Spring

In the early hours of the day, we often danced. Or maybe that was a dream. I remember spilling hot coffee onto the carpet, and it produced the shape of something reminiscent to a foreign country. I linger too long in the backyard, stumbling amongst the hanging linens, and felt the warm breeze of a long awaited spring. I drifted lazily along in the sun, humming and accepting the small kisses of warmth on my eyelids. I felt like an odd pet sometimes, a caged reptile, a moth on a leash. How the neighbors must have viewed it; a wide eyed girl dancing in the grass, marketing a short life on both of her arms, laughing and laughing. We used to speak in a secret way; our eyes exchanging messages, whispers of language residing in movement.

I speak freely now, and say this: How am I to be? What will be? In which ways will I doom myself over and over, and why does laying in his bed feel so good?

I’ve got a headache this morning. Too much wine, blah blah blah.

I keep hearing stories about the world ending. Yes, but when?

You’ve been tripping over your words again, and I speak for you to try to ease the unbearable dissonance between the two of us. I know it’s because my directness makes you uncomfortable. This happens with everyone, I’m realizing.

Is this what it looks like when things finally begin to fall apart? And why do I like it?

I can no longer see the stain in the carpet, you’ve covered it with a rug and I can’t remember if it looked like Africa or Asia. In some subconscious way, this frightens me. I feel as though I have no ownership in this space, I start to wonder why I crave ownership at all. Look at me when I’m concerned. Take this seriously. I’m melting into the walls.

I want to cradle the small burning log in the fireplace. I am not concerned with why hurting myself feels really, really, really good. It seems too simple to use the word ‘masochist.’ However, in this moment I do not reach for the flaming kindle, and refrain from any physical damage. This leaves me bored and waning; like a moon that lost it’s light and just shrinks, and shrinks.

You keep looking out the window, staring at drops of snow that have accumulated quite a mass in the yard. You haven’t moved your gaze in over an hour, and that is okay.

When

When

When

When will I finally say what needs to be said.

Why am I always the one to say it?

Cut. Sometimes I pretend that we are a sitcom, and at any moment a laugh track will alleviate the tension in the room. This never happens and the rigidity builds when I remind myself there is no saving us from such treacherous awkwardness.

I remember when we use to understand the language of each others bodies, but now I understand so little about you that I’ve wondered if you could be a murderous lunatic and kill me in my sleep. Cut. Beat. Laugh track.

How many months has it been? And how long has this snow been gathering on the porch? I have an odd feeling that I won’t be dancing in the grass for some long expanse of time. I no longer ache to know what lives behind my eyelids, and the news reports speak plainly: Storm, Ice Age, Storm, Forever, forever, forfuckingever.

I think I can smell his cologne, but I would get too excited to see him, and that is now beginning to turn into avoidance. I try really hard to not say his name out loud.

I don’t like being nervous. I show up inauthentically and intense. You remind me of this.

Strange, I feel no guilt in thinking of him when I look at you.

I realize we are evolving in the worst ways.

The rain comes next, and I wonder how many consecutive days have been spent inside, and when I will finally touch the burning embers in the fireplace.

Wine is better when I pour my first glass after after 2pm, but I hardly ever wait that long.

The news stopped reporting. What is there to say, anyway? Leave. Leave this house. Get off the mattress. Remember things matter.

You’ve started smoking inside again. You found an old pack of cloves in the basement, right before it flooded.

“Brilliant.” The first word you’ve said in weeks.

Smoking makes you remarkably more attractive, and our bodies finally begin speaking again.

We had sex on the porch while thunder echoed around us, just to see if we’d survive. It was the first time in months.

“Brilliant.” I said.

There is an intense stinging behind my eyes the next day, maybe this was the long awaited shame? I can’t truly look at you the rest of the day. But you won’t move from the window so nothing appeared unsteady. Every time I look outside it’s night.

The house begins shaking tremendously. Winds, winds, winds. Neither of us are concerned. Maybe the house will leave us. But this seems too easy and I shake off any hope that might have begun to stir in my belly. I realized that night we had only known each other six months before we were locked away together.

I wonder if this was a blessing or a curse: had it been better or worse to be trapped with a stranger or someone I had known my entire life? Have I ever known someone my entire life? No, no, not really. Six months seems like a fine amount of time.

I wish you would stop looking at me like that.

The house finally settled, but the fire died and we ran out of wood.

How am I supposed to singe my skin now?

