the map of the places we always return to
i. fm radio, autumn 2003
She admits that when she tries to give up her antidepressants, it takes only
two weeks until she begins to see the world in the mournful way she did before.
So she stays on them, wishing she could live without them, but choosing, finally,
safety over desire. Her hands are looser holding the steering wheel these days,
leaving room for the minute or sudden movements of the wheel as she navigates
the icy New Hampshire side roads; and once she is on the highway, her spine
finally finds the back of the driver’s seat and the tiny creases in her forehead
unsink. And here in her VW with the suffocating new car smell permeating our
conversation we rehash, as we do every Thanksgiving, what happened to her, to
our family, to me, and where we are now, and where we may someday arrive.
We are always inconclusive, and today is no different. “I know you’re angry,
still, even though you won’t show me”, she tells me, trying to coax it out of me,
wanting me to yell at her, letting me know it’s allowed. I can’t tell in these
moments if I want to yell at her, but am too afraid to, or if I don’t want to yell at
all, but am afraid of what this means about me. It is a game we play, where I
resist hurting her and she eggs me on, knowing that making herself the target
for my anger is one of the only things she has to offer me as compensation. I
refuse to let her win though, as I remain too enthralled with this new person I
discover every time I go home to visit; talkative and at ease in the driver’s seat. It
is like trying to watch the sunset, which I do every time we are in New Hampshire,
peering out over the top of the hill and out to where the trees drop off and the
sky shudders with the coming of night; I can see the beautiful moments of pink
and orange striping the sky, but even when I believe I am watching closely, I
always miss the moment it turns from mostly light to mostly dark, and I find deep
awe in realizing the blackness.
We battle over the volume control, moving the black knob back and forth,
unable to find a compromise. When I move it, the music surges and I lower the
window to let some of the sound escape. She is more subtle, anxiously moving
the knob in tiny increments, until she can find the ideal volume where she believes
I will be satisfied and where she can hear the sound of tires hitting ice and the
wind squealing through the open window or the tiny gaps where the door meets
the rest of the car. I don’t know what it is she most wants to hear- these sounds
that echo her Vermont childhood and allow her to drive with relative ease, or the
hum of my voice recalling her long days on the couch in the living room, vomiting
red wine in the bathroom, or crying on hands and knees in the thickly carpeted
beige hallway. I think somewhere between the crisp crunch of the car moving
through the morning frost, and the story I tell her of the day she went into
alcohol rehabilitation, she recognizes the first few notes of forgiveness, and if she
turns the volume on my music down low enough, she may hear it clearly for the
first time.
ii. metal, autumn 2000
In the twelve minute car ride from my high school to our home, we went from
chatting in the forced casual manner to which we had become accustomed, to
screaming painfully at each other, our throats aching from the sublime release of
volume control, of any control. I had needed to vent about how hard school was,
how frustrated I felt with myself as a student, my inability to do well in some of
my classes at my competitive New England prep school. I began tearing up when I
admitted that maybe we had all been wrong, and maybe I just wasn’t all that
smart. I imagined somehow, that she would hug me, drape a short sweatered
arm over my shoulders or run a hand through my long blonde hair, pulling
tenderly at the tips. I don’t know where I got this notion of “mother”, but the
more I seemed to construct it and admire it, the more she disappointed, veering
further and further off the path I wanted us to travel together. Instead of finding
a way to stop me from getting upset, she began crying before I could fully start.
Angry tears screamed out of her eyes and her face flushed and frowned deeply,
deep lines spreading out from the sides of her mouth. I seethed at that sudden
robbery, my upset taken into her hands, so that I could either choose to comfort
her or yell at her. And when you are seventeen and tired and witness to the slow
destruction of your own family, it becomes impossible to do anything but yell.
Her small, dry, October hands strangled the steering wheel, and I wondered
what shade of red they would be when I caught sight of her palms as she
adjusted the hat on her head. A car inched out of its driveway, and my mother’s
body gripped and jumped, like a fish thrusting its way out of someone’s hands.
The car responded to her hysteria, and my body thrust forward and stopped
hard against the seat belt. The shock of restraint made me yell at her more
ferociously, finding pleasure in the frightening contortions of her sallow face.
“You are just as bad to me as Gramma was to you!” I yelled at her, and
again the car cocked and jolted along with her panic.
“You don’t know anything about it!” She threw back as we pulled into the
garage, slammed our doors shut and walked inside the house.
