The Disappearing Line

I am the disappearing line.

Every dream that expires takes a part of me that I can't get back.  Every shattered hope, every unfulfilled wish, every unattempted endeavor bleeds me.

There is no cure for what I have.  The doctor tells me living is a terminal disease.   Every experience takes some of my life, some energy, some perspective, some innocence until one day there is nothing left but the box.

They put the box in the ground, but I am not in the box.  I am the disappearing line.  I was already long gone.

Monsters on Vacation

The warm Mexico sun poured down on me from overhead, warming my bare arms and legs with a delicious tingling heat that only comes from the tropical sun.  I lay on my stomach, propped up like a little seal on my elbows, meticulously brushing sand out of the novel I was reading.  

I was engrossed in the sumptuous unimportance of the first book I had picked up to read for “just for fun” in two years.  Allowing myself to drown completely in the story and the sun, I was deaf to the rest of the world.

Jennifer was there with me, a co-survivor of our MA program and fellow shoe-loving travel-aholic.  I was awakened from my mental lethargy by a blast of sand being kicked up by Jennifer’s flailing legs. 

“Aahhh!” she squeaked as she bounded down towards the warm salty ocean waters.

I glanced up, startled, and adrenaline consumed me as I felt sharp claws stuck in my tousled, salty hair.  I followed Jen’s example and took off in no particular direction other than away. 

I finally got up the courage to pause my flight and turn back around cautiously to where I had been relaxing.  There he was.  The biggest, nastiest, grayest iguana I had ever seen.  He was glaring at me from just below my bright turquoise towel and didn’t plan to leave any time soon.

He held my gaze and slowly picked his way backwards a few feet up the sandy beach to just above my towel where a pack of chips I had been munching on lay.  This is too much! I thought.  I’m not going to stand here and let some lizard eat my Doritos that I smuggled with me on my vacation. I happen to be a huge fan of Cool Ranch.  I slowly began to approach my spot, hoping to intimidate this hungry beast before he stuck his slimy tongue in and drooled all over my precious junk food.  The instant I was far enough out of the water, the little devil charged at me, strategically maintaining his huge corpus between me and my chips. 

I had no choice but to retreat back into the salty water.  We repeated this sequence so many times that it felt like we were rehearsing for the tango.  Everything was there, the heat, the argument, the passion, the steps…

Eventually I had to watch in horror as his dirty hole greedily swallowed up my chips, staring at me in diabolic defiance.   I stomped my foot in the salty sand and felt tears come to my eyes.  Not because my chips were gone, but that I had lost a stare down to an iguana.  Now he sniffs me out every day and I have had to move to the other side of the hotel.  This unwanted pet is almost as bad as my ex-boyfriend who also happens to be on the other side of the hotel.

Inspired by True Events

Their hope incited him like a screaming crowd spurs on a tri-athlete.  Their unwavering faith moved him.  The belief that he was going to make them right with a couple of pills or an injection was painted on their dirty faces, and people took him by the arm on his way to the sickroom.  Flattering, but dangerous.  Especially when he knew he couldn’t fix them.

He raised a weathered hand and wiped little pearls of sweat off of his strong brow and carefully began to pick his way down the rocky slope to the hospital tent.  He felt the nausea of helplessness hit his stomach although this wasn’t his first rodeo.  Seeing their faces, glowing with hope and staring at him with pain poorly concealed behind anxious eyes gave him the adrenaline to work around the clock.  He understood enough Spanish to know that some of them had traveled from Honduras and El Salvador—and he understood enough about medicine to know that many of them didn’t stand a chance.  He was haunted by the smells of rancid flesh that hung over brittle skeletons, haunted by the image of tumors so extreme they seemed to be digitally mastered. 

