Purple Sheets.

Washing the sheets just like you asked, I snap fresh pillow cases and slip the same flattened, shapeless pillows into their fresh dress – a sham covering the spot your sad head laid the night before, boring a dent in the feathers with the weight of the world squished between two ears, behind two eyes, inside one mouth, the pressure building until at last, when your legs stop twitching and your breathing falls deep, your lips part, letting loose the long breath of a guilt you’ve trapped in your lungs – a guilt that’s not yours.

I smooth dryer-warm sheets over the same stained mattress you curled up on, knees bent, your body concave, curved arms outstretched and begging for a wholeness, hands relaxing with the stillness of life after dark, tummy tucked safely back, bum pushed toward the wall – a perfectly rounded “c.”

Just like you asked, I fold the old baby blanket kept at the foot of the bed for good luck and put it on the top shelf of the bedroom closet with the other forgotten markers of childhood fondness: roller skates, Halloween costumes, clothes three sizes too small. I shake out the bedspread, letting it fall slowly over the skeleton of the way you laid here last night and I pull the corners of the blanket just so, making the length perfectly matched to all four corners of the bed – the bed that’s now made in the memory of you.

xoxo

M.L. H’art

Addicted to Voicemail.

A maniacal laugh, a sort of erratic desperation seeping out of his voice. He is anxious, his hand sliding up and down the receiver of the phone, his breath panting and thick with restlessness.

“You’re so far away,” he says, his voice trapped in the tunnel of the phone line, sounding small and muted. “You know, you’re just not here like I need you to be. I can’t touch you. I want to feel you,” his breath tripping, not escaping the lungs fast enough, air and words trapped inside his cheeks together, wrestling to get out alive.

“It’s a mess, I’m a real mess. I, I, I almost died, you know? Yeah, this weekend. I, uh, okay it felt like I almost died. I just need you to be here for me, right?” his vowels constricted by his tongue lapping his lips between syllables, the words a confused slur of pain and the remnants of a fleeting pleasure, traces of it still stuck to his fingers, his nose.

“I just don’t know what to do, this is fucked up. Real fucked up. Can you call me on Friday?” his voice an interference of irritation and sensation – the want to be caught before the crime comes to be. “You know, remind me to be good, right? You could do that?”

“Shit. Forget it. You don’t owe me that anymore.” A controlled sigh, absorbing the fact six months of separation shouldn’t hold her responsible for his choices. “I gotta go. Sorry if I ruined your day?” a question, a need for confirmation. “Uh, yeah I’ll just talk to you later I guess, okay. Bye.”

xoxo

M.L. H’art

Somewhere in the Silence.

I hate those three notes, the way they hang heavy in the air pregnant with memory. Those notes, they were composed to taunt me. Plucking the hippocampus, they are a forced crescendo, my memory racing like light fingers on polished keys – adagio building accelerando, a grand finale of falling facial expression, a requiem for the way things used to be.

There’s an expectation, hearing those three notes – a hope those three simple steps will bring back everything that was alive the first day I heard them, a hope they’ll erase the time and skepticism between then and now, a hope they’ll close the gap between fantasy and actuality.

The tonic of memory triggered by those three notes spiritedly narrates the morendo of daydream: I think of you and like the three notes, you’re suddenly nothing more than a strepitoso whisper of who I thought you were, who I hoped you thought I was and what we were to each other, lost between the notes, somewhere in the silence.

xoxo

M.L. H’art

“I have to tell you about this dream I had…”

A tired day, I drag my feet off the train. It’s dark when I surface out of the stinking station and I want nothing more than to get home to wrinkled pyjamas and a cold lonely bed. The short cut through the park makes me nervous after dark, but there’s enough light from the street it shouldn’t matter. Besides, at this hour most of the area convicts are passed out or shut in for the night. Walking down the path, there’s a glint of light under the tree ahead and though I don’t want to stop, I’m drawn to look.