I began the walk towards my room, a cruel protest, leaving the conversation
mid-yell, and hoping she would not follow, stop speaking and let me cry in my
walk-in closet for the rest of the night. I loved to sit on the stool and blast whiny
rock ballads by the Counting Crows, and sing along with the lyrics, “…She knows
she's more that just a little misunderstood/She has trouble/acting normal when
she's nervous/Round here we're carving out our names/Round here/we all look
the same/Round here we talk just like lions/But we sacrifice like lambs
Round here she's slipping through my hands.” I could already hear the guitar’s
eerie opening notes. But right before I reached the stairs my mother faced me,
freezing her broken eyes on my face and spat out her furiousness.
“You little jerk!” she cried. Her keys, which had been gripped firmly in her hand,
flew at my head and hit the molding on the doorway, white paint flying off in small
dusty chunks as they screeched against the surface.
iii. pine, winter 2003
“Do you want to help decorate the tree?” she asks a few days before Christmas,
and I refuse, as I have every time for the past three years, but I decide to watch
her and my father construct the holiday season in our living room. I grab a heavy
quilt and a small stack of chocolate chip cookies and settle in to a green armchair
as they work in front of me. Mainly they are talking amongst themselves, and I
only interject when I worry that they are forgetting a favorite ornament, or to
dictate an aesthetic change I feel is vital to the loveliness of our tree. Ever since I
can remember, my mother has always proclaimed that this year’s tree is the best
tree we’ve ever had. But this year the tree is not the best one we’ve ever had.
The branches on the right travel down at least six inches closer to the ground
than those on the left, and the tree is much fuller on the right as well, creating a
lopsided effect that is too pathetic to pretend away. Instead, all three of us
embrace its defectiveness, welcoming it into our family as a long lost son. I can’t
help thinking that this tree, flourishing in its imperfections, fits our family best.
I like to watch the way she decorates the tree. Her hands are deft at fitting the
hooks of the most delicate ornaments around the branches. I like the way her
hair is styled around her face, and that she spent eighty dollars on it last
weekend, and does so probably once a month but would never admit that to
anyone. I like the way it is layered and fluffy, trying to disguise the blonde-white
thinness. I like that she is always a little more dressed up than me and I haven’t
seen her wear jeans since she got out of the hospital. Her black trousers are
covered in a Christmas mix of sticky pine needles and flour, and her sweater is an
almost neon green which at once humiliates and delights me.
It is impossible to resist lining up this new self with the old image of my mother
that is imprinted in my unreliable but hardworking memory. I conjure up the
memory of my mother three years ago, her face chalky and bloated, her body
destroying itself somewhere underneath her baggy, faded GAP jeans, and my
brother’s old oversized button down shirts in shades of baby pink and baby blue.
Her hair had thinned out and whitened and looked dead and fragile on top of her
head, serving only as a delicate veil over her scalp. She moved slowly, biting her
jagged fingernails and fingering her flushed cheeks. I began to forget what her
smile looked like, and if her face had ever resembled mine. I knew we used to look
at her childhood pictures and mine, placing them side by side and seeing
ourselves reflected through each other across time. I began to take great care in
my skin, my hair, my body, being careful not to imitate her gestures, her voice,
her appearance. These days I can once again see the resemblance and a friend
tells me my mother looks younger every time she sees her.
For Christmas I have bought her a dark blue, velvet scarf that she saw when we
were shopping in the holiday market that sprawls across Union Square every
winter in New York, and I know she will take pleasure in matching it with her new
coat, or her favorite sweater. It will be wonderful when she calls me in to her
room to ask me if it looks right, and we will both be surprised for a moment, even
now, when we examine her reflection in the mirror.
iv. tupperware
I remember watching the cookie jar in the kitchen. When my mother stopped
drinking she began making chocolate chip cookies instead. We both agreed this
was a much better addiction, and one that benefited the whole family. It was
much like living in a 1950s television sitcom; I came home late at night at least
once a week to my mother in a faded apron and powdered hands stirring cookie
dough in a plastic bowl. I can picture her scooping out the raw dough with a
spoon and using her index finger to release the dough from the spoon and onto
the cookie sheets. I liked the sound the sheets made as they banged against the
inside of the oven, metal on metal. Mostly I liked the smell when I entered the
house, buttery and sweet and a little bit burnt. It would be as late as midnight,
and my mother would still be scraping cookies off the sheets and into the plastic
Tupperware container we used for cookies. Then she would hand me a beater
coated in the raw dough and say goodnight.
