Mrs. Stone

In third grade, I was always afraid classmates heard my teacher call me up so she could whisper “Smile.”

Mrs. Stone meant well. She must have monitored me at “seat work,” watched my brow knit or heard the diaphragm-deep sighs I haven’t yet learned to suppress. She probably noticed that, when the three R’s paused for recess, I was last to leave and first to request re-entry. I don’t remember—but have no trouble imagining—my third-grade self. I’m still that ruminative boy. When I’m not apprehensive about tasks ahead, I’m spent, world-weary.

Perhaps Mrs. Stone’s psychology class in teaching college alerted her to look out for Eeyores like me. She may have been on an investigative mission to detect the cause of depression in children. More likely though, she found my behavior baffling—because what does a third grader have to be depressed about? Or tiresome—maybe I was the itch that always needed scratching.

I bet I apologized. I often apologize for struggling to smile. Mrs. Stone probably couldn’t name my issue—it may not have had a name yet—but in the DSM-5 it’s called “Dysthymia,” or “Persistent Depressive Disorder.” It’s characterized by “Depressed mood for most of the day, for more days than not, as indicated by either subjective account or observation by others, for at least two years.” It’s often resistant to drug therapy. In children, diagnosis requires only a year.

The boy in my school photo from Mrs. Stone’s class isn’t smiling. He leans toward the camera with a persimmon-y look. His hair, parted severely, communicates distinct self-command and control.

I was a ten-year-old Eric Sevareid.

Mrs. Stone looked a lot like Leslie Ann Warren, a star back then because she played Cinderella in a “live version” of the Hammerstein’s musical that regularly reappeared on TV. Third-graders may not be capable of full-blooded crushes, but my appreciation of Mrs. Stone confused me enough to make her regard crucial. Picture a ten-year old summoned by a beautiful actress and asked what he had to be so unhappy about, what harm it would do to put on a happy face. Picture a beautiful actress summoning a ten-year to tell him what an old man he is.

Like a lot of clinical descriptions, the list of symptoms for dysthymia includes many not-clauses. Dysthymia needs to be the only diagnosis possible—it can’t be medical or drug-related or the result of a depressive episode. It can’t arise from schizophrenia or be better explained by cyclothymic disorder (manic depression). It can’t, in sum, be a major depressive disorder. As mental illnesses go, it’s pathetic. It will never merit a telethon.

Dysthymia’s key criteria are that it’s chronic and not necessarily debilitative. Someone suffering from mild to moderate dysthymia can get up and get to work. Work can be, in fact, a saving grace distracting a sufferer from symptoms like “poor appetite or overeating,” “insomnia or hypersomnia,” “low energy or fatigue,” “low self-esteem,” “poor concentration or difficulty making decisions,” and “feelings of hopelessness.”

I doubt I ever tried to explain myself to Mrs. Stone. If memory is (as I wrote last week) more emblematic than descriptive, then a few episodes morph into a something-not-worth-mentioning. Naming codifies, after all, and labels render the transient solid. Even now, I don’t state my illness much. It’s not admissible.

Two of Eeyore’s most underrated traits are his efforts not to burden those around him and his appreciation for any attention. I loved being invited to roller skating parties and asking someone to come over, but I never knew what to do then… and still don’t. Part of any persistent state is becoming inured to it, forgetting what its absence might be like. When my family, friends, and colleagues tease me for being so relentlessly under-enthusiastic, I laugh. I AM an Eeyore. I accept the label and embrace it. Like it or not, I am become him.

So, time machine obtained, I might stand with my younger self and tell Mrs. Stone, “Smiling is relief he wishes he could count on more. For reasons that elude him, he can’t step out of his mood as much as he’d like. This third-grader haunts the adult more than he’d like to admit, and, even now, he feels like apologizing for saying so.”

Your Familiar

Another pseudo-story, based on a common literary motif. I’d call it a 20-minute story, but it took a little (read: a lot) longer to sort out. I’m beginning to wonder how people can be so good at writing those things… because I have longer sneezing fits.

Only in a dream could such a strange meeting take place, and that’s where this encounter between you and future-you occurred.

