I married your mom because I love you both. Because I was playing for keeps. You two girls were my packaged deal. I may not be your father by blood or birth, but that doesn’t mean I don’t love you just the same. Where you come from doesn’t matter as much as where you’re going and who you’re going there with. So, here it is: I’m your dad, what I say goes, you can be angry with me and you can hurt my feelings if you’d like, but know this: I love you and if you didn’t realize it already, I forgive you.
Love – Dad.
COME MORNING
People will tell you that young love never lasts. That first loves, full of untested sweetness and fresh off the vine, are temporary. That the feelings you feel are flightless birds. But, I’m doing this anyway. I do love him in the sort of way that is forever, so the cautious sentiments they say to me, they are hollow. I listen without hearing.
I’m doing this, really, I am. I’ve said that, over and over to myself as the hours ticked themselves away. Now there are no more hours. I’m sitting on the edge of my childhood bed atop bed linens that look like frosting on a fancy cake, for the last time, surrounded by glittery knick-knacks and crisp watercolor paintings and blue ribbons from competitions more than a decade old. I think they wanted it like this, frozen in time, forever the dwellings of a little girl with a toothless grin, pigtails and scrapped-up elbows. They’ve kept me here, time-capsuled in a place where Papa could sit me on his shoulders and Mama could braid my hair. Only I’m not a little girl anymore, haven’t been for a long time now. They can keep the memories of me, but they can’t keep me anymore.
It’s not the way I planned it. I thought I’d have a white wedding, my arm linked through my papa’s, a melody to accompany me down the aisle. I pictured all of the timeless testaments that signify the giving away of a beloved to the man of her choosing. But that’s not this life, and this life is mine.
I told them on a spring night that, after graduation, I wanted to marry him and that he wanted to marry me. Showed them the thin gold band he’d given me just a few weeks before. Papa stood up without a word and walked off, Mama bowed her head, shaking it side to side — a silent rebuke and a definite no.
I’ve heard my whole life how he wasn’t good enough. That he came from the wrong place, as if the tracks that bisect a town are also supposed to bisect one’s heart. He wasn’t enough of a boy to be a friend, or a good enough man to be a boyfriend or a husband. But define good? He makes me happy, isn’t that good enough or good for something?
I’ve packed the last of my things while I waited for my parents’ lights to turn off and for the slit under their door to go dark. Now these are the last few moments of this place and time. And when their lights go out, I’ll count to one-thousand, molasses-slow, and then I’ll set myself free.
I’m taking only the scantest of belongings: a string of pearls from my graduation, an album filled with pressed wild pansies, a picture of Mama and myself on a beach somewhere, a card Papa signed with I love you. I’ll take the happy things this start gave me, bundle them up, clutch them close.
He will be waiting for me, down by the creek that crosses below 101 and the Miller’s farm. I’ll climb into the cab of his old truck that smells of tobacco smokes and us, and we’ll head south or north or east or west, drive until the sun rises and wherever we are when the dark fades to brilliance of morning is where we’ll stay for the rest of our lives. He’ll find work and I’ll set up a home. I’ll fix his supper and he’ll hold me through the night. He’ll take me as his wife, and I’ll take his last name for my own. My parents, when they wake to their empty house will find what I’ve left them, a little note left at the bedside in my abandoned pink room and I hope they will know that, wherever I am, I’m happy and I’m home.
THE MISTRESS
I listen to the shower turn on, to the way he hums as he scrubs all proof of me away. From where I lie, I imagine with the soap and water, we too, run down the drain. These are the rules we live by so I pretend it doesn’t hurt. When we’re together, he’s mine. Stolen moments and hours find us tangled in the sheets of a rented bed in a room appointed with fleur de lis shadowy carpet and blackout drapes. Inside four papered walls and on borrowed time, we’ve built this life.
As he turns the water off, as the curtain scrapes across the bar and he steps from the shower, I roll away and face the dark wall of windows that go nowhere. I can hear him gurgle the mouthwash I set beside the sink and I know then that he won’t kiss me again.
Once, when he loved me more than I loved him, he spoke of divorce. Of leaving her, of introducing me to the world rather than keeping me as a secret. We lay together, our breaths flattening out as the air conditioner buzzed, my head against his chest, I listened to his heart beat, believing it belonged to me. But somewhere along the way and sometime ago, he stopped talking about us as if we could survive outside our self-created chrysalis, as if we could be a real thing. And now that I love him more, I let it be.
He steps from the bathroom, I can hear him dressing but I don’t look at him. These moments of stilted goodbyes and until next times don’t come naturally to me. I always tell myself this will be the last time, that when he calls I won’t answer and when he texts I won’t reply. I will be better than who I am and send him home to his wife, not with remorse, but with love, knowing the time has come to release him back into the life he once chose. But I can’t, so I answer, I reply, I wait.
You may wonder what it’s like to love another woman’s husband as deeply as though he were my own. Curious to know why, in a pond full of fish, I’ve stolen mine from the end of someone else’s line and settled for less than I deserved. I’ve wondered that myself, then I look at my friends’ marriages.