I loved when the container was full, and I knew she had enough cookies to
keep her happy, to prevent her from drinking. The full container meant I could
relax, I could give the responsibility of watching my mother to someone else for a
few days. But then I would notice the cookies disappearing, (for a time, she ate
up to ten or twelve of them a day) and I would bite the inside edge of my middle
finger with anxiety and worry that she would not have time to make a new batch
before running out of the old one. I would eye my boyfriend as he reached for
one of the last cookies, inhaling deeply at the fear that she would see how few
were left and grow lonely. I watched that cookie jar for the six months I lived at
home after she was sober. I would try to resist eating the cookies, wanting to
keep them for her, wanting her to have that one small pleasure, replacing all the
comfort she had given up.
I watch the cookie jar every time I visit home. It is an obsession, counting
the cookies in my head, watching the jar fill up with relief, and shaking my left
foot uncomfortably as I watch everyone eating the cookies, watch the level drop,
until there are just three or four stale cookies left and I am nearly hysterical with
the unnamable fear.
One night when my mother is busy baking cookies in her ivory colored terry
cloth bathrobe, I tell her about watching the cookie jar, and how it has become a
large part of my trips home. She laughs and pulls her eyebrows together in a
worry line, “Cor, I’m fine. Its OK if the cookies run out. I’m not going to be upset
if the cookies run out. This isn’t something you should have to think about.” She
smiles at me and laughs, both of us knowing I will still watch the cookies, still
think about them every time I sit staring at them from the kitchen counter. She
laughs, loving on some level that I care enough about her to cry at the thought
of an empty Tupperware container.
v. untitled, winter 2004
We like to go to tapas restaurants together and order five or six selections
of lamb, shrimp, garlic potatoes, vegetables. The food crowds the tiny table at
our favorite place in Brookline, and we struggle to find room enough for our
elbows to rest next to our plates. We both sip at ice water and eat our food with
the same slow deliberation reserved for anything this delicious.
I imagine, on these occasions, for a fleeting instant, the what-might-have-
been. It is a sick practice, but I envision before and after pictures of her liver, and
say the word “cirrhosis” in my head one hundred times, until it sinks in and I can
feel at once lucky and appalled. When I met with her therapist a few weeks after
she returned home from detox, I was confronted with a small, frizzy haired
woman who smiled hugely at me “I’ve heard so many wonderful things about
you!” she exclaimed, putting an arm over my shoulders. “I know this has all come
as a bit of a shock for you,” she began, and I fidgeted in the overly-comfortable
patterned arm chair I had chosen to sit in. “But really, her being an alcoholic is
good news, Corey. Now we know what’s wrong, why the Prozac wasn’t working,
and she will finally get better!” Then she told me in the calm but forceful voice
that good therapists like to use, that my mother would have died within a few
months if she hadn’t seen a doctor when she did. In actuality the therapist only
said this once, and I replied with an appropriately grave nod of the head, and we
moved on to talk about how to help her get through the difficulties that would
inevitably accompany the rehabilitation process. In my reconstruction of this
memory, however, I am virtually swimming through these words, feeling them
with every part of my skin. It is hard to imagine the funeral of the woman so
clearly alive in front of me. Her eyes are wider than I have ever seen them, pretty
and innocent.
I tell the story to anyone who will listen, and in many different ways.
Sometimes I only tell one piece of it- like finding the hidden wine with my father
when my mother was in detox, two weeks before my eighteenth birthday, or the
night they had to tell me about her alcoholism, or the happy ending where my
mother and I talk on the phone and tell secrets about the rest of the family. I
have told parts of the story in a Russian sauna, in a group of naked American
students. I have told parts of it over the phone sitting in my closet. Some of it
has been told late at night on a flannel sheeted mattress, falling asleep halfway
between love and hate. Parts have been told drunkenly in bars, sitting in broken
porch chairs on Brooklyn rooftops, all over New York City, Europe, and the
greater Boston area. The focus is always different, the conclusions I draw always
freshly confusing. I don’t know which versions will retain life, which versions will
die out, which parts of the story will vanish into a kind of collective memory. Each
time I finish the telling of it, I know I have to start again, from the beginning, or
perhaps from the middle, where I can look both ways, backwards and forwards,
and know which way I am going to travel this time.
i. fm radio, autumn 2003
She admits that when she tries to give up her antidepressants, it takes only
two weeks until she begins to see the world in the mournful way she did before.