The sun sat at an odd angle that grazed the tabletop, its thick light hard to distinguish as morning or evening when you didn’t know where the window was. Somehow future-you seemed similar to the table’s shadows, pulled like taffy and attenuated but full and dark too. Naturally you expected future-you to be wise. You had so many questions.

Instead, for some time you and future-you communed, listlessly shifting and turning glasses, plates, and bowls as if they were pieces in a board game of subtle spaces and moves. The sun dimmed appreciably. Your eyes and future-you’s eyes marked its shrinking influence.

Future-you cleared his throat and you nearly jumped, but he had nothing to say and may have been prompting you. You locked stares, and you guessed his meaning—he envied you and wondered when this wisdom you expected left him or whether he left it on the lips of the last woman he kissed or in the swoop of letters never finished, or in everything granted, sold, given away, and lost. His doleful expression said so. He expected comforting. You didn’t anticipate that.

So you advanced your hand toward future-you’s. He drew back, then nodded.

You spoke first. Nothing you might say could be new, you figured, and so your speech rolled out in bursts like beach breakers. You can’t remember any of what you said, just that you recalled you were dreaming. Mostly you paused for interruption and hoped future-you might answer your noise with a greater and graver future voice. That would be enough.

Instead he appeared tickled, pleased to hear you fumble so. You would have mistaken his response for condescension except—of course!—future-you would react so, charmed by everything still fresh in you and spoiling in him. You matched his laughter with your own before catching a whiff of his breath and the unwelcome hints in its smell. You knew and didn’t know future-you, and he, you believed, knew you entirely.

His tears welled slowly at first and just glimmered in failing light. When you recognized his weeping, part of you wanted to console him. The other part desired more—how could you become so leaky, so riddled with age-spots, water stains, and patches of rust? How could all you wanted come to no more?

Perhaps future-you sensed confusion. He scooted his chair back and stood. You couldn’t miss his struggle. He hadn’t seemed old before, and his stoop loomed like death in the room’s near-darkness. He wasn’t angry. He held his dignity up as all he could say about you and him. And he meant to tell you he loved you. Whatever disappointment dwelt in him didn’t reach you.

Seeing that, he left and you woke.

Another Exchange

I thought it might be fun to try something dark and Kafkaesque. I was wrong, but, nonetheless, here’s another twenty minute fiction…

The inspector says, “No good fortune eliminates life’s little troubles,” and, with that, breaks another finger on the accused’s left hand. The force—he knows from experience—is big enough, and the responding howl will diminish into a whimper before long.

When silence settles again, he readdresses the accused and says, “You couldn’t have expected anything else.” Really, expectations are immaterial—the inspector stopped thinking of justice as more than fiction long ago—but the statement sits in the script he’s built over years.

“Do you want something to drink?” he asks.

Perhaps the inspector pours too fast, but the accused doesn’t expect alcohol, and what he doesn’t spray across the room dribbles down his chin, pink with his own blood and thicker than it ought to be.

“A shame” the inspector mutters. He half-expects the accused to say the same in unison—some relief might be welcome—but somehow that never happens.

“Can’t you speak?” he asks instead.

The accused’s crime remains unnamed, needs no name. The way of things places them in these roles, and they act. Outside this room, the inspector hears birds, their song filling the lapses between sobs and heaves of breath sawing the air. A gust stirs the leaves. Sunlight surges and fades as clouds pass.

“You might as well,” the inspector says, “it doesn’t matter.”

The accused is mute. It’s the nature of an accused to be so. Some transcendence would be nice but, to the inspector, it’s all so predictable—the questions, the answers, the inevitable. Sometimes, he finds himself suddenly as here-and-now as the accused, but the inspector slides into another moment, no second persisting long at all.

“Listen,” the inspector says, “We only want something, anything you can give.”

The accused may be unconscious—so hard to distinguish—and that’s fine with the inspector. The best time for acquiescence is exhaustion. Accept a reality other than your own and you shall be freed.

“Yes,” the accused whispers.

The rest joins history.

Habitual

Another odd fiction….

Joan writes with invisible ink.