Stepping into the backyard: the wind had stopped, and it was no longer night, but the weather was far too warm and the sky appeared a strange sort of green. Trees had been strewn about, entirely uprooted. Everything had the handprint of death on it. There must have been a devil out here, I tell myself. I turned around to look at the house; not a scratch.

I thought about him again for a moment in the small eternity we’d been spending inside.

“I’m seeing someone else.” I say,

“Hallucinations?”

Cut. Beat. Laugh track.

The radio began working again, but the TV still remained a fuzzy static. You smoked three cloves in a row and turned the dials trying to discover what you could. I thought this to be pointless.

Fires, desolation, winds, blah blah blah.

Yeah. We got it.

I started sitting on the porch more often, but was afraid to venture any further. I read somewhere once that inmates who spend the majority of their life in prison don’t actually care to live outside their penitentiary if given the opportunity. Too comfortable, maybe.

Fuck.

I pick up smoking now too. You find this unattractive. It makes me laugh; something I thought I’d forgotten how to do. We sit on the porch together and point out figures in the smoke, and remark that the sky is a lighter shade of grey with each passing day. “Maybe this will be over soon.”

Fear, fear, and fear. Do I like living this way? Who survived? Will we even see each other again? Where wouldn’t I go? A surge of questions pour through me and I begin shaking uncontrollably. Best to forget such things.

I put the end of a clove out on my ankle, and you take me inside to dance in the living room. I wish it had made me feel something.

Today the inexplicable happened, I was sitting on the porch, and saw something peer from behind the gray.

Sunlight. Huh. Had I so readily accepted that I would never see it again?

I don’t remember being such a bleak person.

Bleak skies, bleak mind.

I rushed inside to tell you but by the time you came outside it was gone again. Maybe you were right about the hallucinations. No, no, no. Not crazy yet.

And suddenly, as though time had hurled us forward, we began seeing the sun daily.

Daily. Nightly?

Please don’t go. I am far too aware of myself now.

Everything seemed to stop for some time. There was no wind, no breeze, no drifting precipitation, no more fires, nothing. Just endless shades of grey and moments of bright light that could only be the sun. There was no night, there was no day. This has got to be the longest leg of the journey.

And I have to remind myself to mark days on a calendar, and look at a clock, and eat, and sleep, and sleep, and sleep.

Who were we before?

And were we ever really those people? I wonder if they were just pretty masks to hide the primal ugliness we now adorn full time. I can’t remember the last time I tasted something that wasn’t out of a can.

It would be nice to get pricked by a blackberry bush.

Sometimes, when I take fake naps,

I pretend that he’s lying next to me. This is a dark thought, and it reminds me of some kind of film that I can’t quite put my finger on. I can’t remember the way he said my name, and in the silence I shed rivers of tears.

Then I come upstairs and read while you fidget with the TV.

If I die here, where will you bury me?

A question I had while you were lighting the fire.

Also: is today finally the day?

Everything stays very still outside. We do not comment on this, and so default to deep sighs on the porch. Nothing changes, and nothing stays exactly the same. Maybe we died during one of the storms and we’ve crossed over into purgatory.

Wrong again, because I’d surely go to hell.

I thought I heard something in the bushes when I was sitting outside. Impossible, impossible, impossible, I remind myself.

Where did the neighbors go?

I am again reminded of the purgatory concept. Fuck, fuck, fuck.

You’re looking at me weird again, and I contemplate the ability to read minds.

Let’s hope not.

What was my favorite song? Am I starting to become this house?

Today: the lightest shade of grey yet, and maybe some sort of blue. The air feels different outside, I can’t put my finger on it. The best word I’ve found for it is: pulse.

In the magazine, there was an article on page 67 with a list of all the top rated hotels in Seattle. I wonder if they’re still standing or if they’ve turned to dust like all things.

I’ve never asked you your middle name before.

“Alexander.”

“Can you be him?”

“No.”

Cut.

The calendar reads M A R C H in big abrasive letters, and I am offended by the imagine of a small rabbit in a green garden. These are things I will potentially never see again. It speaks volumes to where we’re at, doesn’t it?

I wish I was an artist. No better time to start a new hobby than the apocalypse.

I have lost the meaning of certain words. Thrive being one. My mother used to say “Don’t just survive, thrive!” If only she had foreseen me withering away in this old house.

I take the calendar from the wall, and draw strange faces all over the rabbit’s body.

You did not think this was as amusing as I did. I pour myself another glass of Cabernet.

