NO NEWS TODAY
Today you learn you don’t have to have your
cross-country skis exact in the grooves in order to pick up the slick
momentum they deliver. You learn that crossing a dog’s piss line can be
precarious, a World War I trench-breach. You are trespassing not only on
urine but on his vow to return, his yowls and teeth-baring atavistic
laments for the rending of memory. You wish you could make the snow
recount your own life, so that then you could simply walk away from it,
returning only when the snow has vanished and the earth reverted to mud
and loam. You are reminded that the consolations offered by the
companionship of a guinea pig are limited. You learn that you do not
necessarily know things you were sure you’d known, such as the location
of your stuff you’d put in storage, that you were sure was being kept
cozy and dry, the elements at bay. You will learn that no one cares
about your stuff as much as you do. You will learn again that “you” can
be both singular and plural, though “I” is always one. You will learn
that you can increase your memory a thousandfold simply by following
seven simple steps. You will learn that you are incapable, at this point
in time, of traversing seven steps, even to get to the kitchen, the
shower. You will read, staying in bed, something about building your
memory palace, but you will forget what or where that palace is. Have
the serfs that built your palace risen up in a surge of rebellion,
leaving it ruinous, chasmed and chunked? Chunking, you will learn, is
how you are supposed to hold things together. You will discover that
your chunks are unwholesome, unwieldy sandwich-fare of lusting and
longing, lost things, greasy fry-foil, and the struts of bridges out.
You will come to realize that memory need not dwell in palatial
conditions—that it can subsist in a shack an ice fisherman wouldn’t
abjure, thrown-together particle board recovered from a sagging barn
along with rusty trikes and Howdy Doody dolls with rust lodged in their
eye sockets and sprinkled in their clothes and dusting over their
freckles like an orange snow that won’t go away because no accomplice of
cold. You will learn that memory can shop around for a new place,
something well short of a mansion, Mc- or otherwise, can be open to
looking at efficiency apartments, rehearse prying open the fridge and
consulting the relish for mold without scorching ass on the burner’s gas
pressed right up against the back like some force that, however
galvanizing, is unwanted. You will learn that in the end memory can go
homeless like anyone or anything, lodging itself wherever it can, in
alleyways, under fire-escape awnings, in shelters, soon enough never
again too proud to ask for soup, to gesture for seconds. Eventually
memory, you, will find your way back to your own couch. Things will keep
surfacing: bones of unreckonable species, enough cereal to bead a
necklace twice around, the remaindered ones set aside for a bracelet.
You’ll keep moving the age of your relationship backwards with each new
excavation, every find. You’ll wonder whether someone else was living
with you all along, some third party that was discrete and hairless, or
just discrete.
I miss you and your almost-raw diet. I miss its
exceptions, your stockpiling of tuna. I miss the vowels you invented,
and those you inverted. I miss the way you’d talk about the Feng Shui of
time and rearrange events that I’d thought were pretty much nailed and
soldered into the floor, the wall. I even miss what I recognize only
now: how you saw every wall as a climbing wall, were always scanning for
footholds, places you could land your hand, calculating which carabiner
you’d need, which rope, which of your yoga retreat goddesses you’d
channel for, among many things, her plenitude of hands, blurring as they
grasped and clung, whirling in the face of such a range of choices,
options, ways to get up and over and away.
Tim Horvath is the author of Understories (Bellevue Literary Press) and
Circulation (sunnyoutside press). He teaches creative writing at the New
Hampshire Institute of Art and Grub Street, and can be found at timhorvath.pubspring.us/
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