She started when she was young. Her secrets should be lost, she thought, and once she’d spilled her emotions, words’ effectiveness ended anyway. In the beginning, she never returned to her pages except to assure they’d faded and, sometimes, if they didn’t, she sought an unnoticed patch of sunlight to erase them.

Friends and family watched Joan march parades of words through her notebooks, the prose dropping like a curtain line after line. When she was a teenager, her father counted notebooks on the shelves in her room, called her “His scribbler,” and pleaded.

“What stories you must have told by now—why won’t you let us read?”

Joan stared at the page and pretended to recite what she found there, all of her speech invented, all of it strange and estranging. Her father listened as well as he could as long as he could but soon found reason to leave. Joan hid her notebooks after that.

Though she needn’t have. They were empty. When she left for college she discovered she could refill the earliest books and did, again and again, wondering whether she followed the actual ruts of what she’d written before or how these thoughts might echo earlier ones. Nothing seemed fresh, and, try as she might, her dreams of novelty disappointed.

Her husband was the one who encouraged her to become an actual writer. By then she’d stopped refilling notebooks, but her family told stories of Joan’s late hours poised in a puddle of light at her desk, her pen pirouetting. For their first anniversary, her husband bought a fountain pen, sturdy ink labeled “archival,” and several blank books with pages opaque as canvas and suitable for sails.

Joan started immediately, and the habit came back like breath. Soon, her husband fell asleep to her scratching. Moons presided over tidal confession.

He wanted to hear what she was saying to her blank books, but, through an odd alchemy, something in Joan’s mind and hand invaded the pen and transmuted the ink. Permanence, it turned out, didn’t arise from circumstance as much as routine. What she’d written the week before disappeared as it always had. She kept books closed to preserve words, but—in light or darkness—they slipped from sight. Joan cried. The tears washed pigment from the page.

For some weeks, she traced the trail of prior days’ signs, but her hand cramped, her mind quit. Shadow overtook her. In its wake, little remained.

So Joan pretended again, speaking invention instead of reading. Blank books gathered in plain sight, but her husband, respecting her privacy, stopped asking.

Then Joan only sat at her desk, studying her husband’s sleep and dreaming what writing might mean, imagining her words honored by attention, their sounds real, important to more than her.

15 Chapters

This story was rejected for publication. Who can say if a rejection letter is worse in content or form? The content is—a given—bad news, but the form, intended to give comfort or at least not offend, often has the opposite effect. The generic manifestation:

Dear You,

Thank you for submitting “Your Title Here” to the Our Title Here. We had an exceptionally large pool of over XXXX submissions. The editorial staff was impressed with the consistent quality of the work, and we struggled to choose. Unfortunately, your submission was not selected. Please Read Our Title Here on this date to discover our choices.

We hope to see your work again in the future!

Best regards,
Us

P.S. To subscribe to Our Title Here… website

How the supplicant might read this letter:

Dear Spurned,

It’s easy to thank the unsolicited, and we get a shitload of said unsolicited. If it makes you feel any better, yours was consistent with all the rest of the rejected, and we were pretty damn pleased we received so many (feather in our cap). It was hard to go through them, but we did. Unfortunately (we’re saying “unfortunately” but our decision clearly indicates, from our perspective, NOT) your submission was rejected. Please blunt your disappointment with money in our direction.

By all means, waste our time again if you like!

Best we can manage regards,

Us

Bitter? Maybe, but what’s wrong with “Listen, not this time, but don’t give up. We know it sucks to get a letter like this one…”?

Oh well, here’s the story anyway:

1.

On an errand some years ago, he found himself lost. He’s been trying since to make his way home. At first he seemed near. Each fresh vista promised landmarks to lead him back, but little seems familiar now. He glimpses a tree outstretched or a low-hugging cloud. They could be from before or a memory from this journey, he can’t be sure.

2.

The day he departed, he left his love in bed. Dipping his face close to hers, he watched her eyes flutter under their lids and wished he could join her in sleep, in dreams. “I’ll be back later,” he whispered, and let his hand rest on her upper arm, naked above the covers. She didn’t wake. He’s sure she didn’t, having so many hours to revisit the scene, but she did moan, and in her moan, he heard their desire.