Luckily, this house was built for situations just as ours, however I am down to eight and a half bottles of wine, you only have maybe elven cloves, but ultimately we are both just low low low low. I thought I saw a firefly from the corner of my eye, and I felt a breeze when the sky was at that grey-blue hour.

Finally, you broke.

The moment occurred sometime after I woke up, you sat in the yard and howled. I am terrified you will look at me through this same lens soon.

Will I have to keep it together for us both? Shudder.

Old letters I found in the attic from the previous owners of the house, they read as follows:

10/3/47

Margaret,

I don’t know how to tell you this, so I’ve left this information for you to find on the bedside. Bernard died. He could not battle his demons any longer, and God felt it was his time to go. Please reach acceptance with this terrible news, my girl. I will meet you back in New York.

- John

Seems a little on the nose to me.

Please reach acceptance.

I think I will finally go to the fireplace now, give myself a good hurt for a moment or two. Feel something, feel something.

But no, you are standing there, waiting for me, guarding the flame.

Perhaps you’d also like to burn just a little.

The mind reading is becoming annoying.

Outside, a miraculous realization:

Clean air.

I had forgotten how damp and smokey things had become since the fires, and this (morning?) I stepped outside for wood and

woosh

clean air.

There was no heaviness and I think I coughed because of the purity. Could this be a sign? Does the sky almost look blue?

I’m learning that I might be allergic to hope.

You were crying on the porch with your cloves, coughing and crying, coughing and crying. There was something so vulnerable there that I fell back in love with you for a moment.

You are getting closer to reaching a limit. I took you to the backyard and we inhaled deep breaths. You only collapsed for a moment, before getting a hold of yourself, and returning to your breath. This level of strength is admirable, and I hope it prevails.

For his sake, or mine?

On the radio today:

“Discovered! Clean air blows south of Canada and to the Pacific North West.

Skies are being seen in Vancouver!

Could the storms really be over?”

And at the same time, the fuzzy TV turned on an emergency broadcast.

I think I’m gonna be sick.

Sometimes, it amazes me we have’t gotten into any physical altercations.

We’re too depressed to care that much.

Sometimes I peer at you from the kitchen when you’re sleeping on the couch. My eyes are darting from you to the fire endlessly until I loose track of time.

I am not normal.

What the fuck is normal now anyway?

I’ve never been much of an optimist, but if I were, I would congratulate us both on not being any worse. However, I am not an optimist and I feel like I’m lying when I think that.

The TV is on at all times, and we both stay on alert and wait for our next moves. “Top scientists say…” and then I sorta block the rest out and hope you’re paying attention.

Six bottles of wine left.

We are starting to tell a difference between the night and day, the great movement of sun and moon. For a second I suppose I had thought that the sun and moon where gone too. The air is temperate and clean, we’ve spent all day in the backyard and I think I feel the best that I have since this whole thing started.

I am still not convinced this isn’t purgatory, and I am afraid of how little food we have left. Would you eat me? No, no, no. You were a vegetarian and that’s too big of a jump too soon. Right?

We both spent the rest of the night watching the fire, and listening to music coming from the radio. Yes, the radio now plays music again. From where? Anywhere.

A surprise for us both: The kitchen door whirls open, and inside runs a small opossum! It was scared and shaking and hissing and when I looked down at it I felt a pang of familiarity. I realize I may have been so selfish and cruel out of fear.

Copout. Everyone’s scared. You’re just a heartless bitch.

We spend the morning luring our opossum out from behind the fridge that lost power months ago. I want to keep him. Anything that is alive is welcome in the house so we can avoid each other. When we finally get it out, I see that it is only a baby. You start sobbing and leave the room.

I’ve decided to name him Bernard, like the man who died from the letters in the attic. Bernard mostly sits in a box by the door, but occasionally will climb on top of things and scare the shit out of me.

We really have lost it, haven’t we?

My best friend is a opossum.

You stayed downstairs for a few days. I tell myself I didn’t check on you because I figured you wanted space, but I know it’s more so because I want to be alone with Bernard and the fire. I’ve still managed to refrain from fireplace bodily harm. I don’t know how much longer I can hold out.

Tonight I watched you eat in silence while you stared at the wall. You emerged from downstairs with such melancholy I found it nearly unbearable. I sit by the window now and wait for you to say something. This does not happen and you return downstairs.

The winds are normal, the sky is blue, the air is clean, and wreckage is everywhere.

In the backyard today, we were gathering more wood and looked across the hollowed out forest line and saw something: a person.

I began to scream a loud “HELLOOOO!” only for you to cover my mouth with your hand. We froze, and the man looked up, froze, and ran off.

