Mitch

We drove through the silence together, and out of it again when the beach came into view. The waves roared & licked the shore like a pride of lionesses.

"I feel like I'm starting all over again," she told me in a low voice. I felt like I was starting new; we felt the same then, but reacted to the feelings in different ways. "I can't seem to focus wholeheartedly on anything anymore."

"Maybe you don't need to now--maybe you're not supposed to," I told her with an undetectable edge of desperation to my words. I wished I could lend her my acceptance of the way things are--however they happen to be.

She pulled the lumbering beast of a vehicle over, killing the engine the moment the back wheels hit the gravel of the shoulder. The headlights extinguished themselves under her demanding hand even before we glided to a stop, and we immediately began to drown together, submerged in the wake of the heavy darkness dimming the cab.

Ciarra

The house across the street is vacant now. (It's viiisible... Gone. Viiisible... Gone as I watch its image fluttering over the roof of my own house, jumping on the oversize trampoline in my back yard. I would expect that it's forlorn enough to be gathered up and scattered by the wind [after all that it had and lost] but it just sits there [all steady-like]. It is an atrocious house [to remain unmoved]. Living in that house, one can come to believe of the leaves to cackle as they fall (the nutcases). I too have surpassed my salvation (the sucker), like pencil marks invisible on skin [felt alone/only felt]. [Like Jesus even, huh? or so poised as this moment...] I've lost my unknowing companion, so that I might remember that it's cold.

[The in between is what I want. I want the darkness.] [Writing the words or the depths? Wondering about truth?]

I was in the car a few days ago and I saw an old man walking, as slow as you like with his hands behind his back, pondering. It hit me then, the beautiful intricacy of this life of ours. The excruciatingly frailty of this web that at times is the last strength in the universe. The only truth: that life will go on. Whether it tears or shatters or snaps. My life seems so complicated but that man, his life is complicated as well. It had consumed him. He needed a change of scenery just to comprehend the one he left behind/came from. It was surreal. Perfect. That's it. Gorgeous, the sheer perfection of all these fumbling attempts as though towards something we already possess. (Like the bus ride snippets...convey the magic of the everyday, if you can.)

MysteryGuy?

Counterfeit exhaustion got him there, but the coming fall is all his own. His pulse is strong and slow, which seems odd to his senses. Under his breath his own voice is muttering to him but he can't make it out. Instead, he gulps the coffee sitting on the church pew beside him, wishing he could be of service to someone.

MysteryGuy?

My eyes fill with her hands. They regard my face curiously, tracing away my lines until I feel my face a blur. My chocolate irises commiserate with her sepia skin, as the two move slow again through their ancient introduction.

"Will you write me down?" she asks me with quiet interest. I tell her hands yes, that I will write about this--but no, I will not write about her. "I miss being strong," she tells me, leaning down to give me her lips.

We go on, reaching out to bliss & contrition, but really it ended there.

The next morning she leaves without waking me, but to be fair I had lay in her bed for fifteen minutes without squinting an eye, listening to her lingering departure. When she goes, I roll lithely from the mattress and stand naked in her kitchen, making myself half a pot of her Columbian without a sense of guilt or regret to temper my actions. I sit at her bright chestnut table sipping for almost forty minutes, distracted by nothing else, and afterward, take care to rinse the mug I had used. As I leave through her large oak-black front door, seen for the first time during the brief darkness of the evening before, I can't imagine entering through it again.

If you're already feeling sorry for me--even if your pity's unrealistically self-directed--then you've misinterpreted the string of the story that I'm telling you. It's true that my solitude is not all I've hoped for this life, but when I delve into it I do so in a peace offering to every person that I love, and who has been handed the misfortune of loving me in return. It's the very best I have to give to them.

Ciarra

"Don't you remember why?" She didn't speak it aloud to anyone, because nobody was there with her. She wrote it down instead.

"What did her reasoning look like? Would she even remember now?" The words kept her awake that night, and not for their lack of an answer.

(Writing is so hard! when you still can't say, 'Fuck the words; I want a story.')

Simmer down, love. And uncoil. It's okay that you're waiting for something that you don't know how to expect. It's okay if it doesn't even come tonight. Loose your patience again, let it linger here. Do you still feel the ache of your arms? The depth of the cold to your feet? You do. They are just momentarily yours, remember?

Your stomach thinks it's hungry most of the time now, and you can hear your dog-heart snoring. When the second-hand ticking...pauses, the rain outside sounds alone, so that it ticks just as often as it does not. Of course its/the whole feeling of company is pretend.

Why do we dwell on loneliness? Why do we delve into it and reach for ghastly immersion? Why can't we tell the difference between loneliness and solitude? And what the fuck is it about approval? Utterly offensive, out of place approval... When will you come back inside and recall the way you always want(ed) to breathe? ... Girl, tell me a story, will you?

Janey & Ciarra

When the smile moved to me it didn't lose (any of/a bit of) its warmth. I realized that this proved she didn't recognize me (after all). No more than I had expected, I had let myself believe--I had left her when she was barely six years old, mind you. She nodded at me, paused in a way that wasn't in wait, then immediately began signing to me, evidently knowing I'd understand: Hi mom.

I'd been wrong. I had misread the smile as though to a stranger, forgetting that's all I was to her--whether or not she'd kept a picture of my former self in her head (all along,) now to draw upon after all these years. Hi daughter. I signed back, bravely testing her emotion by claiming her, having indeed/in fact not/never lost this sleight-of-hand skill of communication.

Indie

Her skirt rode up her thighs when she sat; she'd never worn this short before and she remained alarmingly aware of it. Sex is so boring, she thought. Or at least the mere mention of it, without the expectation of follow-through. And DISTRACTING at that, even from the possibility of actual attraction--so impossible is it to meet another person's eyes, dressed in this presumably obvious way. Just let go of the vanity, she urged herself silently, trying to focus on the jasmine breeze instead.

Just as her mind wandered to the potential of vining plants--the lovely fragrance of bougenvillia or the proud shape-color of ivy--her at last almost selfless musings were interrupted rather pleasantly: "Hey there, sweetheart." Sure, a rebellious irritation/offense struck her before anything else, but then she looked up to match the familiar face with the even more familiar voice--although entirely out of place as both or them were--and saw the only man with implicit permission to address her such.

"Dad?! Where'd you come from? What are you doing up here?"
"I took a drive. Check it out..."

He indicated at a place down the street, and she leaned over the coffeehouse railing to encounter the view: a Streamliner travel trailer--the thing he'd dreamed about simce at least as far back as she had breath in her. She 'whoooaa'-ed her delighted appreciation at the sight of his now-tangible wish, while wondering tangentially whether tea could be brewed from any sweet-smelling flower?