Wishes On the Wall: A Passing (of Time)

It's night time.

I just parked next to a semi truck in the far reaches of a parking lot of a motel just outside of my hometown and, as I'm walking up the slightly rotton wood staircase that leads to the second and only other floor, I am carrying a bundle of photographs of my dead friend.


(pause)

Eddie's hands. The cuts and callouses all over them. The sunburnt face. The momentary blush of shame of not knowing "the right word for" what he was trying to express. You know the exact fucking words for what you want to express. The rip in his boots that exposes the dirty padding of it. The lull a few years back in construction, and how it meant that he would be the one to care for her when James needed to work and her kids needed to get to school.

(pause)

I met up with my recently-dead friend's brother in a motel.

There were two beds. There were five lights. There were the floral, slippery, nylon-type comforters found in such motels covering the beds. We sat on the beds like chairs, and faced each other.  There wasn't enough room to sit down like you're supposed to.

He went through photographs of her, still wet and sticking together from when the firemen had come in to drench his burning room. (How is it that things like this happen so closely together?  Your family's small house begins to burn down and, a week later, your sister is dead.)  He told me the story of each of them.  Paused only to peel them apart from each other.

(pause)

Later that night, I dropped him off at the long term temporary colonial-style apartment complex that his family is staying in while workers repair their burnt up house. It was dark in the lot of complexes. Dirty miniatures of The White House all lined up in a row.

It was watching Eddie fumble for his keys in the dim light outside of this unfamiliar waiting home that it finally hit.

Something about imagining his mother, forever reading romance-novels from behind her seventies, half-tinted glasses sitting on the couch behind the door of this temporary home.

Something about imagining his father, his short temper and stocky self- always in dress pants (unstained, but not pressed) for the reason that every man of his class wore them.  Proving something. Hiding something. Habit. Some men will never have hair past a close cut, and it will never be about style as much about an evasion of judgement.  But that, too, will be hidden. In language of diligence, and of jobs.

(pause)

Let me tell you about how my bones shift when I am home.

Let me tell you how the things I have hidden in the past ten years come to bare themselves when I hear the familiar angles of the local pronunciations; when I see the things I try and hide and want nothing more

than to covet them.



--k.

(Title is a slight reference to the snippet of a lyric from Wish Fulfillment, by Sonic Youth. Listen to it if you can. It sets the feeling for this post, or, has at least informed it. Listen, here: It's my favorite shot of you: You look so pretty - your eyes were true )
(image: Frida J via Untrustyou Tumblr)