A boat. A small, shining, aluminum boat. With a red stripe painted down the side. There’s no body of water for miles. Inside sit two paddles, laid one on top of the other. The bottom of the boat is clean, it obviously unused. I climb in, run my fingers along the lip, touch the paddles with the tips of my bare sandal-clad feet, hold both sides of the boat as I look over the edge, expecting the grass to suddenly transform to water. I lean back, take a look around the dark, empty park, feeling safe in my little boat.

You come out of the shadows but don’t surprise me. You look good, better than the last time I saw you. Your hair’s well kempt and your pants are clean and you look like you’ve been sleeping well. I invite you to sit in my boat and you do. Together, we sit staring at each other inside the comfort of our boat and we don’t think for a moment it’s silly our boat is high centered in the middle of the grass in the park on the walk home.

As we talk, the stars turn to twilight and the air gets warm with our conversation and before long we’re sitting, me leaning against your chest and you with your arms around my shoulders, talking about how things could be if we just let them be.

The sun starts to peak over the tops of the trees and we think, for a moment, about getting home to bed before the business traffic starts tromping its way through our little green lake of comfort. I pull your arms closer around me and push out the responsible thought of getting home to bed, getting home to shower, to eat, push out the thought of remembering you’re probably no good for me.

But then the ground falls out beneath us and our boat starts to rock from side to side and we’re falling and falling and falling – an impossible drop – but you don’t move and I don’t move and I don’t scream and you don’t scream and before long we hit real water with a gentle splash, our boat nothing more than a light ripple on the surface of a lake.

It’s beautiful, the crystal water, and I can see all the way to the bottom, can make out smooth stones and waving plants. I wave back and giggle at the faltering reflection of a girl, it seems, who’s not smiled in a long time. It’s not weird to me there’s no fish in this water. Around us, mountains strike high into the sky, lush trees and bushes and flowers on the shores of rich land, the soil dark, fragrant, musky with fertility.

We paddle you and me, taking turns, until we see a small cluster of cabins on the horizon. As we wash ourselves ashore with the help of the gently lapping waves, a stream of people we’ve never seen before come out of doors, smiling, carrying small children, looking at us with sparkling eyes. They know our names and welcome us as though we’ve been gone only a short while. They pat my hair and shake your hand and we’re led to a table with two empty chairs and two full wine glasses, waiting for us. We eat and we laugh and the company of these people I’ve never met is so comfortable I forget I’m not anywhere close to home.

After our meal, after our last glass of wine, after the children without names go to bed, I realize it’s time I go back to life, no matter how dull and stinking, and I think perhaps it’s time you go back too. We turn to push our boat into the water, not thinking we may not be able to fall upward without the help of some unknown miracle, but the people who’ve just fed us and adorned us with care and attention are angry we’re leaving; they’re surrounding our boat telling us they’ve been waiting so long for us to rescue them.

I don’t think twice about grabbing your hand and running toward the boat. We push off the shore as the people we don’t know hurl obscenities at us. The women are crying and crying and crying and I realize I am too, cold tears running down burning cheeks, though I don’t know why.

As we paddle away, the sky grows purple with anger and the clouds clash above our heads sending daggers of rain into our skin. We’re shivering when we make it to the same place we landed, only instead of falling upward by means of some unknown miracle, our boat spins and spins and spins. I’m dizzy and tired and cold, so cold, and I lay down in the middle of the boat’s floor and you cover me with your coat when I hear your phone ring.

I scramble to answer it. Hello? I say into your phone.

Hello? I yell into your phone.

Hello? I sob into your phone, pinching my eyes closed.

When I open my eyes, you are gone. The boat is gone. The rain, your coat, the water, the people’s voices that were ringing in my ears – they’re all gone. I am alone, sitting under the awning of my shitty apartment building, confused. The stars, they’re just turning to twilight.

I pick myself up, dust off the seat of my worn workpants, check my pockets for the contents of me: cell phone, wallet, keys, crumpled receipts and pen, empty of ink.

Inside the dim hallway of my apartment as I fumble for the right key to slide open my lock, there you are: slumped against my door, eyes only a slit of consciousness. As I walk toward you, you say to me: “I have to tell you about this dream I had….”

xoxo

M.L. H’art

Rotting Red Pepper.