So she stays on them, wishing she could live without them, but choosing, finally,
safety over desire. Her hands are looser holding the steering wheel these days,
leaving room for the minute or sudden movements of the wheel as she navigates
the icy New Hampshire side roads; and once she is on the highway, her spine
finally finds the back of the driver’s seat and the tiny creases in her forehead
unsink. And here in her VW with the suffocating new car smell permeating our
conversation we rehash, as we do every Thanksgiving, what happened to her, to
our family, to me, and where we are now, and where we may someday arrive.
We are always inconclusive, and today is no different. “I know you’re angry,
still, even though you won’t show me”, she tells me, trying to coax it out of me,
wanting me to yell at her, letting me know it’s allowed. I can’t tell in these
moments if I want to yell at her, but am too afraid to, or if I don’t want to yell at
all, but am afraid of what this means about me. It is a game we play, where I
resist hurting her and she eggs me on, knowing that making herself the target
for my anger is one of the only things she has to offer me as compensation. I
refuse to let her win though, as I remain too enthralled with this new person I
discover every time I go home to visit; talkative and at ease in the driver’s seat. It
is like trying to watch the sunset, which I do every time we are in New Hampshire,
peering out over the top of the hill and out to where the trees drop off and the
sky shudders with the coming of night; I can see the beautiful moments of pink
and orange striping the sky, but even when I believe I am watching closely, I
always miss the moment it turns from mostly light to mostly dark, and I find deep
awe in realizing the blackness.
We battle over the volume control, moving the black knob back and forth,
unable to find a compromise. When I move it, the music surges and I lower the
window to let some of the sound escape. She is more subtle, anxiously moving
the knob in tiny increments, until she can find the ideal volume where she believes
I will be satisfied and where she can hear the sound of tires hitting ice and the
wind squealing through the open window or the tiny gaps where the door meets
the rest of the car. I don’t know what it is she most wants to hear- these sounds
that echo her Vermont childhood and allow her to drive with relative ease, or the
hum of my voice recalling her long days on the couch in the living room, vomiting
red wine in the bathroom, or crying on hands and knees in the thickly carpeted
beige hallway. I think somewhere between the crisp crunch of the car moving
through the morning frost, and the story I tell her of the day she went into
alcohol rehabilitation, she recognizes the first few notes of forgiveness, and if she
turns the volume on my music down low enough, she may hear it clearly for the
first time.
ii. metal, autumn 2000
In the twelve minute car ride from my high school to our home, we went from
chatting in the forced casual manner to which we had become accustomed, to
screaming painfully at each other, our throats aching from the sublime release of
volume control, of any control. I had needed to vent about how hard school was,
how frustrated I felt with myself as a student, my inability to do well in some of
my classes at my competitive New England prep school. I began tearing up when I
admitted that maybe we had all been wrong, and maybe I just wasn’t all that
smart. I imagined somehow, that she would hug me, drape a short sweatered
arm over my shoulders or run a hand through my long blonde hair, pulling
tenderly at the tips. I don’t know where I got this notion of “mother”, but the
more I seemed to construct it and admire it, the more she disappointed, veering
further and further off the path I wanted us to travel together. Instead of finding
a way to stop me from getting upset, she began crying before I could fully start.
Angry tears screamed out of her eyes and her face flushed and frowned deeply,
deep lines spreading out from the sides of her mouth. I seethed at that sudden
robbery, my upset taken into her hands, so that I could either choose to comfort
her or yell at her. And when you are seventeen and tired and witness to the slow
destruction of your own family, it becomes impossible to do anything but yell.
Her small, dry, October hands strangled the steering wheel, and I wondered
what shade of red they would be when I caught sight of her palms as she
adjusted the hat on her head. A car inched out of its driveway, and my mother’s
body gripped and jumped, like a fish thrusting its way out of someone’s hands.
The car responded to her hysteria, and my body thrust forward and stopped
hard against the seat belt. The shock of restraint made me yell at her more
ferociously, finding pleasure in the frightening contortions of her sallow face.
“You are just as bad to me as Gramma was to you!” I yelled at her, and
again the car cocked and jolted along with her panic.
“You don’t know anything about it!” She threw back as we pulled into the
garage, slammed our doors shut and walked inside the house.