3.

At first, some of each day was knocking. Few people answered, and those who did opened doors just a sliver, their bodies blocking golden, glowing interiors where, sometimes, other curious faces lurked. On occasions they spoke instead of shaking their heads, they loaded their directions with distrust. He heard reluctance and couldn’t remember beyond the third change of direction or the sign he was supposed to know on sight. He couldn’t go back to ask again.

4.

He leaves doors alone now and is well past crying out. Having used every name he’s ever known, his voice has died, its squeak no more than vocal chords rubbing. He said his love’s name most, and, in the end, his mother’s. Before he set out though, before he took whichever wrong turn, his mother was already gone. Even after all these years, he still sometimes imagines her form up ahead, back turned, bowing into her hands and sobbing over his loss. That, he supposes, is a wish. In life, she wasn’t demonstrative. In his old world, she never seemed surprised to see him.

5.

When he was young, a measure of pride arrived if his parents called him “Little Man,” as it meant he’d stood up to some unanticipated injury or fury, dammed his tears, been complete in himself without needing instruction or help. The name brought him closer to separation he sensed they desired. They seemed exhausted, and his deepest affection was to grant them peace, let them rest. One dim afternoon, his mother waited at the door when he came home, and she said his father was gone. For a moment, grief stood before him—amassing as unaccountably as a wave—but he squared his legs. “Little Man,” his mother whispered, and turned inside.

6.

The neighborhoods he passes through are orderly. Houses reach a natural average, less different with every reiteration. Windows stare back blankly, bored. And the streets’ angles of north, east, south, and west are razors. He turns like blinking. Suddenly the sun is behind or ahead or rising.

7.

No matter what he does, the world goes on. A day comes when birds sing again, or he notes their songs again. There’s pleasure in those moments’ thaw and the softening air and earth. The slant of sun across his face is revelation. “If I’d learned to pay attention,” he thinks and sighs. The intake of breath plants him. If it placed him were where he wishes, he might be happier, but he only ever wanted to be happy enough.

8.

Not very often, but sometimes, he stops. Pausing in the blue shadows of dusk, he takes inventory, checks to see if he wants to keep searching, how much hope remains. He always goes on because the sun rises and sets. The cycle of days and his mind run furrows scored by habit.

9.

Dreams visit randomly. In one, he turned and stood on the walk leading to his house. He closed his eyes to be sure he was awake. When he opened them again, he detected someone moving in an upstairs window. The shadow shifted like a ghost. He knew (without knowing why) that it was his love. He had waited to find her, and she’d waited too, was even then rushing down the stairs to let him in. He woke weeping, his wet cheeks having ended the dream.

10.

He may be home now. Had he chosen wandering, he wouldn’t care about living in this overlap of spaces. Home would be an idea easily carried. His trouble is expecting recognition, someone to say they’ve seen him before or someplace announcing he belongs.

11.

As a boy, he wanted a horse, and that fantasy returns often. Then, he knew not to express such extravagant needs, but he feels a right to it now. When he was young he consoled himself by being the horse, galloping, forming lazy S’s in imagined meadows. More than anything else, he delighted in the twitch of musculature, the power and purpose and stateliness and certainty. The horse was his, he thought, and he was the horse. They shared honest love. He believed his daydream as only children can.

12.

Every step leaves a little behind. Fatigue rises tidally, and eventually he’ll close his eyes for good. The darkness that awaits him may or may not be welcome, may or may not be familiar, may or may not be final. But he has his desires, which he dares not state, even to himself.

13.

One memory lingers—his love’s breath. He smelled the spices she loved and, occasionally, he discovers some echo of them in fallen leaves or the faint smoke of someone’s fire. A light rain can raise the scent or sudden warmth on a winter afternoon. The day he left, that smell hung about her, clinging to her warm skin, and, though he felt embarrassed by the rapture it incited, he took it in. Of everything he misses, that matters most, just that much of her.

14.

Another turn looms.

15.

And night. In gray twilight, he recognizes streets beginning to settle, a sky assuring snow.

