My roommate is a wonderfully domestic sort, the kind to make scrambled eggs in the morning and chamomile tea at the evening hour. She might hate that I write this. I am not sure it is how she thinks of herself, but I love it. I love the calmness of it, the constancy. Oddly enough, she possesses the same qualities I respect in my father, the steadiness, the command of time and of life. Pain and happiness alike pass through her eyes; suffering transient, but a childlike joy remaining always. I seek it in her eyes, her joy contagious, her sadness uncomfortable. The world calls this “empathy”. I note that I feel if for very few, but I feel it for her.

The thought of her leaving is sour in my breast. I hate it when my mind goes there, though the passage of days and nights bring it ever nearer. I know the hours of my discontent to be fast at hand. I hesitate to call the thing “love”, neither of us, being the outwardly sentimental sort. Somehow that word is weakness to both of us, something in our respective pasts having tainted it. We are what we are, wedded with no marital bed, nor desiring one. The joke of it is palatable, leaves a taste in the mouth for its truth.

Dare I call the thing “friendship”? I am not sure, I am not sure there is a word for this kind of intimacy. After all, what can you call the eyes that peer into your face, the eyes that know every one of its creases and can read your whole demeanor in a fraction of a second? What can you call that knowing glance that prophesies your emotion before it ever rises to your cheeks? I cannot call it anything I suppose, too deep for “friendship”, too shy and inwardly for a label given so liberally. So then I will call it nothing, and I will keep these mediations to myself, they have no place in our usually light-hearted discourse. There is no pressing need to make a moment sad or awkward when it can be so easily avoided by keeping one’s mouth shut.

I will sit down at our rickety wooden table, eat a bite of scrambled eggs, and smile at the face that sits across from mine, alike in veiled emotion. I smile for the promise that passes unsaid between us, that should we hurt from what is to come, we hurt privately so as to not wound the other.

I am certain that this nightly torture is of my own doing,

Emanating from words that lingered at the root of my tongue long enough

That they soured; the bitter milk of feigned piety and fear,

I whisper them now to four walls and a ceiling, eggshell white and judging.

Perhaps I could deceive myself and still half-believe

That fate, karma, or a sinister Godhead placed us in this numbing limbo,

Where we can neither step backwards nor forwards,

Locked in a false friendship, swallowing another pill to buy another dream.

Rolling onto my back, laying a pillow across my thighs,

Eyes closing, I pretend to feel your weighted heat, I shudder and am sick.

Evening is here and the moon names me “hypocrite”.

Sweated sheets hold me in the ways you can’t, red shame sits on my cheek.

These are hours of atonement, sober in their misery.

The stars would tell me were they not bade silent, if I face time itself alone.

In those weakening moments, I try to fool my mind

That I am still asleep and that our souls are strewn together with golden string,

That the vacancy in this chest is but a melancholy mood

Possessing a weary heart for minutes at a time; and I know, I can believe that,

Halfway across the world, behind a higher window,

A candle burns, an ever-drowning flame rising just above a pool of liquid wax.

The candle, the one I gave you, the scent familiar,

A gift favored in your sight for the memories it does revive of our journey.

If this fire burns brighter, though unacknowledged,

Greater love yet remains, hot enough that God himself cannot extinguish it.

           She was perched on the edge of their bed, rocking slowly back and forth. He watched her for a time, half-mesmerized by the solemn rhythmic motion. Fear welled in the pit of his stomach, and nausea came in waves. This was the third time this week he had awoken to her silent agitation. He felt powerless. His age-spotted hand found her shoulder, she paused for a moment, and then continued her rocking. At times she would mumble things, most of them incoherent. He sighed and wiped a tear from his own cheek. Rising from the mattress, his arthritic feet combed the floor at the edge of the bed for his slippers. Sleep had fled for the evening, he would not find it again tonight.

          The bathroom was a few steps from the edge of her side of the bed. By memory and the red glow of an alarm clock he crossed the room. He did not look at her as he passed before her, turning on the light and closing the door behind him. He gripped the edges of the sink and stared hard into the mirror. The granite eyes that greeted him seemed alien, if a soul was even lit beneath them, it was faint. Had the figure in the glass not moved in time with him, he would have sworn he beheld a carcass and not a living creature. The skin on his face hung off the bone in loose folds. He stroked them with his hands and noted that a shave would soon be required. The man in the slippers smoothed the hair atop his head until it lay flat against his scalp. Not that there was much to smooth anymore, but the movement was a practiced one. The old man squinted into the mirror again, trying to remember something or trying to forget, he was never sure which of the two he wanted these days.

       The bathroom was lit by a single bulb to his left. The bulb was one of a set of five. He lacked the ambition to replace the other four and had grown accustomed to the softer light. If the old washroom could speak, it would thank him for that. The tiled floor was cracked in more places than he could count and lathered with grime and mold. The once eggshell shower had yellowed with hard water and age to the point as though it seemed some delinquent had relieved himself repeatedly against its walls.

          No matter, a few more months and the house would be the city’s problem. The light in her eyes was receding day by day and when she left this earth, he would too. There was a bottle of sleeping pills to ensure that much. He wondered how many it would take; three, ten? 'Best take the whole damn bottle just to be safe,’ he thought to himself, fingering the knob of the medicine cabinet. He wondered if anyone would notice. The slippered man thought for a moment he should call the county before he took the pills. Better not, they might arrive in enough time to resuscitate his corpse. He decided he would rot beside his wife, become another bit of filth, another stain in the decrepit house. Ah well, not tonight; he was too tired tonight.