I wish I’d learned the lesson the first time, the tenth time, even. I wish any of him wouldn’t make small talk with me at the bus stop, the bar, the bank, the grocery store on Sunday when I’m in my pajamas; I wish I’d have the nerve to say: “No thank you.”

I’d bow my head, pull my coat closed tighter, slip by him as my basket full of vegetables and dry cat food smacked him in the thigh. I’d forgo the idle chit chat and false niceties, breeze by the awkward first fumblings when – you and I – we’d determine the boundaries of how far things should go and put a stop to the unfortunate mornings when I’d wish you’d stayed at my place so I could kick you out.

I wish when a glass of wine was set before me I could drink it without the anticipation of the next glass; I’d savour it, breath it in, taste it – really taste it – swallow slowly. I would not slurp impatiently to find the bottom of the glass so I could tell the waiter: “Oh perhaps just one more.”

I wish my cunt didn’t smell of you, didn’t betray my mind into translating touch into sentiment or forgive conscience for numbness. 

I wish I were able to find me, in all of this, buried between the rotting red pepper and his thigh, the cork and my bedsheets; I wish when I found me I liked who was there.
 
 xoxo
 
 M.L. H’art

The Waiting Room.

“Maybe I’m much too close to jealousy
Lost between regrets and melancholy
But give me a reason to be less insecure
Maybe I’m much too close to fantasy
Miles away from reality
Sorry if I’m unable to hear anymore…”

~ Sorry, Pascale Picard

Sitting in the waiting room, I’m stuck between Regret and Melancholy. Pushing her elbows into my ribs, gluttonously hogging all the space between my chair and hers, Regret fills up the room the way an unpleasant odour sticks to everything. Melancholy, his hair hiding his eyes, sits in the corner and sighs as he turns another page in his book: The fifth edition of the Anatomy of Melancholy: What it is, With all the Kinds, Causes, Symptomes, Prognostickes, and Several Cures of it in Three Maine Partitions with their several Sections, Members, and Subsections, Philosophically, Historically, Opened and Cut up.

Confusion’s wearing a path in the carpet, pacing back and forth, eyes darting from door to window to phone, open in his palm, the time not ticking fast enough to please his busy mind. Nervous stands next to the door, hands intertwined in themselves, pulling loose hangnails from frayed fingertips, licking her lips and nodding, up, down, up, down, anticipating news – good or bad – as confirmation of the way she’s feeling.

Lackadaisical Carelessness spreads himself over two chairs, throwing his hands up behind his head, laying long legs out in front of him, a smile crawling crookedly across his lips. His white t-shirt sits lopsided and wrinkled, a compliment to the faded jeans and dirty sneakers. Beside him, his sidekick Joviality smacks her lips, cheery gloss sheening, as she pulls dark sunglasses over her eyes and lets out a quick giggle, trill and pitched.

Stress has his hands wrapped up in his hair, his brow deep with furrow, beads of sweat sticking to the tiny hairs vibrating with his worry. Contentment slides over another chair, attempting to distance herself from Stress and his worry. She rubs her hands together as if to absolve them of the negativity. She turns her attention to the window and smiles, slightly, not too widely, a look of calm washes over her. She’s nearly forgotten about Stress and his worry.

Awkward walks in, lets out a jilted laugh, looks at her shoes, at the reception desk, back at the door, contemplates just walking out but instead tugs on the bottom of her shirt and walks, turtlishly, toward Tired, who’s keeping post behind the desk.

Tired tells Awkward to fill out this here paperwork, take a seat anywhere she’d like and take a tip from Carelessness and relax – it’s going to be a long wait.

The room’s vibrating with the puzzled energy of too many feelings; the air starts to get so thick with empathy I think I might choke. I swallow loudly, scan the room, catch Carelessness’ eye and stand up out of my chair and head toward the door.

I step out into the sun just as Tired gets up from her desk and says “Ms. H’art? Ms. H’art? The doctor will see you now….”

xoxo

M.L. H’art