Then Silence

“Silence propagates itself,” Samuel Johnson said, “and the longer talk has been suspended, the more difficult it is to find anything to say.”

When I’m sleepless in the middle of the night, I think about lost friends and wince over unreturned phone calls, emails, and letters, all the thank you notes, flowers, and thoughtful gestures I meant to make to show affection. Most of the people who haunt my insomnia have likely forgotten me or think no less of me for drifting on, but life would be richer with their continuing company. I find plenty of time to work, to engage in activity I forget a few days later. I put tasks before people, and, if I could reverse that, I might sleep better.

I enjoy company and find sympathetic souls everywhere. Only recently, though, have I tried to cultivate and keep friends. Carl Jung said the meeting of personalities is like a chemical reaction—both personalities are transformed by contact. His statement only makes sense if you and the other personality are reactive, if you’re willing to venture outside yourself. Most of my life I haven’t been willing. It’s easy to converse, to slot in personal stories your listener doesn’t yet know. You rifle through relevant and appropriate remarks and, like a good raconteur, offer your most skillful talk. Or you can take the more secure stance of bouncing everything back to the speaker. Now you see. I’m well-practiced at the familiar and accepted steps of civil discourse.

But careful and polished steps aren’t dancing. Dancing is chemical and requires more than keeping up.

One of my first real friends welcomed me to his lunch table after I’d been exiled from another. Middle school cool failed me, and my usual companions froze me out. My new friend barely knew me, knew only that I had nowhere to sit and invited me over, but vulnerability proved a good place for us to start. His kindness endeared him to me, but hurt created our relationship. No purpose in pretense, we began with honesty instead.

His family invited me on vacation, he ate over my house whenever I could make him stay, and, even after I moved away, we exchanged antic letters full of imaginary schemes for becoming treasure hunters or famous tag-team auctioneers or dueling butter sculptors or engineers specializing in converting schools to bumper cars. We laughed, I think, because we knew we needed to. We were seldom comfortable except in the company of the other.

Some people believe no true friendship can ever cease, that, even after years of neglect, friends feel the same old understanding and affection. That thought consoles me at 3 am—though, in most cases, I can’t verify it. I wouldn’t know how to start looking for many of the people I’ve lost. In some cases, I remember how I felt with them and not their names. And though we might achieve familiar rapport if we were thrown together, what I’ve missed would be just as telling.

Next weekend my younger brother is going on a golf outing, and some of the people are part of a group of friends he sees frequently, old friends from high school and college he’s seen through every stage of life. I don’t care about golf—it’d be horrifying to even try playing—but I’m jealous. My oldest and best friends are, right this second, elsewhere, expecting and accepting the usual distance between us. We will talk when we talk. His friends wouldn’t let him neglect them. He wouldn’t allow it either.

After receiving a commission to West Point, my friend came home in three weeks. He wrote a letter that was meant to be funny but threw me. I wasn’t sure how I felt, how to console him or whether he wanted consolation and can’t recall now what I did say to him, if I did. Some nights I can’t convince myself I wrote back. I continued to hear reports of him—he went to college locally and then law school, he excelled in moot court and sang in his church choir. He married and had a daughter.

But by the time I looked for him—finding him was why I joined Facebook—someone told me he was gone, killed in a traffic accident a couple of weeks before. I read the obituary and thought again and again of writing his widow, his daughter, his mom. Perhaps he mentioned me. They donated a bench in Central Park because he liked to visit New York, and I could find it and sit on it.

I didn’t. I haven’t. It isn’t just that my right to speak seems lost, and that every day pushes him and our history further into the past. I’m beginning to think the best way—the only way—to honor him is to try harder to be an actual friend, the sort he was to me.

Shrouded

I’m so busy this week, I worried I’d have nothing to post today and actually only have this, a vignette and an exercise of sorts. I opened Chronicle of a Death Foretold to page 54 and stole (with adaptations) one sentence. Then I set off,  just to see what occurred next…

He drank the second bottle more slowly, sitting down, looking insistently toward the house on the sidewalk across the way, where the windows were dark. The night hid him, and he felt sure if she looked from one of those windows, she wouldn’t see him. But the familiar wave of vertigo rolled through his body—maybe he was more visible than the thought.

