Project 4: Mary Don't you Weep

I ‘was here,’ until I’m not. Blackboards erased, sidewalks repaved. An echo, captured like a toddler’s ant, flicked by the hum of your standing fan. I won’t unfold into view on your changed angles looking in the mirror. Would you want me to?

    Don’t weep.

                What’s happened, has happened. Take comfort in idiom—a truth underscores every trite comfort, there are no fewer bones in Mother’s hugs if mothers’ essence is to hug. There’s honesty in evasive monsters under the bed, just as there’s honesty in bowls of soup and Oreos aside Kleenex boxes on bedside tables. What has been heard before, has been true before, and though skeptics can cling to the uncertainty of rising suns, know that if you rise, it must have.  

                Don’t mourn.

                What’s planted is not prologue provided it’s perennial, like chrysanthemums and dirty dish disputes. Wreaths are bouquets bundled differently, and evergreens are more persistent than heart-dotted paper. Hay-fever and thorn-pricks signify spring and spring rains, blue-coated fires in hearths with cedar-scent, winter and New Year’s. Perspective is fickle.  

                Witches float and the sinless sink. Smoke ascends. Burning logs settle. Weight was bestowed on all full things.

                None of what’s above is true. None of what’s above is false. Reject all absolutes. Everything conforms to the perceiver—everything. Rorschach riddles, missing teeth no longer under pillows, three half-eaten cookies on a plate by the fireplace, missing cookies and empty jars and brushed teeth and lips dotted clean. There need not be someone taking things for things to get lost. And yet, I took a nap and I was gone, you took respite in things no longer there, we had taken each other’s words without proof of parted seas, and that all seemed fine.

                Here are things I promised, without any promise of possibility: to be your rock (whatever that meant)—igneous processes left things sedimentary; to be by your side—sometimes I led, sometimes I followed, but always one or the other; to be permanent—instead, I was incessant.

                But broken promises are not shattered idols. Only hoarders keep everything. To commit is to close your mind, and no one called for that. We were not in pieces, we were pieces, like kitchen tiling. I never felt you, nor you me, but we were always close by. There was no stubbed side of the wishbone. This was all fine. We kept each other, in moments.

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                For me: you crumpled yesterday’s newspaper for kindling, travel and obituary sections, opinions and Science Times. Your hair was down, your legs crossed. I had my tattoo. Our hands were chapped and our lips were chapped. We had cream and Vaseline, but what did it matter? I knew you could not see me when you talked, but I was there shimmering in the window’s reflection if you had just turned your head. You bemoaned another lost day and asked when would you get a breath, when would things end moving so fast. It was rhetorical. I respected your privacy. The fire sparked and you were still until the flames had crept up the pages to the twigs to the sticks, translated to the cackling cedar logs. I was sleepy and did not answer. But the rest was not silent.

               

                

Project 3: Balms of Gilead

One of the striking things about a lot of the songs in this section was that while they were meant to inspire hope, the lyrics betray near hopelessness in one's current state. For example, the hope found in "Swing Low Sweet Chariot" is the hope found in death and the afterlife. There is no promise of hope in one's current life. The hope in "Balms of Gilead" lies in a similar place.

And yet, I could not help but feel these songs are hopeful. Even though the lyrics may be bleak, hope was imbued in the pieces in their performances. The act of singing as a community instilled (and instills) a sense of comfort in comradery, even if the songs, themselves, seem hopeless.

This realization about these songs in some ways colors my own experience with my story. The speaker's situation seems hopeless. And yet, in voicing this hopelessness--in performing the story--he can find  a similar support group to the one found among fellow singers.

Project 2--You Are My Sunshine

Listening to all the different versions of You Are My Sunshine—by Jimmie Davis, Johnny Cash, even Ray Charles—one line stood out to me: “You’ll never know, dear, how much I love you.” I found this line particularly haunting because it indicated that fault in the failure in the relationship rested, in large part, on the speaker’s shoulders. This inability to express emotional attachment sparked the following story. In my piece for this week, a self-obsessed young male refrains from expressing his appreciation for his partner because of perceived implications to his ego should he be the more invested partner. Insofar as the speaker is self-obsessed, and insofar as the song’s speaker yields no expository information about his lover beyond that she loves others, I felt leaving his lover largely undescribed worked best.

In writing, a distinct theme of possession emerged. This was not expressly intended, but is certainly a large part of the story that resulted—both in explicit mention and in the paragraph centered around how the verbs of love are often expressed with conjugations of the word “have.” This focus certainly meandered from the song a bit, but insofar as the ‘love is war’ metaphor consumes our discourse on love, I think it is appropriate. 

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I didn’t remember who kissed whom the first time we kissed, but I knew it had to be just one of us. Every transitive verb has a subject and an object, and it never felt right that we could act intransitively. “We kissed” skirted around our relationship’s vernacular because the first person plural lugged with it obligation, and to be obliged rested askew, like an improperly screwed child-lock.