His first trip to Guatemala as a college student had changed his life.  The sounds of muffled screams seemed to echo to him off the library walls at night and the feel of the hand saw beneath his trembling fingers kept him awake during his studying like a rumble strip on the freeway.  And every year, he came back to them with more knowledge to offer as he poured himself out surgery after surgery, slowly making a dent in the incessant lines so long they seemed to fade into the golden horizon.  He had worked night after night by the dim light produced by the generator with the rickety tools that were often improvised.

He remembered the pained looks and the brave nods as he watched understanding fall over their prematurely aged faces like a curtain.  “The chances aren’t good,” he would say, then wait for it to be translated from English to Spanish and oftentimes from Spanish to Quiche, Cakchiquel, Mam, or Tzutujil.  “There is a great likelihood that she will die in surgery,” pause for translation.  “The tumor is lodged too deep in her spine…she might survive but she will never walk again.”  Emotions are a universal language.  He didn’t need anyone to translate their reactions.  So many problems, so little time. 

He swept aside the bug net at the entrance to the tent, an attempt to keep a sterile environment.  He put on his white coat, took the handsanitizer the plucky student pumped into his hands and strapped on his mask.  “Ready?” he asked her.  She gave him a brave smile and nodded her head, strapping on her mask.  They walked in together and her steady hand held his tools, nothing more than saintly compassion keeping them rooted to the bed from which the putrid smell tried to drive them. 

Long-suffering

Margaret closed her eyes and rested her head against the cool vinyl of the booth. 

“I loved you the first time I saw you; I’ve never stopped loving you.”  It was the first time he said it, even though she had known for twenty years.  The problem was she loved him back.  Wilson’s voice bounced dangerously around the confines of her mind.  It was so clear, so overpowering that she felt everyone could hear it.

She had been in love with her husband when she met Wilson.  She was admiring her reflection in the hall when she first saw him.  His image invaded the mirror as he entered the corridor behind her.  He was tall and serene, handsome and strong.  Her pale eyes glowed like blue flames as she met his gaze through the glass.  Her heart skipped a beat.  She turned, pressing a sweaty palm to her royal blue gown.

He smiled out of the corner of his mouth and extended a bronzed hand.  “Wilson,” was all he said in introduction.  A million words couldn’t have made the impression that lone word did.  His voice had resonated in her mind ever since, an eternal vibration. 

For Margaret, everyplace was an opportunity.  She hoped to smell his cologne when she entered a room, hear his voice from her husband’s pool parlor, clear his empty glass from the cigar room.  She glanced at her husband, Jack, then finally at Wilson as he entered the lounge and joined the company.  Twenty years of torture.  She tried not to contrast the two men she loved the way a child tries not to have nightmares—in vain.

They were everything the other was not.  Jack’s extroversion and ready laugh had won her love, but they didn’t intoxicate her like Wilson’s half-smirk.  Nothing about Jack set her on fire; everything about Wilson made her crazy.

They had gathered that night to celebrate life—and a close call at that.  Wilson came and sat with the group.  The party was for him.  A silence swept over the table as their eyes perused the lengthy scar that ran from below his nose and down his neck, stopping just above his collar.   

Jack took control of the situation.  “Here’s to the lion,” he said, raising his glass in a toast.  The people laughed a little and the tension broke.   “I can’t ever thank you for what you did,” he said on a more serious note, directing himself to his friend.

Margaret, his wife, looked away from him and back to Wilson.  “Let’s not talk about the lion,” she said.  Wilson looked at her without smiling and now she smiled at him.  His eyes burned into hers with the same message he had just whispered to her on the veranda.  She willed herself to tear her eyes away from his gaze and accepted Jack’s hand that was nuzzling into hers beneath the table, swallowing her feelings down with her Malibu and Diet Coke.

Balance

Click-clack, click-clack. The heels of her boots slapped tiredly up the cement sidewalk.  She paused, heaving her purse farther over her shoulder, careful not to crush the eggs that were wedged into one of several plastic grocery bags dangling from her arms.  Click-clack, click-clack; the metal grate stairs were the last obstacle and they were covered in ice.  When she scaled them without falling, she felt like she had won. 