He knew how foolish he could be and how wrong he often was when drunk. He put the bottle down gently beside him, determined he’d had enough.

She might not be there at all, and he hoped instantly that was so. Why had his feet carried him there when he had no more to say and she said every word already? At first, he’d believed if—as she spoke—he held his love in his mind like a candle, she might see it behind his eyes or feel its faint warmth. His silence might speak. Staring at her house in the dark might speak.

Ridiculous. He pulled his feet into the shadows from where they’d edged into moonlight.

He knew her mother didn’t like him but hadn’t heard her speak in her mother’s voice until the last night they were together. “You have no plans,” she said, and it was true. He had no plans except her.

Closing his eyes, there in the night, he whispered, “Except you.” His voice startled him. He grabbed the bottle and took a long swallow. His head swung to the space behind him, and the world momentarily blurred in flux.

He wished again for something else to say but, anyway, he had only himself to say it to.

Down the street, a couple passed through the intersection. She laughed at a witticism he couldn’t hear and shouted, “You have no idea!” The rest tumbled inaudibly between them, her and him, all of it incomprehensibly but vividly intimate.

Once he’d said to her, “I’d like to say what I feel,” and she’d said, “Then do it” and he tried, but it never sounded right, even when he thought ahead to what he ought to speak.

“You aren’t what I need right now,” she’d said. That was the last time they touched.

Another swallow, and the bottle emptied.  He lifted it over his mouth, and a drip missed and rolled off his chin and down his neck. He wiped the tear away. He stood unsteadily, dusting himself off, straightening his pants with a tug.

Before he stepped into the streetlamp, he’d gather himself. Drunken dignity was still dignity. If she saw him, she might think he had purpose, that he was between her and someone else, marching still.

He took the greatest volume of night air he could, sighed, and stepped onto the sidewalk.

Empty Bed

As I’ve said before, I’m not particularly gifted at fiction, but sometimes stories occur to me, and I write them down.

She leaves him sleeping, but he isn’t asleep. With his eyes closed he assigns meanings to each zip and snap. When she steps in front of the window, a shadow like a wandering cloud overtakes him. The mattress dips. He hears her putting her feet into her shoes, imagines her pausing at the mirror, waking her hair with her fingers, tilting her head to her left and leaning toward her reflection, rubbing the smudges under her eyes as she does, giving up, and then walking out. At any point, he might speak. She might speak. Neither care to.

They’re friends, but lately they’ve acknowledged this mutual need and the convenient means to fill it. Sometimes, in the throes, he detects a low strain of melancholy in her voice, and he thinks she must want more from him than release, or a release greater than this. Sometimes she reminds him: if she finds someone, they are through with these nights.

And he agrees. When the door closes, he swings his feet to the floor and finds it welcomely cool. These first moments are an untangling—complications resolved in cascades. He’s hungry now and will eat.

They met in middle school. She wasn’t so beautiful then, with odd glasses and braces and a shape stretched mid-growth and not yet full. Still, she seemed perfect, and he averted his eyes when she caught him looking. He engineered ways to line up near her or stand at the same lab table. From the beginning, they laughed apart from the rest. All day, as bells moved him from class to class, their last conversation lingered, and, later, when they spoke again, she remembered what he’d told her. They were experts in each others’ lives.

Through it all, he felt grateful, indebted. She had boyfriends in high school—and some girls had been interested in him—but their friendship never suffered. She still called late. He still gathered thoughts he meant to tell her. When they met again after college, each brought a new store of experience to share. Only recently have they stopped really talking.

When he opens the refrigerator he sees she’s taken the leftovers. He has eggs, the little butter remaining, and a jar of salsa. Enough.

His friends didn’t believe him when he said he’d never kissed her before six months ago, and he was immediately sorry he’d said so. He doesn’t talk about her staying over. She doesn’t forbid him—she wouldn’t—but he always knows what she wants. He doesn’t always like it or like knowing, but he does.

