of my life to sleeping. Infrastructure, I keep telling people; my mind is always making up elaborate infrastructure, and I hope outside of nightmare I'll have more attention for these systems of planning and public transit, strange maneuvers through familiar cities.

On the drive back from the A frame outside a town I could never have imagined knowing, two years ago, a place whose name, at least, I now recognize, its scant roads on a map, a vacation rental and a very nice man in a very small plow—in the middle of our drive north we stopped for coffee and then again at Barnes & Noble, where as usual I spent too long. Later we gathered at M’s for the Superbowl, an event that emphasizes in me a mild and laughing confusion; I am very much not a football fan and very much asexual, reports from the party at large over Usher’s performance having much less than mine to do with the actually very interesting cut of his first look, which I Googled later, because I couldn't stop looking at the line of the jacket—it was Dolce & Gabbana and online I look closely at the angles and edges and am more impressed than I was in the living room, my loudest response to the game after all being a comparison of this to the blank flash of so many looks from previous years. Which if I'm being honest I can't at all remember, and were maybe this good after all, only it wasn't a slow afternoon in my friends’ perfect apartment, eating pizza and Oreos and paying no attention to the sport and only to my friends watching it, to the unnecessity of my speaking or acting, the ease of the single hour I spent there, between a trip to Savers and an evening of cooking at home, picking C up from the airport, making more sense of my own rearranged words, still walking all over the pages.

Only a meager cast of days later and I am back in the city that raised me, feeling anxious and at the same time relieved to be back, to be texting friends and planning meals and anticipating the stretch tomorrow of a tattoo appointment, followed by dinner in a place I used to go all the time. It isn't Valentine's Day anymore in New York, but back in Utah there's almost an hour left, and for the stretch of it I spend awake I'll be thinking of people there, recipients of my love and of the digital card that made me laugh from the moment of its ideation until…still, actually, until now.

So go to sleep and dream of strange cities, perfect tailoring, suspended moments of history and home, and I'll see you there, maybe,

E

ps please tell me about your strange dream visions

pps do you think my strange visions are related to either prophecy or curse? If you do you have to tell me, it's the law