Warmth burst out of the little apartment like a welcoming embrace as she turned the key in the lock and shoved the sticky door open.  She grimaced and made a face as she stepped in, dropping the bags, except the one with the eggs, onto the floor.

“It smells like something has died in the walls,” she called out.

“Well, do something about it,” a voice responded frigidly from the bedroom. 

“I always do,” she retorted.

The tension in the formerly welcoming house grew like bacteria.  She took a can of beans out of one of the bags and slammed them onto the counter.  She crumpled the plastic bag noisily and shoved it under the sink.  She glared at him through lowered eyelids as he walked out of the bedroom with his slippers on and turned on the TV, settling comfortably on the couch. 

“Uhh…” she started, “I thought you were cooking tonight.”

“I can check the score and still cook,” he shot back at her. 

Hot, angry tears filled her eyes.  Women’s rights did nothing more than make women work twice as hard, she thought, emptying another bag and stacking the pancake mix and rice on the pantry shelf.

After a few more minutes of pained silence (except the pointedly loud unpacking of groceries), she began to angrily pick through some chicken she had laid out on the cutting board. 

He smirked from his throne on the hand-me-down couch, dying to ask for a beer, but preferring to make her wonder when he was going to ask for one.

“Blasted neighbors!” she spat.  She washed her hands in the kitchen sink and stormed to the bathroom to return with a can of air freshener.  She pressed the top and held it, marching through the house in protest of the smells of old fish and curry that wafted through the wafer-thin walls.    She took extra care to linger in the living room, spraying more than necessary.

Her husband covered his mouth and nose with his sleeve and glared at her.  “You don’t have to use the whole can,” were the muffled words that came out. 

“If I didn’t always have to deal with everything…” 


He tuned her out.  It was the same argument, different night.  He remembered what happened last time, and the sun sagged low.

The Generational Implications of Weak Wills

                                           The Generational Implications of Weak Wills

           She managed to keep the tears that were welling up inside her from racing down her cheeks until she heard the car door shut and the roar of the engine.  She fell back against the door and sank to the floor, wrapping her thin arms around her body in a cold embrace.  Sobs shook her bony figure as she heard over again the words that had been whispered only moments before. I love you too, Mom.  Her daughter’s voice had cracked as if it pained her to say those words these days.  Her beautiful daughter, broken and bruised, yet trying to hide it under icy eyes and bright but frigid laughter.

            Looking at Veronica was like seeing herself years earlier, lies and all.  She wiped her sticky cheeks with shaking fingers and closed her eyes, remembering the happy bells of Veronica’s childhood laughter and seeing her blonde curls bounce as she bounded through the grass like a little fawn.  She had been thin then with bony knees and features that were too harsh for her delicate little frame.  But with age, and with the mysteries of cosmetic surgery, that skinny little girl had grown into a thin but curvy young woman.

            She glanced through the living room and into the kitchen and could almost smell the homemade pizza she used to cook when her children were young, see their faces smudged from playing outside and hear their pleas for popsicles to soothe them from the summer sun.  This door that now supported her fragile weight had seen so many things, shut in so many secrets.  And it was still here for her to do what she was not strong enough to do, what she had never been strong enough to do.  A hot ball of poisonous guilt seared itself deeper into her stomach and she imagined it seeping out of her pores, another clue to the outside world of the horrors that had taken place in that once-happy house haunted by secrets too terrible to tell.

            A coo coo bird popped out of the old wooden clock to announce the hour and turned to make his own retreat behind his little square wooden door.  With resolve, she raised up her body, weary with sadness and laden with shame, shuffling through the silent house which failed to muffle the echoes of remorse that ping-ponged .

