You Take the Window Seat

 31 May 2022

Before we were disposable, we had friends. Before our hearts turned to plastic, we made them into metaphors. Before I began to write this, I thought I’d venture into happiness. Where you are my harbor, the crook of your arm my consolation. When I lie on you, your body calms itself from trembling. Give in to move on. Prepositions again, or propositions that all moments are created equal, even if our experiences of them differ as orchid to train (except on a bridal dress). The small words are all signs, in a relative sense, pointing to something more than relative, though less than enlightened, perhaps. When Sebald ran into Hardy at an intersection, they spoke of coincidence (there is none) and of experience as a map, spooling like tape to touch a ruler, erect, that measures vertical space. To react too strongly to a map is a sign of trauma, because the map can’t bear witness. It’s just a throw rug on which we either walk or fall down. Slippery slopes are often real, even when they’re flat. His flag (in space) so close to my childhood (in time) that memory starts its demented walk down a long hallway, slow and stiff.

Before we had friends, we were disposable. A blue toy, lacking hands and feet, left by the mower and his retinue of egrets. The mother Mary, whose fingers were chipped, now stands without her hands--stacked below her on the ground. The next day, one hand lay in the road, smashed. I moved it back in proximity to her. Feet still intact, she looks out over the graves, batting no eye at such a loss.

I take a photograph of an old black pick-up truck; in the back are an old broom, leaning against the back window, door just ajar, and a purple net at the end of a pole. I try to get both broom and pole in the photograph, or broom and window, but nothing works. A man yells at me from down the parking lot. “Whatchu taking picchas of?” I tell him the broom. I say no harm. He yells “ass” at me. Mine, or his, I don’t know. When I look at the photo, I notice his safety sticker is overdue by nearly seven months. Which of us in this vignette was not safe?

Her window view is static: her tall apartment building looks out at similar. Time in Kyiv has slowed; she now goes out for coffee, invites her twitter followers in. Chronology's gone in Donbas, each minute laid out on a table to be crushed. There are fingers, but no hands, glass but no windows, the components of wholes without any context. Neither body nor building holds, though eyes and windows stare out. Someone at the coffee shop yelled to put a lid on it.