You remind me today that present society is not the society we've known. Things have changed, over a year has passed.

A year? Only a year?

We collect as much wood from the woods as our arms can carry and scurry back inside. It dawns on me that if someone wanted to, they could break into the house and take everything and kill us both. I am saddened that that feels like luck. I am sad all the time anyway.

The news comes flashing on with another emergency broadcast. There’s one, two, sometimes even three every day. You sit down and listen carefully to any and all information available to you. I do not have this patience and despondently look into the back yard.

The next day you tell me you are going to scavenge.

This hits me in strange ways. Am I afraid you are going to die or am I afraid of being left alone? Either way I realize that this is not a conversation, but more of a telling.

“Be careful.”

“One of us has to be.”

Nice.

Cut. Beat. Laugh track.

It has been hours, and Bernard is getting restless. We go out side and lay in the dirt. Death’s hand still lingers on all that’s around us, and I begin to wonder how Bernard survived as long as he did out here.

Super-Opossum.

I arch my body in the dirt, stretching and stretching. Bernard is in a bush, or maybe he ran away forever. I turn my head to the right and see if I can spot him. Instead, I spy something else.

A small patch of wondrously green grass. Something sprouted. Ohmygod ohmygod.

I sprint over, bend down and begin to examine. A small bush.

Dicentra Formosa. Bleeding Heart.

Flowers for fuck sake?

I am overwhelmed that something has been able to grow in spite of the insurmountable amount of death surrounding us. The small pale pink flowers seemed to mock me. Bleeding Heart? That’s ironic.

I hear Bernard scratch at the back door and we go inside. I pick one of the small flowers and put it in my pocket. I am crying but feel nothing.

I am barely conscious when you find me. I am still holding the log and I awake to severe pain in my arms.

Sting! Sting! Sting!

You are yelling and seem panicked. I smile up at you and something crosses your face.

Disdain? Disgust? Pity?

Please don’t let it be pity.

You pick me up and take me outside. Suddenly, cool water is being poured all over my forearms and I begin to scream uncontrollably.

“You did this to yourself.”

Dick.

More burning, more stinging, and I am afraid to look down and see the damage. Oddly enough I don’t even remember doing this. You are now putting some kind of viscous fluid over the burns and I loose consciousness again.

I wake up on the couch, my arms are covered in gauze and there are voices in the other room.

Voices? Plural?

What the fuck?

I shoot up from the couch and creep over to the wall.

No. This can't be happening. He survived? He actually survived??

This had to be dreams, hallucinations, absolute pure insanity. I am loosing my mind. I step back and the floor creaks, both of their heads shoot in my direction. I realize now that they were fighting. Did he tell him?

I tried to once. The apocalypse seemed a bigger concern at the time I suppose.

Everyone is frozen, nobody wants to speak first. This level of coincidence is nearly impossible, right? The purgatory idea flashes in front of my eyes.

This, this could be hell.

Suddenly I am seeing little dots in my vision, things are getting dim, and I am falling to the ground.

The last image my tired eyes see before darkness:

Both lovers lurching forward to catch me as I pass out.

I come to in the back of a moving vehicle. I can tell we are moving fast.

Panic, panic, and more panic.

Where is Bernard?

Your voice collides with him in the front of the car, and I am laying in the back seat wet with sweat, and shivering.

“She needs medical attention.”

Me?

Of course you, you fucking idiot. You stuck your arms into a fireplace and probably have third degree burns.

Where the hell am I going to seek medical attention? I imagine any semblance of a hospital has been out of commission for some time now. Also, realizing I could die finally washes away any worry of being dead already… right?

You’re both talking so loud.

I can smell his cologne. He is not how I imagined him.

I would use the term disappointment, but that doesn’t seem quite right.

I lift my head up, strain to look out the window. He reaches around and motions for me to lay back down. I know that it is inevitable I will black out any moment, and potentially for the last time. I choose to see what I can.

Everything as I knew it before had been destroyed. Are we on Williamsburg Ave?

The trees are all dead, and I am reminded of the bleeding heart in the back yard. I try to tell you to save the bush, that something grew, that this matters. Words do not come out.

Behind the forest of dead trees a final vision:

a lavender sunset, tracks of gold in the sky. I can hear you both calling my name but in no scenario would I ever look away. This was the perfect moment. I had finally left the house.

From my pocket I pull the stem and flower of the Bleeding Heart. I think it’s spring: deep breath of clean air out the window. I can hear you say "Hold on."

To what?

Cut. Beat.