mono
Lately, that's what living feels like also it's been raining a lot lately but I don't mind get diamonds tossed into my hair even if they're temporary and cold.
There are so many stains, the eye does not know where to settle except in space—past people.
My father taught me silence.
First, it was the silence of adoration, of moments of sitting mute from happiness. Under seven years old. My father used to blow dry my inky hair that I inherited precisely from him as I sat with his legs flanking me. Talking interrupted the black noise of the blow dryer so I used my arms to convey whenever he lowered the hot air too close or when I felt my hair was sufficiently baked.
He would let me have mouthfuls of his coffee ice cream when my mother was looking away too. It was our secret because my mother was outlandishly convinced that any caffeine would stunt my growth irreparably. She was always heart-wrenching-ly anxious about small things. But the ice cream kept me still and otherwise complacent wherever we went after we left the ice cream parlor. I still grew. Taller than my mother easily.
Then, there was the strain. After we moved continents, the silences began to fill with adulthood seeping in. The lack of words was more accusatory than peaceful. How dare my parents be parents, I seemed to often think. I found silences less wearying than talking, especially when we uprooted ourselves again from the complex Pacific Northwest that I dearly loved to elsewhere. Gone were the smells of petrichor mixed with lush pine, the patchwork of moody greys in skies, and most of all, everyone who grew with me from my childhood to teenagehood.
After the next move, my silences became armor. Speaking seemed to feel as if it were an unfairly divided chore between us or surgeon tools slicing knowingly to the where the pain lay. I could find blame in all things, if moved to do so. My father would repeat, "what happened?" to me, while I would respond "I don't know" or with a stare. The latter pains me even now to recall.
As years passed, our silences became salves that we can carry cleanly anywhere for each other's sake. I grew more. Learned more. Wised up. Emerged from my rigid chrysalis happily. We both know how many words silences condense without losing any of them. I lean in to show that I understand. I smile to reply.
My people were born from mugwort garlic and a she-bear that ate these two things and these two things only in utter darkness away from the sun for too many days until she became a woman who shed the skin of a bear and emerged from the rock void feeling clear glow light on her almond center skin and wept for the first time out of equally jet eyes.
No matter how much he slept, he felt the same.
He only liked the stasis of sleep, of absolute disconnect. He thinks he has the most potential while dreaming. Lately, life has a habit of tiring him absolutely. Nerve-deep.
The way he looked at her.
One of his dearest wishes was to outgrow a house instead of having to abandon it.
To grow old and match its precise woodgrains with his own skin as time passed. Houses, he found, he could love unconditionally, know better than lovers because they changed empathetically with their occupants. Every scar he left on the house—a scored floorboard from the time he dropped a lumpy mug he'd made in ceramics, the chipped corner of his room from overenthusiastic bookshelf dragging, and nicked stair railings—stayed in the same shape until he tended to it.
He liked that houses couldn't repair themselves.
That's the color she wore on her nails—a blue so deep that it became the static black of ceilings on sleepless nights. She kept them precise and unchipped.
Every night a new victim. Anyone from a stranger who smelled too sharply of liquor, to an acquaintance with an eerie habit of staring a beat too long, to past lovers she had outgrown for some reason or another.
Always only after midnight. She'd write their deaths, how she imagined each one would die—exquisitely without her.
He would cocoon my feet in his legs. During winter, the only parts of me that ever get cold are my extremities. It's like the rest of my body hoards the heat.
He'd give me the most vulnerable parts. Behind the fold of his knees or the shins. Eventually, my toes would thaw, never quite warming completely because they'd drank in his heat.
One evening the sky was nearly navy. We were on his unlit twin bed, straight on our unbent backs—forearm to forearm.
"Listen to this," he said, in his rolling human whisperer voice that always tickled me deep below my sternum.
He broke his straight-backed pose to reach over me to click on some forest-screened guided meditation. He had told me that it helped him journey without moving before he slept lately. He either slept as luxuriously and often as a house cat or not at all. He did not often use spectrums—only their utter ends. Which is why, I supposed, the world leaked into him more profoundly. But lately, he had been in cat mode.
He clicked the screen on. Settled back forearm to my forearm. We closed our eyes. Him first, because I liked how he looked with his eyes closed. Much more settled than when they were open. I closed mine and thought of nothing.
A quiet woman's voice told us things. About a walk in a forest. To step here, step there. Trace the bark. Smell the pine.
At the end of it, he opened his eyes. He asked what I had seen.
I had remembered how my father and I used to watch the liquid blacktail deer behind our beloved house— the silence eloquent.
"Green," I'd said.
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