On walks to Walgreens for medicine and soap, I wanted to hold her hand, and wanted even more so on return trips, solo, for soap-dishes. But we knew that holding hands transcended interlocking fingers and kissing palms and held meaning as a symbol, something greater. It meant the death of what we’ve had, only maybe, in different terms, just a change. I could not risk giving in because giving in was not giving in but precisely this giving up. The first to feel for a hand cedes all power. The power to own and rebuff. The innate power in indifference to negate. The power to progress, blasé, as in the last moments before spinning out, before the instructor tightens his hands on the passenger-side wheel and the smell of burnt coffee settles in to the seating. Ibelieved in the slippery slope from grasping for a hand to being clingy, and that all relationships were built on comparatives, like more thirsty, more reluctant, less amused. When I laughed at her sarcasm, my unwillingness was superlative.

I made great motion to appear unmoved. In her hallway, I used my phone for a reflection and spent time dealing with antagonistic, combed hair, because to be couth was to care too much. I always trimmed my nails at my place before jogging over and never forgot to capture my breath before texting “Yo” to signal I’d arrived. We greeted each other with brusque hallway hugs. I allowed myself to let my fingers dig into her back.

Inside, I often did tell her I loved her, but she was asleep. Perhaps that “but” should be an “and.” After all, I could only say it when she was on her back, maybe snoring, basting in the fresh sun that slipped through the window bars, face submerged in a pillow past the ears so that she had no chance of hearing. During the day, I held adoration in my throat, like phlegm, and at night I let it out because she would not witness to accuse me of vandalism.

This, because love implied want and exclusivity and because exclusivity was an unspoken dirty word. To give oneself to another was archaic. Monogamy embittered contentment, birthing jealousy, and we did not desire a love-child. I said I had others, and said I had others commensurate to the others she said she’d had. I had incommensurate others to avoid lying. I avoided laying with the incommensurate others. In her bed, I ceased having sex with her, and she started to have me. To be possessed felt uncomfortable, to write at least.  

But I got drunk and itched to level with her, inhibition sandpapered off like the finish on a table for repainting. In her hallway, an hour later, I knocked, thick, and waited. Beyond the door, sounded the tapped ruminations of meandering feet. The hallway smelled of maple car-freshener. I heard her approach the door, and I stiffened, grasping my right wrist to ground myself. Drunkenness waning, the alcohol waxed in my mind from a revelatory agent to a constructing one, and I began to reconvince myself that admitting was cemented to losing a power struggle, or to reconvince myself I cared. She opened her door and messed my hair with her hand. I gargled my words, reclaiming them before they could ever escape. She kissed me and had me take a breath mint with a glass of water.

Fully sobered, I screwed myself up, like a wrung towel, to avoid an outburst. I fake drunk texted compliments to gauge her, contorting insobriety into a façade under which I could cover in case she accused me of desiring too much. She did not respond. I got drunk to try again in earnest in person, and drunk again to try again, again and again. When face-to-face, I could never charm sincere words. She took longer to answer the door. She ran out of mints. She stayed in her pajamas.

Again, I was tired and tugged along her hallway, unannounced. Her fingers had grown still the past few times we were together, and I was there to revive them. My hair was combed. She did not hug me at the door, grabbing my hand instead and leading me to a couch.  

“This,” she started, and I brimmed, “this” being a classificatory word necessarily indicating our relationship was now trespassing on the defined. She shoved a glass of water in my hand, and I poked my pointer finger towards hers. She steadied the glass in my hand and withdrew.

And then she continued. “This should end. I can no longer find anything like I did when we used to kiss.”

Project 1

As the story I wrote this week is very much concerned with sound--of people's voices and accents, of urbanization, of the echoes of a valley--I decided to not post it here and leave it as a heard, but not read piece. Below are some thoughts I had about the song and the story.

In creating my story for the "Down in the Valley" project, I tried to make sure various components of the song shone through in my piece. I included a few referents to the song, but mainly I focused on recreating the mood and not pulling out specific textual components of the song. In trying to capture the mood, I wanted both the sound and the lyrics of the song to make it into my work.

The sound of the song struck me almost as waltzing music. This in conjunction with the line, "throw your arms round me," led me to want to establish a physical relationship early on in my story. I did not think such a component should dominate the piece, so I decided to have it fizzle out as the story progressed. This created an evolution of the speaker's love from a physical obsession to a more fanatic, manic one. 

Having established the romantic component of the song in my piece, I wanted to complete the song's juxtaposition of romantic longing with the natural world. I tried to blend the lovers' story with the story about the valley changing. First, I made much of the language concerning the speaker's ex be homonymous with language concerning nature--e.g. she is doing logs and roots in a math class, the speaker is removing logs and roots to blaze a trail through the forest.

My interpretation of the song's valley was that it was a source of obstruction, of blocking one from seeing the world beyond. In my story, the actual valley restricts the speaker from accessing his lover and her new life. Additionally, the speaker's metaphorical valley--an inability to let go--blinds him from the reality that his lover has, at least for a great portion of the story--moved on.

Finally, I wanted to match the ambiguity of the lovers' response in the song with ambiguity in my story. Hence I ended with the word "gawn," which is either "go on" (and touch me) or "gone" (as in, it's over). I have a clear belief about which the lover is indeed saying, which I fear I imposed in my pronunciation while reading the story, but I do not think there is necessarily a right answer.