         He eased his aching body down on the toilet seat and ran his hands across his seamed face. God, he wanted a drink, even a cigarette would do. He gave both of them up decades ago in exchange for a Bible. At present, he regretted that decision. Perhaps Jesus could forgive him for his sins, but no one else could; at least whisky had the power to shut them all up. That Bible was useful only to burn for warmth in the event the city shut the electric off as they had threatened. The room shifted around him as the dim light of the washroom played with his mind and he started to dream without closing his eyes.

           A boy stood before him, fifteen years old and enraged, a fire burning in his eyes white hot. The slippered man felt like fury sear his lungs and face and rolled a lit cigarette between his fingers. He grabbed the boy by the arm, wrapping tightly long yellowed fingers around a small pale elbow. A sadist’s smile ripped his face from ear to ear as he held the burning end against youthful flesh. The boy did not cry out, and did not look away. The black-haired miscreant only watched the skin bubble and blister silently. The boy even seemed to enjoy it, one fire feeding another, he watched hungrily.

          The old man started awake. His son’s face danced in his mind. The slippered man had always been a violent drunk. When he found the church, he would say that the alcohol had created in him a monster, but that was only half true. The monster was born when he left his mother’s womb and it would die when he finally did. Ethanol had only cut the lock on its cage.

If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

But make allowance for their doubting too;

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,

Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,

And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;

If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

And treat those two impostors just the same;

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken

Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,

And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings

And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings

And never breathe a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

To serve your turn long after they are gone,

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,

Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,

If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,

And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

____________________________________________________________________

*** This poem has always meant a great deal to me, even more so I continue my education into a Ph.D. It is a kind of sermon on humility and the striving of man. I have it memorized now, that I may tote it with me wherever I go. Often falling short of the "Ifs" here printed, I still always endeavor to keep them as a guide.***

Responding to my private confession,

She whispered through tears,

“There exists no greater lie

Than for you to say that you love me.

You may feel your heart aching

Within a weaker moment,

But come the stronger light of day,

The world bearing upon your shoulders,

You will deny that you ever

Enfolded my hand in yours.

I know truth to be bolder than this,

Harder and more frustrating.

Its concealment is difficult and flawed;

You hide the flame beneath a basket

And it burns the whole damn house.

But this, this is an easy lie

You turn affection on like a switch,

Illuminating a dark room.

Once you find what you are seeking

You turn it off again.”

I spoke nothing more to her

And cast my eyes upon the ground

The house was already burned,

My clothes and hair smelled

Strongly of smoke and gasoline.

And still I remained a coward.

For the fire I had set burned all night,

But come morning was ashes and pitch.

There is something beautiful

In the way we say goodbye.

The way we hold on and let go.

For people like me,

Both are equally difficult,

Both come slowly

And reflect the greatest amount of trust.

She found that ageless tongue

That bleeds dry the blue veins

Of philosophic beings,

Witnessing yet again the old

Becoming young.

The tongue that once cried out,

Calling for change amid constancy,

Disquiet in complacency,

Whilst grasping hidden truths

Known only above.

The tongue to run the centuries

Backwards toward universal emotion.

Speaking unto stone hearts

She reveals the wrongs of man

Nursing his injuries.

To sit a moment at her torn side

Is a new kind of holy confessional.

The mind remembers those

Legacies recreated in the dust

We fought to hide.

I must have written a thousand letters to your shadow.

The postman never caught a one;

Written by lamplight in the darkness

Each word a tear on the page, dried by the rising sun.

Falling in love with a ghost is not half so bad as they say.

Rejection is not a truth that exists

When in the grave I place my affections,

The tombstones breathe no word of my secret trysts.

Still the fieldstone lies cold and the earth so hard.

And I cry out because I cannot sleep

To dream the dream of your love,

Longing to lay beside you, buried six feet deep.

The caretaker pretends he does not hear my moaning

And rolls over in his warm bed,

Knowing there never comes true rest

For a man who is living while his soul is newly dead.

          There was a sadness in her eyes when I pulled away. Heaven knows I hated to be the cause of it…. even if it meant that I was loved. I think about it often enough, the awkwardness of that embrace, but also the purity of it, the sincerity of it. Moments like those leave us wondering if we will ever feel to that extent again, if the depths of such emotion are to be plumbed once and no more.

          It certainly feels that way; seems as though we barely escaped with our lives, our dignity. Moments like those teach us that we are capable of a love beyond reason, beyond one’s capacity for logic. I try to tear it apart, to analyze it and with all my words I cannot define it. I cannot parse out its inner workings or discover by what mechanism it so seizes the brain and turns intelligence to infantile mumblings.

         This is not a confession I often make, to admit an inability to understand a concept. Yet, it is the confession I make now. I confess that I do not understand love and its ability to arise from nothing more than the meeting of two strangers.

My reflection is such that it frightens me

With its transparency,

Its emptiness.

I see myself reflected in the panes of windows

And it is as though

I view my own ghost.

A fragment of reality impaled by sharp objects

From the world beyond the glass.