In the years they lost each other, he reinvented her, imagined new warmth between them. During his loneliest hours, she was his fantasy. Now these are his loneliest hours. The touch between them is a sort of ache. He can’t remember how it started.

One day she’ll have news. She’ll meet someone or find distant work. They’ll have a last dinner between them and laugh. Old stories will be aired, and she’ll say again how much he’s always meant to her.

He wonders what he wishes she’d say. He eats his eggs and stares at the blank face of his phone.

The Messenger

I’m having a busy week and only found time to get a little writing exercise. I’ve tried to compose a very little story of ten sentences, the first of 50 words, the second of 45, the third 4o… you get the idea. It felt a little like rolling downhill, and the tone and content may have tumbled with it…

Because you left the door open and because your expression said you meant for me to enter, I walked through it, and, though you wanted comfort—isn’t comfort all we ever want?—I was only silent company, another heart in a room, a near stranger often worthless even to himself. Once, as my mother waited for my father, sitting in the gray light of a Saturday’s end, an empty glass in her hand, her hand resting on the table, staring toward the street, she hummed music I barely heard and didn’t know, and I spoke. She turned as you turned, eyes landing on my face as if my face were dusk itself, the final whisper of light when sun slips past the last obstacle, and every echo of reflected gold in every window blinks out. Now I don’t remember exactly what either of us said, but her half smile, which she hoped offered warmth and attention, couldn’t hold its place on her lips and, despite her, fell with her tears. So perhaps you understand why I didn’t extend a word but sat just out of your reach and vision, more keen to be present, frightened to topple your fragile calm. When you grow up in a house that swings between ferocity and exhaustion, you harmonize without noticing, settling into whatever keeps you safe but close. And what was there to say that you didn’t know?—he was gone and meant to be, wouldn’t be back. Sorry as I was then, I couldn’t tell you so because I loved him too. He left both of us, and he meant to leave. I only found him gone.

A Necessary Virtue: Saturday Morning

A busy day awaits, so I tried to make a virtue of necessity and allowed myself an hour to write this morning. Here’s what came up with, probably more exercise than composition, but all I can manage:

Quiet seems more complete when the heater’s blowers die, and the outside noises that our inside noises erase suddenly become audible—the L roaring past, tires crushing snow, a whoop of laughter into a cell phone. Inside, everything is still but an insulating film over the fireplace, a covering my wife added during bitter cold two weeks ago. It bellows with drafts and winds, and I imagine it as a giant eardrum, sighing on its own as it gathers every vibration and variation of pressure.

The house is so still this morning, I see myself in every object and perceive them as companionable. My family shares our home with things we admired, wanted, needed, received, surrendered to. Sometimes these things have their own voices, announcing their provenance as your eye falls on them:

• a drawing an art teacher at my old school gave me, a casual doodle that once seemed the dissected limb of an alien but now, sun worn, returns to whiteness again.
• my daughter’s backpack beached beside the chair we threw it out of
• boots and shoes on a mat by the door, speaking the desperation with which they were thrown off, home at last—their hulls bump as if some unseen current moved them
• the cutting board squeezed between the drainer and the sink wall in the part we never use, the board’s face scratched and scarred with incidental art
• a nearly finished sweater, a Christmas present from mother to daughter—green nearly black in the twilight this time of day—draped over the back of the couch and trailing yarn to the floor. It looks marine to me, a sinuous creature attenuated by life in the sea and unsuited to gravity
• a badly stacked pile of folded New York Times Book Reviews, all unread, their half-faces staring up blankly

Meanwhile, as I create this list, the day stirs. Three floors down, someone scrapes the sidewalk of last night’s snow. Upstairs, my wife clicks the computer mouse. These noises don’t advance time as a watch ticking does, but, irregular as they are, they mark moments as well, alerting me to the doing I ought to start too. The L passes. The heater kicks to life—the blower followed by the throat-clearing ignition of flames to heat air. No silence will stay. I can’t stay. Light, even the gray light of an overcast day, demands motion.

Maybe things watch me as I do them, each of us having our instant of visibility, our utterance, our place, our beginning, our purpose. Something calls us, and we are. Something prods me on.