A Few More Seconds of Fiction

I’m listening to a radio show about censored books. The olden days are gone, mostly, here anyways, so celebrate!

I, however, would like to be able to censor myself. Like last night with Edam. They bother me but Why oh why cannot I let the cigarettes go?  The smoke it does get in my eyes yet when it clears there is sadness in hers. Her eyes that will no longer look at me. That is the bite. That’s when I realize: life does go on but it has no obligation to take you along with it.

And so Edam floats on, giving her sparkle to others. I am left here on the wet and slippery bank of my excuses to watch.

The Last Fight You’ll Ever Have With Her Never Declares Itself Til After

We, us Wrong Doers, us Nitpickers and Fight Pickers, we think we have an unlimited cache of fights. And so we pick them haphazardly, on whims. We choose them. Isn’t this why it is said one can “pick a fight”? We choose them from the dizzying array of options, a whole lifetime of Irritating Things.

“She’ll stay,” we are not even aware of believing but of course we do. Believe it. If we doubted it, questioned her commitment to this less than perfect union even but especially in the hot second of our angriest adrenaline, we would never fight with her.

Instead we would charm, and woo, and deliver cookies we made ourselves to her workplace. We would let things go we would be bigger men we would laugh at our differences.

The last fight you had with her. What was it about?

Parent Partner Cancer

The house is quiet.
I got up early
   
     what house, what fire?

to read, to write
to swim, to stretch

     what house, what fire?

I made the coffee.
Pet the cat.

I read a poem.

     what house, what fire?

A flash of anger
At sickness, at burdens
we feel too young to bear.

     what house, what fire?

I close the windows
when we fight.

We scream in silence
our faces flare.

     what house, what fire?

At the block party
I pointed out our house across the street
many times to perfect strangers
I hoped would become our friends.

No one knew and I didn't tell them what we keep inside our house
How one day it will burn us.

One Second of Fiction, January 25, 2014. 2pm.

“What age would you stay? 30s?” 

Overheard in women’s room at the Main Berkeley Library, today, 2^nd Fl. One young twenty-something to another.

“Yeah, 35, 25…21!”

“Haha--’Forever 21’?”

The year before you got sick. That’s the age to stay, girls. But no one can tell you this. It’s different for everyone: The Spanish Flu, cancer. Just getting old. The brain injury that changed you so much you can only, just barely, remember who you once were—like the wisp of smoke you think you saw after the train rounded the corner. The spinal cord injury that left your nipples your main sex organ, taking up the sword of your lower, formerly in command, phallus.

The year before any of that or worse, the year you didn’t know would be the one you’d want to keep. For me it was the year I met Sally.

We convinced each other it wouldn’t matter if we said it. We both felt the same so why say it?

“I want you” became code for “I love you,” which we said when we grew braver. Finally, when we became more sober (but confused it with growing braver still), we said, “I will marry you.”

 We knew we didn’t need to state the obvious: “I see you, I will stay with you, I will honor you.” We didn’t need to say it.

Should we have stayed? Should we have stayed forever in this year?

What did it look like?

The rope swing hung steadfastly. It hung on a branch of the weeping willow tree over the deepest part of the river, floated like the wisp that was true, that really did hang in the 5 o’clock blue of a summer never meant to contain the rest of our lives. The summer we swung out over the deepest part of the river and dropped, mercifully, into the cold forgiving water. How did we know? How did we know to trust the previous Good Time Charleys who hung the knot there in the first place? Or in the 4^th or the 19^th place? How does the lineage of trust continue? Was it because the knot was strong and right, looked like a knot our fathers would tie? Or simply by merit of it being there that we trusted the rope was safe. “We’re all in this together,” the knot seemed to say.

That bright indigo summer’s eve was not meant to contain our whole lives. Our friends must have known this but we did not. We tried to capture the perfect, lasso it with that swinging rope. Borrow the strength of the knot and let it stand in for the rightness we wanted to feel in our words but did not.

Whatever Gets You Through the Night

Another patient today, an older African-American woman named Ella walked in the room. She looked frail; thin hair and face. Told me, as if picking up a conversation we'd never had,

"They can't tell you when it's time. Only God knows that."

Taking the power she doesn't have away from the doctor and putting it on Jesus.

Receiving comfort in that. And, for her, and in that moment for me, too, I said I full-heartedly agreed.

Stillness of Esme

lying between us in bed, in as deep a darkness as this

communality with street lights allows.

This is the profile of a girl calmed after a bad dream

Long neck.

Golden (her word), hair swooped aristocratically over a high forehead.

Tiny nose, delicate and
maybe--eyes still open? 

Her breathing has slowed from its earlier panicked pace.

Is she thinking and not sleeping?

That's when I realize,
grateful it's her, not him:  

This is the difference between girls and boys.

(I generalize here for the sake of sleep).

Simon could never lie so still even at 4:45 in the morning.

Deeply sleepy comes out in him as

Hilarious, if only to him.

Sideways smile slips out a happy “No,” tone tilting upwards at the end of the word

to show he means it but it’s not personal. 

Instead of sleep he would offer us his great corporeality, roiling waves of legs

swinging down up CRASH on the bed

Heavy head seesawing its turn to do the same.

Ouch! Everyone says, eventually.

Even him, at the backdoor of tears, as it gets 

way too late to be up so long, Love.

But Esme.

Her inner life as strong as his legs.

Esme’s silence, her Esmeness

maddening during the day when questions go unacknowledged

a not quite guileless look up, surprised, What?

is the what which allows this quiet form, this elegance to lie between us in our bed.

Now in the deep dark early morning I remember:

She has her own world we don’t know about
the one we hoped she would create.

I fail first, fall asleep.

She touches me reassuringly on the leg

as I drift off.  

"Thumbnail" is the new "nutshell."

Health, Life, and Equality

Perhaps one day there will be a stem-cell treatment that can double one’s life expectancy by slowing the aging process, making a centenarian as spry as a quinquagenarian. But if such a serum benefits only the few who can afford it, our national life expectancy will hardly budge — it’s an average, after all. In 19th-century Sweden, the figure was dragged down by infant mortality. Today in the United States, it grows slowly because of the premature deaths of the less fortunate. Thanks to this vast inequality, even a high-tech fountain of youth would hardly move the needle.

“Look at the countries with the highest average life expectancy,” says Denney, referring to places like Japan, Australia, Canada and, yes, Sweden — nations that distribute their health resources more evenly. “Ultimately,” he says, “life expectancy is a measure of quality of life.”

By Maggie Koerth-Baker, science editor at BoingBoing.net and author of “Before the Lights Go Out,” on the future of energy production and consumption.

Published March 19, 2013 in the Magazine section of The New York Times.