What I see in the dark

The white is full of dark colors, Bentley. The black and blue of falling on ice (what I saw in the dark): the noir of a knee taken over by shadow and bruise. The noir of a colleague who disappeared in the night, just as winter began—she, too, taken over by shadow and bruise. And I’ve been thinking about her letter, what I suppose only a few will ever know, and I’ve been writing it for her, over and over, changing the ending, over and over (the mind goes where it goes, you’re right, Bentley): I’ll send a postcard, It’s been fun, See you in the spectrum of color. Though the outcome never changes. The goodbye. The cruelest of editing jobs.

I can’t save anything, Bentley, as hard as I try.

In this way I’m stuck in your accordion of memories, and I’ve been missing the dead. Both human and animal, both dead in body and dead in presence—those I’ll never see again though they may still be breathing. Isn’t the past the same as dying? The used to know, the used to. Perhaps it’s the holidays that breeds nostalgia—waking up in panic, the card I forgot to send, the present I forgot to buy, only to realize the recipient died months ago, years ago. I find it difficult to remember them all. A slideshow on repeat.

And every time I forget, I wonder what it means. I keep being confronted by the possibility of parallel universes—an accordion of Willards living similar lives—and maybe this forgetting is a form of travel, a split-second where the dead are breathing, where the card is waiting to be sent. Where the letter I keep writing and rewriting is my own, a letter powerful enough to sling me back and forth between selves. And I wake sitting up, all the differences translated into the forgotten.

Past perfect

What You See in the Dark is the title of a book I just received, Willard. The cover is lit like noir, all chill and shadow, the title light-infused. The effect is one of luminosity. I haven't read it. I've been failing at books this year, my attention shattered. Maybe not shattered. Meandered. Scattered. Scattered is what I mean mostly. Splintered. Broken and swept into bins. This has been happening with time too. Not circular, but recursive. I find myself thinking about a moment and it accordions into others, some from years ago. Like memories of lovers coming unbidden in dreams or in spare moments, those spent in the interminable line at the post office, the snowbird old queued up to send reminders to their relatives of their existence. We're still here, they say, I imagine. Do you remember us? We remember you mostly, though those memories get crossed and switched like on the old telephone switchboards that gave rise to the metaphor.

So I check out of these moments when I'm waiting. I don't feel good about it, though the mind goes where it goes. They're wondering what's taking so long. I'm wondering what they're thinking, what the contents of their letters are. They're so thin, barely there at all. And then I'm somewhere else. There's a scale on a tile floor. The walls are white, as are the tiles. A hospital? Maybe. One from years ago, nestled somehow in memory. Then there's a flash. I'm back. It's nearly my turn. I don't know how much time passed, or if time passed at all. A lot of things seem to be passing.

Do you think you'll always live in the white? I live in the white. Not actually afflicted. Not nested in cold. Instead we have darkness, years of it. Snow on the mountains. All trees there I think. It's treat, a distant threat. A reminder that we live in an insulated world.

Each layer, and then

My body is revolting, Bentley. The metaphorical blizzard has confused it, and it wants nothing more than to be pared down, stripped, eviscerated, the pressure too much, an undressing in the most violent of senses. This chill the same as snow. A heartache in my gut, a more appropriate of places for such an ache.

I started writing this last year, when the snow had started, or was, or not at all--no, I remember now, no snow, just death.

And where am I now, nearing a year later. These days, a year feels like a circle. No moving forward, just back around, like winter. Hello again. Round and round, back to the beginning. Some advice, Bentley, to find a straight line from the path of a circle? Is the only way off to jump? But I apologize--questions in general are so vulgar.

Instead, I'll wait, legs crossed, looking out the gap of my curtains, feeling the temperature drop, day by day. The leaves disappearing with each gust. And maybe then, when the silence comes, I'll walk out into the snow, follow the straightest of tracks, a new kind of undressing.

Timework

A full rotation is no small magic. Of late I find years begin to blur, the space between breaths attenuated. When I hear a snippet of a song trailing out of one of the radios from a passing automobile, or sometimes from one of the wiring mechanisms that accidentally picks up a signal and starts to sing (itself more than worthy of note, I think), it cues memory. That is, if I know it, and I rarely do, then I try to place that song in narrative. When was it the soundtrack to my life?

You speak of the hush of white and silence so loud that it becomes a whine, rising, aspiring to thunder and lightshow in the snowburst. I know it too. I have never been good at apprenticing myself to silence. It does not seem to be in me.

Are we us, Willard? Are we still who we were? Do we contain those selves? If those old skins heard song X and were induced to electrical state Y and we felt, what, aroused? weightless? explosive? somehow more alive, harboring such potential energy, do those selves still exist? Or are they retired, decomposed in the compost heap or in the cemetery or in the backlist of our brains?

Have I ever told you about the phenomenon of paradoxical undressing? That a body gets confused in blizzard conditions or when chilled sufficiently, that it starts to feel hot, that it strips layers off and discards them in the snow, that bodies are found on some mornings, especially those following the big snow storms, naked and frozen and buried, maybe a foot still sticking out, the ice crust on a face like a rite? That police are often fooled into thinking murder, molestation, at least at first?

The brain is so easily misdirected that it's hard to believe in I, in anything, in who we were or who we are. But then you step out in one of those moments that you describe and all those thoughts erase. It's so obvious, then, who you are, who you couldn't help but be.

Perhaps you already know it well.

Yesterday I looked around me, at the snow, and smiled

Almost an entire rotation since I wrote last. We are entering a new decade, Bentley. Did you know that? Of course you did, aware of time in the same way that I am. Aware of snow, too, even there, in a different kind of desert. Back when snow was a novelty, I used to wait all year for the possibility--a probability, I don't know when it didn't snow at least once per winter, but rare enough to wonder--and when the snowflakes finally arrived, a look up, eyes wide, I'd listen to all the noise of the world being blanketed, and it was the sound I loved most. Not silent, but quiet. Have you heard it, Bentley? And even when I wasn't alone, when there were friends speaking to me, I heard that quietness as the snowflakes landed. But then I discovered loss and I forgot about that sound or could no longer hear it, and it was bad, Bentley. No rest for the weary, as they say. The constant buzzing, the year-round noise, not even muffled in winter. Until yesterday. I ventured out into the snow, drove on the dangerous roads, did what needed to be done, and by the time I returned, stepped out of my car, and looked up, looked around me, I saw that snow once again and smiled, and it wasn't what I saw but what I heard. It was a moment, Bentley.

But I don't know why I even bring this up because it isn't the happy ending I was hoping for.