I dream you are dying

I dream you are dying.

Ischemic heart disease. Tuberculosis. Cerebrovascular disease. Aneurysm.

It doesn’t really matter how you die, just that you are dying.

I cry, but the tears feel fake.

Sloppy fat crocodile tears breaking on cold linoleum, splatter-splash, puddle forming til my socks soak right through, soggy sucker steps slipping, Alice’s unhappy tears flooding the hallway: a great big spaloosh.

Pushing shaking sobs out of heaving lungs, I try and try, but the real salt-lick tears never come.

Sitting in the cold and empty house on the day of your dream-death, I take stock of the life we never had: the junk drawer full of twist ties, and loose buttons, and rock hard mint candies in rip-torn wrappers, and elastic bands stretched and brittle, and faded ticket stubs, and crinkly old see-through rolling papers, and pieces of that broken mug we bought on vacation, the one we never glued back together, and phone numbers written on the back of old cigarette packs, written before I quit and after you told me you’d leave if I didn’t, and an old fortune from a cookie that reads “happiness is a direction, not a destination,” and the ratty old collar belonging to the big fat tabby who ran away and never came back.

I stare at your dying body, the way your face pulls taught over your bones like saran wrap stretched, and suddenly I can’t breathe.

Floating, I break through the front door, weeping wave flowing fast, a steady stream down Empty Street.

Outside, an endless palate of beige prefabricated cookie cut bi-levels and two stories and bungalows, gently rolling stucco and shingle and brick hills, young trees stretching soft bark toward a prairie sun disappearing, vanishing point pulled far off into the orange horizon: sleepy suburban streets stuck in a time long before you and I, abandoned bikes on lawns, lazy sprinklers tumbling, faint echoes of children laughing, this is an idyllic canvas: this is small town Alberta.

I peer into milk-yellow lit bay windows, undressed tempered glass leaving bare the stuff of Sunday dinners and quality family time. On the heels of dusk, I creep under carefully pruned perennials and sniff stale parochial air, trying to catch just a whiff of the way I remember you used to be, nostrils twitching in memory.

I try hard to imagine you before you were dying: pock-marked face, soft belly and doe eyes, unsure of you and me but sure never to grow old. I try hard to understand you: husband and father and all the things you said you’d be a long time ago when you were there with me, but I can’t quite call to mind your hands, spindly fingers bulging at the knuckle like gnarly trees roots, or the pitch of your voice, soft shale under the worn white rubber sole of a child’s running shoe, or just how tall you really were, knowing only that I fit the way I did, just under your sometimes scruffy but never bearded chin.

I can hear the old clock clanging, the cuckoo abandoned on the side of the road, laying face down in the ditch like a sad sex crime uncovered, on the day we fought: raised up voices and fists, torn open heart wounds left leaking, bad decisions made, and hurting you only because I wanted to be made to feel important and not like a backup plan, B to your A when things fell through.

One clang, two, three clang, four, then silence, dense as stale Christmas baking.

And like that, you are gone.

Air sucked out, lips left cracked, a shell of a man I remember you to be.

I dream you are dead.

xoxo

M.L. H’art

Starburst

Lost and leaving, the goodbye got jumbled up: leaves left turning, summer to fall when we fell apart, it was the year the emails sat unsent, the phone calls disconnected, the so-long’s so unnecessary; it was the year we kissed kindred memories of budding womanhood goodbye, promises of growing up and growing old and growing fond of bravely wearing purple together put on the backburner bubbling discontentedly to a char, thick black and burnt to the brillo-scratched Teflon coating flaked for sake of dishwashing worn thin.

The soul-searching need to define oneself outside the context of back stabbing gossip gone wrong: all made up, we tore it down, fake eyelashes fluttering, silver hoops tearing sensitive lobes in long stretched lines ripping skin, lip liner smudged for un-lady-like words drooling out droll lips laughing bitterly at loves lost to chances missed, what a mess.

But I ain’t the goodbye girl and I doubt much I’ll see you soon, so save your teary-eyed goodbye and give me the satisfaction the faction of friendship wasn’t a waste for years spent holding hair back and wiping tears dry and clasping hands in uncomfortable moments: abortions and addictions and arrests and obsessions and cravings and cavings, awkward bathroom stall fumblings, secrets kept and woes wept, we saw it all.