One girl, she married for love. In college her husband was the moody, artistic, coffee-house type, the tips of his fingers always stained with tobacco and ink. Now, he’s a financial planner and they have a middle-of-the-road sort of life. Another, well, she married up only to end up down. She had dreams of housewifery, a yellow kitchen and an apron sink. They’re a paycheck away from broke, living in a studio apartment, and she works three jobs trying to make those ends meet. I guess life, and to that end, love, never looks the way you think.
“Next time?” he leans down and whispers in my ear. I all but taste the mint on his breath.
I roll towards him, look up into the face of the other woman’s husband, and seeing the man I love, I nod.
OTHER BOYS
She could hear them on the other side of the door. The sound of them gathering slowly, the greetings they exchanged, the occasional peel of laughter escaping from the din, floating like a balloon above the crowd. The air was fragrant with scents of oleanders and lilies and the polished old oak that cased the windows and graced the floors, doors, jambs, pews and alter. Through the windows she could see the sky, a cloudless abyss of crystalline blue that stretched over that perfect Saturday afternoon uninterrupted. She’d wished for rain, for the sort of luck it brought girls on a day like this. But she didn’t need luck. Not really. She already had him.
She turned towards the mirror, faced the pure white raw-silk gown, the seed-pearls hand-stitched to the Chantilly lace that clung to her decollate, her hair, done up in waves of autumn amber, her skin, sun-kissed and glowing. Through a veil of delicate netting that covered her face she stared at her own reflection, and she thought of all the other boys.
Fledger. His apartment had always smelled of shoe-polish and cologne. Every surface cluttered with nostalgic chotchkies; a horn magnifying glass atop a stack of travel brochures, an un-nested Matryoshka doll, an inlaid mahogany box, a string of cobalt and white Grecian beads, a vintage style messenger bag from Fossil tossed upon a bronze leather pouf he’d casually set beside an electric fireplace. He dressed in grey flannel and tweed even in the summer months. He spoke of literary novels and far away countries while sipping thimble-sized espressos at Starbucks. Some boys are long series of contradictions.
Michael. His sea-g
reen eyes had been terribly dangerous, set close together, hooded by dark brows. Those eyes could search a face as much as they could search a soul. His language had been poetry, when he spoke, his words had been rhythm and verse. All those winter afternoons they laid atop his bed, watching the ceiling fan spin above them, their hands intertwined. He’d spoken softly to her, and she’d almost believed every word until he’d called her the name of another. Some boys belong to no one person.
Adrian. Even all these years later, when she caught the errant scent of densely sweet smoke, she still thought of him without meaning, too. Of the way his face softened after his first hit, the way she giggled after her own. The click of the lighter, the deep, first inhale, the long exhale like a sigh as their limbs and minds loosened. The restfulness they found afterward. Everything was funny, everything was easy. There was no such thing as want or need. It hadn’t ended badly as much as just ended. Some boys are a rebellion a girl can outgrow.
Dante. She could still remember the way the leather of his motorcycle felt pressed against her chest as she leaned into him, her arms around his waist, holding tight as they chased a blood-orange sunset through a southwestern desert town. No sound, only the wind in her ears. He’d gone one day and never returned. She hadn’t been all that surprised and she only wished him well. Some boys aren’t meant to stay.
The other boys, they’d been the petals of a daisy, plucked and pulled. A garden of he loves me, he loves me not, but Marcus… Of all the other boys, he was meant just for her.
THE GROUND FLOOR
“Do you hate me now?” she asked softly from behind him.
The sound of her voice startled him. He’d thought he was alone on this last ride he’d take into the belly of the building. But in the cool, stilted air of the elevator he could smell her and she smelled of home — of the all the meals they’d shared, of the hours they’d slept, of the laughter they’d exchanged, of the perfume he’d bought her. She was a place and time. She was happiness and sadness. She was love and letting go.
“Hate you?” he repeated, pressing the button, watching it light up, feeling the weight of the elevator shift under him as the pulleys and gears moved them towards the ground.
“Yes,” she said. He could hear her sigh heavily. She’d done that when he failed to see things the way she did, he’d always loved that sound.
“No.” He shook his head slowly.
“But you’re moving out. I watched you pack all our things,” she spoke, and he said nothing. “Are you moving on?”
“I’m trying.” He swallowed hard and lifted his head, eight more floors.
“Do you love me still?” Her voice was lithe, the lilt of it heartbreaking hopefully.
“Of course.”
“You did once.”
“I did…not once, but for a long while.”
“For a long while, once upon a time,” her words were like a breath, an exhale, a sweet remember.
She didn’t speak again and for that, he was grateful. In silence the floors passed by, their numbers lit up and blacked out in countdown. When they fell to the earth, their love story would end. She would go left, he would go right. She would move on and so would he. She would vanish like a curl of smoke and he would let her go.
