No News Today - Guest Post - Tim Horvath

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/