            She needed to finish the wash and mop the dog prints off the floor before he came home.  She half smiled, half grimaced as she remembered her former expectancy and nervousness for his nightly arrival.  Sometimes the king of this little castle used to come home with cupcakes and flowers, pleased with everything she had prepared and proud of his children’s sports and school successes; other times he would crash in, bringing the tempests of the day to the dinner table and to anyone or anything in his way.

She paused on her way to the laundry room and let her fingers caress the smooth rail that led up the stairs where her children used to sleep.  She closed her eyes and caught her breath as she momentarily imagined the crumpled body of Veronica lying at the base.  The blood that had once stained this wooden banister and some of the stairs was gone now, trampled in after years of use and now forgotten—but not to her, and not to Veronica.

            She knew that her daughter had her own stairs now, soaking up blood and soaking up fears.  She knew that Veronica’s heavy wooden door was also her faithful friend, muffling the arguments and drowning out the whimpers of a mistreated wife.  Her daughter never spoke of such things—Veronica learned more than great cooking from her mother, Rosaline thought ironically.  But she could see it in the tight lines of her face, in the nervous glances her beautiful eyes cast around the room.

            Rosaline turned from the stairwell and continued to where the swishing of the dryer had just stopped, shrieking out a dull buzz that brought her back to the present.  And she wondered, as she took the steamy fresh clothes out in a pile, what would he have done, had he come home one day to no dinner and to the chores undone.  What would he have done if she had taken her children, and her fears along with her—if she had left?  And she couldn’t help but wonder, would her daughter have learned that from her too?

7/7/2009

EJ

So many faces, so much diversity, depth, intelligence and meaning.  I see the sculpted marble of a beautiful piece of art, perfectly molded and held together by poise and confidence.  Grace is bound up in the very fibers of your soul, weaving in and out of your many facets and bonding them into an aura that feels like sunshine when you laugh, which is often.  

When you are quiet, your silence is like dew in the morning, calm and refreshing with no pressure to speak and break the spell of deep, wordless understanding between true friends.  Your mind is a jewel that bursts forth rays of enlightenment that pour from your lips like a fountain of honey, sweet to those who recognize its value and intriguing to those who chance into the atmosphere of its perfume.  

Your will is like forged iron that has stood the test of time and come out unscathed.  You hold justice in one hand and drops of pure mercy cradled in the other.  You have a balance in which “judge not” outweighs your priceless opinions that are painted by an underground artist who someday will be known throughout the world.  Your back is strong like Atlas as you carry the pain of the world in your heart yet your body does not flinch and your knees do not falter as you wake up each day to trudge through the slimy quicksand of the world that would like to see you crumble.  

You have come out of the valley and to the top of the mountains where nothing can cast a shadow on you and you have silently rejoiced, basking in the light of the future.   

7/21/2011

Two chairs, a table, and a thousand bottles of wine.  Tea light candles give life to dancing shadows that hover and twirl in beat with the jazz that floats in from the terrace.  Friends and lovers gather in the extended cellar and their voices blend together, seeping into the brick to be guarded in silence by the pursed lips of mortar and stone.  I glance over the table and beyond your chair at the iron nameplates above the cluster of glass bottles—Spain, France, Italy, the Northwest.

But your chair is empty.  

You ought to be across this table from me, your dark eyes caressed by the heavy shadow of your lashes on your beautiful cheekbones.  There ought to be two crystal glasses side by side on the little round table and your knees should brush against mine as you rest your foot on the bar of my chair.  

But your chair is empty, cold and stark and your silence screams at me across the little table.  

I don´t know what to do with my hands since they can´t reach out and find yours.  I wish you were here with me.  Glancing again around the long room, everything reminds me of you.  You are the art, the décor, the cold metal and the warm light; you are a bottle of rare wine that cannot be classified by origin or color, taste or complexity.  The voices and the music and the wine on my tongue fade into vagueness as thoughts of you consume me.

Your place is on the ledge, on the two bricks that stand out from the others where a single bottle stands alone, proud and unique.  

6/05/10