While I’ll take yours to the grave, you gave mine to the next available ear and, dear, that’s not the pact we made when we stayed up the night through, doctor dealt sobriety saving you from momma’s wrath when I held your hand, IV still dripping, and said: No, I promise. I won’t tell. But if you make me take you here again, hospital reprimand for partying awry, emergency ride from bar to bed, I won’t do it, friend. No, I won’t.

Black smudged makeup wink, you promised: we’ll stay true and you and me, girl, we’ll be besties till this world be through and I promise when your kids call me auntie I’ll tell them harrowing stories of their cape-clad hero-mom, sugar smile sure, the demise of my undoing undid with one hug, a glass of wine and a word to the wise. I’ll hold you right here, you said, hand on heart, IV line drip-drapping, saline sailing through night to morn and back again when you and me, we really were the best of the besties.

But faded photographs of fashion fads long past and bodies shifted, shapes bent and broadened and broken, only tell the truths we want to remember – and doll, in all this time, I clean forgot what it was like to have you in my life.

xoxo,
M.L. H’art

Pica’d

Toes curled around weather worn two-by-fours stained cedar red last August, rain pocks marring fresh coat number four to show two less shades in the sun, chipped red nail polished toes showing the same worn dents, a mark where the brush slipped when you delivered the news; standing, the juniper padded cliff an open invitation, I daydream dropping off the lip of this deck neck first into the decline, rolling shoulder to knee downward ninety feet or more to the base of the mountain, tangled pine needle mane, gravel skin, pinecone eyes, feather mouth spitting dirt. I’d fall like Alice: down, down, down.

But I don’t. Dinner’s on. I’d hate for it to get cold. I fill your plate. I lay the crisp white linen serviette across your lap, trousers stained with lunch’s meal when the earlier serviette slipped under the table and came to rest at the dog’s curious nose. We eat.

After dinner, dishes: washing six plates, washing six forks, six knives, six cups, six wine glasses, sick, sick, sick I get sick in soapy suds, bile bubbling up through grease fighting Dawn, I am so sick I smash plates, all of them tiny shards of eggshell porcelain with floralaine detailing in ash green cutting dish pan hands, pinching silverware into palm crevices until stainless steel steak knives bought on sale puncture life and fate and health and sun and moon and mercury and love lines, a blemished road map staining tea towels iron red.

But I don’t. I wash. I dry. I tuck leftovers into conveniently sized Glad disposable Tupperware and stack each neatly one on top of the other on top of the other inside the fridge to the left of the milk where you’ll find them later after I’ve told you it’s too late for a bed time snack.

After sleep, you snore. Fat throat working slacked jaw loose on its hinge till, dripping drool escaping flaccid mouth, you cough ancient phlegm from back gullet, a gurgling hiss catching wind for a long saw-vibration sigh of the uvula-soft palate encore, the same tune again and again.

Sipping wine one bottle at a time I think about breaking green tinted glass and eating shards like a side show freak, the pica magpie digesting slick slivers of gastro-intestinal destruction.

But I don’t.

xoxo,
M.L. H’art

Lolati

Like the piggy: banked pedagogical thrift savings, pygg clay molding factions of friendship and time spent in the tenement of ten years or more; snout for nose, small eyes shining, this little piggy had none, but that first penny-clink link between me and you was a promise we’d cross our hearts and hope to die before we ever crossed each other.

A child’s onomatopoeiatic lesson learned: the baa-baa bashful wool pulled over my eyes. Leave me alone, I’ll come home, but Bo’s still looking: her bleating heart found her tail, drip-dried blood a puddle at her feet, tail nailed to a tree.

So let the dish and spoon affair, I’ve no concern to hear you say hearsay for the sake of passing time. Even silver bells and cockle shells do bite, I know: colloquial treats screwing thumbs and piercing balls. Remember, those maids in a row serve the guillotine blade, slick swish metal to skin. They’d have your pretty neck, pussycat, and for cheap.  

Oh hush now, hush-a-bye, say goodbye: that bridge done burned up, not just fallen down. Bricks and mortar will not stay, ash and smoke gone blown away.

xoxo,
M.L. H’art