I began the walk towards my room, a cruel protest, leaving the conversation
mid-yell, and hoping she would not follow, stop speaking and let me cry in my
walk-in closet for the rest of the night. I loved to sit on the stool and blast whiny
rock ballads by the Counting Crows, and sing along with the lyrics, “…She knows
she's more that just a little misunderstood/She has trouble/acting normal when
she's nervous/Round here we're carving out our names/Round here/we all look
the same/Round here we talk just like lions/But we sacrifice like lambs
Round here she's slipping through my hands.” I could already hear the guitar’s
eerie opening notes. But right before I reached the stairs my mother faced me,
freezing her broken eyes on my face and spat out her furiousness.
“You little jerk!” she cried. Her keys, which had been gripped firmly in her hand,
flew at my head and hit the molding on the doorway, white paint flying off in small
dusty chunks as they screeched against the surface.
iii. pine, winter 2003
“Do you want to help decorate the tree?” she asks a few days before Christmas,
and I refuse, as I have every time for the past three years, but I decide to watch
her and my father construct the holiday season in our living room. I grab a heavy
quilt and a small stack of chocolate chip cookies and settle in to a green armchair
as they work in front of me. Mainly they are talking amongst themselves, and I
only interject when I worry that they are forgetting a favorite ornament, or to
dictate an aesthetic change I feel is vital to the loveliness of our tree. Ever since I
can remember, my mother has always proclaimed that this year’s tree is the best
tree we’ve ever had. But this year the tree is not the best one we’ve ever had.
The branches on the right travel down at least six inches closer to the ground
than those on the left, and the tree is much fuller on the right as well, creating a
lopsided effect that is too pathetic to pretend away. Instead, all three of us
embrace its defectiveness, welcoming it into our family as a long lost son. I can’t
help thinking that this tree, flourishing in its imperfections, fits our family best.
I like to watch the way she decorates the tree. Her hands are deft at fitting the
hooks of the most delicate ornaments around the branches. I like the way her
hair is styled around her face, and that she spent eighty dollars on it last
weekend, and does so probably once a month but would never admit that to
anyone. I like the way it is layered and fluffy, trying to disguise the blonde-white
thinness. I like that she is always a little more dressed up than me and I haven’t
seen her wear jeans since she got out of the hospital. Her black trousers are
covered in a Christmas mix of sticky pine needles and flour, and her sweater is an
almost neon green which at once humiliates and delights me.
It is impossible to resist lining up this new self with the old image of my mother
that is imprinted in my unreliable but hardworking memory. I conjure up the
memory of my mother three years ago, her face chalky and bloated, her body
destroying itself somewhere underneath her baggy, faded GAP jeans, and my
brother’s old oversized button down shirts in shades of baby pink and baby blue.
Her hair had thinned out and whitened and looked dead and fragile on top of her
head, serving only as a delicate veil over her scalp. She moved slowly, biting her
jagged fingernails and fingering her flushed cheeks. I began to forget what her
smile looked like, and if her face had ever resembled mine. I knew we used to look
at her childhood pictures and mine, placing them side by side and seeing
ourselves reflected through each other across time. I began to take great care in
my skin, my hair, my body, being careful not to imitate her gestures, her voice,
her appearance. These days I can once again see the resemblance and a friend
tells me my mother looks younger every time she sees her.
For Christmas I have bought her a dark blue, velvet scarf that she saw when we
were shopping in the holiday market that sprawls across Union Square every
winter in New York, and I know she will take pleasure in matching it with her new
coat, or her favorite sweater. It will be wonderful when she calls me in to her
room to ask me if it looks right, and we will both be surprised for a moment, even
now, when we examine her reflection in the mirror.
iv. tupperware
I remember watching the cookie jar in the kitchen. When my mother stopped
drinking she began making chocolate chip cookies instead. We both agreed this
was a much better addiction, and one that benefited the whole family. It was
much like living in a 1950s television sitcom; I came home late at night at least
once a week to my mother in a faded apron and powdered hands stirring cookie
dough in a plastic bowl. I can picture her scooping out the raw dough with a
spoon and using her index finger to release the dough from the spoon and onto
the cookie sheets. I liked the sound the sheets made as they banged against the
inside of the oven, metal on metal. Mostly I liked the smell when I entered the
house, buttery and sweet and a little bit burnt. It would be as late as midnight,
and my mother would still be scraping cookies off the sheets and into the plastic
Tupperware container we used for cookies. Then she would hand me a beater
coated in the raw dough and say goodnight.
