Observing Atoms

Grave Diggers For Richard Siken When we met I became aware of the hole I’d been digging for decades, a ditch of sorts, a burial plot for my feelings, my secrets, all the ugly bits. Twenty four hours later I stood in the shower thinking of you, the way your left hand gripped your coffee cup, how your eyes looked quickly at me before they nervously looked away. You said, in other words, you said, you don’t want this, I’m flawed, I wear my mistakes around my neck, a tie pulled too tight, a noose. Two shells, the undead, going through the motions among the living. You climbed down into my pit, held the shards of glass to the light, cut your finger on my edges to show me how you still bleed. Come lay in this grave with me, I beckon, imagine in this darkness the dirt they’d throw on our bodies if they knew how our hands held each other. Feel how alive you feel as the earth fills in around us. Wanting life will be our death. Love, our resurrection.

June Rolls in all sweet and salty. Our twin seductress, her early morning gloom gives way to afternoons that scorch the most foolish of earthworms; waiting soil but inches from their drying bodies. Kids stay up late, giggles echoing down the hall; live the waking hours with popsicle stains across the front of every shirt. Filling driveways with pastel castles and hopscotch mazes, begging for snacks, begging for an end to their boredom. I, too, become entrenched with thoughts of rebirth, of unbecoming the self I’ve been since last September, living day to day by calendar reminders and routine rituals. Our reward for enduring is the fullest moon on the longest day of sunshine. Everything illuminated. Asking us to see ourselves in a new light. Asking us to shed the skin we’ve been carrying through the darkness of winter. Grab a nectarine hanging from the bountiful branches and bite in hard to the flesh – let the joy overwhelm you. Feel the gravity swelling inside you, pulling the tide closer. Allow yourself to be carried away by the burgeoning waves.

Love’s Teeth Sink in soft to the flesh, incisors through fresh baked marshmallow. Always biting off more than can be chewed at once — an enduring bifurcation of foolish optimism and a voracious appetite to be continually consumed. The feast begins at the mouth, delighting first in the sweetest of pleasures. Then working their way down to the bones, to the tender marrow, to the beating heart, until nothing is left but fragmented remnants of the people we were before the first delicious bite.

Curiosity May have killed the cat but it was only one of his lives, so I’d argue the juice may have been worth the squeeze. After all, what is there to live for if not the wonder of discovery — the jolt of acidic tartness on a willing tongue; toes on the ledge, dipping themselves toward infinity as a heart pounds against its slender ribcage; eyes meeting eyes for the first time, wondering what secrets may be revealed if both are brave enough to not look away.

Observing Atoms Writing from sadness is easy. It’s catharsis, a leavening of self. Writing from joy is far more complicated. The writer is not seeking alleviation and so the act of writing it, in all its transient splendor, becomes ominous. Do I dare speak of the way her body nestles neatly as she sneaks under my covers, her flesh born from inside mine — or of my soul’s wholeness upon her existence? The moments swell in my chest, tidal waves of emotion so large they may carry me for decades down the shore, or drown me slowly, as I cling to the white wash.

Women Friends Are so much easier to find when you can pass them notes in the hallway about boys you’re obsessing over, and when sleepovers are commonplace for lady bonding. But as they marry and move away, you are forced to cry into a cell phone on your hardest days, instead of cuddling on the couch, intermittently berating your boyfriends between commercials of The Hills. In the longing void of their presence, you find loneliness deeper than any from a man. An ache of kinship still alive from afar; asking you to nurture it, as your arms long to hold the newborn resting on his mother in an alternate time zone. Offering anecdotes via meme way passed midnight. Little reminders that love isn’t lost with girlish innocence. Then one day, by chance, you meet another and you watch as she tends to her son in a way you recognize. You'll never know fully the things that shaped her as a girl — those slumber party times have passed. But you eat together and realize that it’s never too late to ask for belonging. Like coats, collected through the years, they keep us warm on days we need them most.

A Secret Garden For Rainer Maria Rilke How many lives did we almost lead before the ones we’re living found us. How many loves were lost in the chaos of the growing of ourselves, holes forming in the toes of socks we once danced together down the hallway in. A constant knitting together and pulling apart of the tiniest details of our daily rituals. It hurts to be alive as the seasons change — remembering our faces as they once were, the foolish little sins, our disbelief in tomorrow reaching us during the darkest nights. The key turns to unlock a thought, once buried, and we move now through the threshold as translators of a foreign tongue. To feel alive is the best reason for living, so we keep going; pressing our fingers deep into the soil, the ache of mortality at our back and the possibility of it all, budding right before us.

The Suncatcher’s Sonata We’re all born to this earth, sturdy prisms of possibility. Unaware of ourselves, our facets unencumbered by pretense. Then we meet people. We meet love and want, heartache and harmony. Each a beam of light, bending as it encounters our edges, dispersing truths in vivid arrays of varying hues. Every soul a different wavelength, allowing an alternate aspect of our identity to be revealed. The gift of being known, given to us in rainbows of revelations. Little mysteries, once transparent, now alive in splendorous technicolor.

Kids No one told me how funny it would be to have them point at my freshly showered body parts and repeat “what’s that?” as their dad gives each part a silly name and we all laugh uncontrollably. Or how suddenly the topic of how babies are born can come up, and how easy it would be to tell the plain truth, only to have her shrug and move on to a new topic. No one told me how frustrating it is to sing the same nursery rhyme seven times in one night, or how scary it feels to catch glimpses of their face in the morning light where at just the right angle they look mature beyond their age. No one prepared me for the months when one drives you nuts and the other seems easy, and the months after that where it’s the other way around. If only they’d told me how her skin would feel on mine while we spun in circles — the gravity of her little body pulling away from me as her arms wrap tighter on my neck. Wispy hair floating mid spin. Hot breath exhaling laughter deep from within her belly. Second hand stopping on the clocks for just a moment, only to quickly begin again.

Time is Not a Thief Stop saying that. It’s not a clock with hands ticktocking away as it steals your freedom. It doesn’t come at night to gather your valuables and vanish into the darkness. Time is now. It says I guarantee you this moment, and nothing more. While you toil over sins and sadness of the past, or longings for the future, I’m here. Offering you something you won’t ever find elsewhere.