But first…
The elevator dinged and he stepped out into the haze of morning and into the sound of city noise. The way the world had carried on always amazed him as if their life together had been nothing more than a fingerprint smudge on a pane of glass, easily wiped away. He was ready, ready to see her one last time. He turned slowly, imagining the way she would look when their eyes met — her hair blonde and feral, her skin bone-china white with a smattering of freckles across her full cheeks and the bridge of her nose, running down the lengths of her arms. He hoped she’d smile at him like she had when they’d met. It was a smile full of promise, brimming with endless possibilities and ever-afters that came before the sickness, before the death and dying and the letting go. He sucked in a steadying breath and turned slowly to face the place she stood. Only now there was nothing to be seen, the moment passed and with it, the last words she’d whispered came from a place he’d yet to go and the elevator smelled, not of home or her, but of lemon cleaner and oil.
GARY DALE BURNS
Gary Dale Burns is the author of Haiku Composed on an English Tour and has been published in Cavalcade. He lives in New York and is finishing his first large collection of poetry.
WHEN WE ARE OLD
When we’re old there will be a house—our house. A place that has already seen other faces reflected in the built-in cabinet glass. A house that’s felt over its wood floors the scurrying feet of children chasing dogs, parents readying for work, sleepy teens late for school and grandparents softly paddling their slippers back and forth over all this history. When we’re old we’ll be grandparents, hosting the next generation in the guest rooms who visit on holidays and summer vacations. Our house will have a fireplace for the poor circulation in those slippered feet, with toenails blighted like chestnut trees—but we’ve had these nails for years. It was one of the many semblances our youthful love drew to our attention, and on these very same feet we’ll pull over boots in the vestibule and take our tapered bodies to the garden as springtime approaches. The earth we turn gets under our fingernails and we’ll color each other’s pale noses with the brown-red crust of this planet and laugh for awhile, leaving the knowledge behind of our eventual passing into the same ground.
When we’re old the house will be home, a place to rest after all our travels in search of work, new friends and chance opportunities. Many jobs kept us tired and apart, many friends stayed strangers, and the cities were often fearful and loud. But there, in the garden, where your small yellow studio stands with its red oak door, full of fabrics and found objects and art-in-progress, we will have found a place for our own work. On warm days with my window swung open, I sometimes look up from my office in the house, across the garden and into your studio with its door sitting open. I stop pushing my pen to the page and you, intuitively pausing from your needle and thread, look up at me through the air fresh from rain, hot with sun, smiling with a smile that affirms—“Yes, we did this, we’re doing this now, and we wouldn’t have it any other way.”
When we’re old, our youth will have been the adult to the babe of old age, as Black Elk or Wordsworth said contemplating life’s geometry. We cannot square the circle, but we can understand that a curving line leads us along the path that Nature has proscribed and that so many lives, even our own lives at times, tried to deviate in search of the same rounded area for corners, straight edges and Facts. When we’re old, at home, reading by the fire with the last few logs left from winter, we’ll continue to regard each other as if this ember of love will last forever, long past death and beyond the boundaries of all speculation. Philosophy will matter little when we’re old. Love will have been the better teacher than the love of wisdom could have taught us, ever.
ALAN
A few seconds after she left, when the shock wore through the bottom of my chest and I began to heave, the first tears came on. I was all alone in the apartment, the remainder of the Texas twilight dying beyond the blinds. I fell against the couch cushions putting my face into the thick, dark furniture. I had abandoned her first. We’d just come from the largest music event in the region. It was our summer after high school graduation and she was my first girlfriend. In her inherited, turquoise family van we shared our first kiss. The interior smelled like Nori paste, a Japanese paper glue, and to this day whenever I smell the stuff the memory comes back of our messy, awkward, teeth-clinking and lip-pulling. But I could only kiss her forehead and put my arms around her stiff, non-reciprocating body before she turned and went.
Didn’t she understand what had happened? We had been planning to go to this multi-stage festival on its last day for months. We were going to brave the heated asphalt lot full of merchandise and over-priced food, and see all our favorite ba
nds perform. But she had to bring her 10-year old brother. If only her parents hadn’t tasked her with baby-sitting, then none of this would have happened! I could not get up until Alan came home. Alan was a few years older than me, my co-worker, roommate and the best friend I had. He had just come back from visiting his father’s ranch outside of Austin.
“What’s wrong man?” He asked.
“I think I really messed things up with Steph,” I said in a quiet, raspy voice.
Alan seemed to be weighing the visible grief and heavy air I’d exuded all over the living room for the past hour or two. I could only imagine how he was looking over my red face under my messy hair, cross-hatched impressions of the couch’s upholstery on my cheeks. All Alan said of this scene was “Let’s go drinking in the graveyard.” Producing a sixer from behind his pants leg and with the keys to his Ford still in hand, we left the gloomy apartment for a comparatively brighter place—to “get some perspective.”
Alan drove through the humid night air that was slowly cooling. He dropped the headlights to low beams as we went through the sparsely planted bushes beside the gate. Alan sat in the driver’s seat, listening to my babble of sadness, anger and regret. I had left her out of infantile jealousy. We had seen only one band perform before Will complained of “heat-stroke.” Steph took her little brother back to the air-conditioned van and I objected to returning but she had no choice and her best friend had her back. I felt diluted, disconnected, unnoticed—and so I bled into the crowd, not turning up until the end of the day. She must have worried, but I didn’t care until I saw her again in the van. She didn’t say a word.
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