I loved when the container was full, and I knew she had enough cookies to
keep her happy, to prevent her from drinking. The full container meant I could
relax, I could give the responsibility of watching my mother to someone else for a
few days. But then I would notice the cookies disappearing, (for a time, she ate
up to ten or twelve of them a day) and I would bite the inside edge of my middle
finger with anxiety and worry that she would not have time to make a new batch
before running out of the old one. I would eye my boyfriend as he reached for
one of the last cookies, inhaling deeply at the fear that she would see how few
were left and grow lonely. I watched that cookie jar for the six months I lived at
home after she was sober. I would try to resist eating the cookies, wanting to
keep them for her, wanting her to have that one small pleasure, replacing all the
comfort she had given up.
I watch the cookie jar every time I visit home. It is an obsession, counting
the cookies in my head, watching the jar fill up with relief, and shaking my left
foot uncomfortably as I watch everyone eating the cookies, watch the level drop,
until there are just three or four stale cookies left and I am nearly hysterical with
the unnamable fear.
One night when my mother is busy baking cookies in her ivory colored terry
cloth bathrobe, I tell her about watching the cookie jar, and how it has become a
large part of my trips home. She laughs and pulls her eyebrows together in a
worry line, “Cor, I’m fine. Its OK if the cookies run out. I’m not going to be upset
if the cookies run out. This isn’t something you should have to think about.” She
smiles at me and laughs, both of us knowing I will still watch the cookies, still
think about them every time I sit staring at them from the kitchen counter. She
laughs, loving on some level that I care enough about her to cry at the thought
of an empty Tupperware container.
v. untitled, winter 2004
We like to go to tapas restaurants together and order five or six selections
of lamb, shrimp, garlic potatoes, vegetables. The food crowds the tiny table at
our favorite place in Brookline, and we struggle to find room enough for our
elbows to rest next to our plates. We both sip at ice water and eat our food with
the same slow deliberation reserved for anything this delicious.
I imagine, on these occasions, for a fleeting instant, the what-might-have-
been. It is a sick practice, but I envision before and after pictures of her liver, and
say the word “cirrhosis” in my head one hundred times, until it sinks in and I can
feel at once lucky and appalled. When I met with her therapist a few weeks after
she returned home from detox, I was confronted with a small, frizzy haired
woman who smiled hugely at me “I’ve heard so many wonderful things about
you!” she exclaimed, putting an arm over my shoulders. “I know this has all come
as a bit of a shock for you,” she began, and I fidgeted in the overly-comfortable
patterned arm chair I had chosen to sit in. “But really, her being an alcoholic is
good news, Corey. Now we know what’s wrong, why the Prozac wasn’t working,
and she will finally get better!” Then she told me in the calm but forceful voice
that good therapists like to use, that my mother would have died within a few
months if she hadn’t seen a doctor when she did. In actuality the therapist only
said this once, and I replied with an appropriately grave nod of the head, and we
moved on to talk about how to help her get through the difficulties that would
inevitably accompany the rehabilitation process. In my reconstruction of this
memory, however, I am virtually swimming through these words, feeling them
with every part of my skin. It is hard to imagine the funeral of the woman so
clearly alive in front of me. Her eyes are wider than I have ever seen them, pretty
and innocent.
I tell the story to anyone who will listen, and in many different ways.
Sometimes I only tell one piece of it- like finding the hidden wine with my father
when my mother was in detox, two weeks before my eighteenth birthday, or the
night they had to tell me about her alcoholism, or the happy ending where my
mother and I talk on the phone and tell secrets about the rest of the family. I
have told parts of the story in a Russian sauna, in a group of naked American
students. I have told parts of it over the phone sitting in my closet. Some of it
has been told late at night on a flannel sheeted mattress, falling asleep halfway
between love and hate. Parts have been told drunkenly in bars, sitting in broken
porch chairs on Brooklyn rooftops, all over New York City, Europe, and the
greater Boston area. The focus is always different, the conclusions I draw always
freshly confusing. I don’t know which versions will retain life, which versions will
die out, which parts of the story will vanish into a kind of collective memory. Each
time I finish the telling of it, I know I have to start again, from the beginning, or
perhaps from the middle, where I can look both ways, backwards and forwards,
and know which way I am going to travel this time.
r.kv.r.y. quarterly literary journal
fall08/winter09
fiction by c.a. haydu
fall08/winter09
fiction by c.a. haydu