Saturday, October 29, 2011

Home Alone

Nothing of the eager laziness that defines the way they live at home. Here, they are visitors. I'm their host. I rally them to comfort. "Take off your shoes! You're home here, too." They don't bother to pretend they believe me. In their eyes: How can we be home here, if you're not?

~

I'm reading again. Four, five books a week, as if I'd returned to college.

I'm uncluttered; my mind's not only sad; I remember my dreams (literally); most days it's the little conveniences I miss, like a mitt for handling hot pans.

And again I'm sleeping on the floor, as I did when I was teaching at San Diego State; also as Amy and I did just after our wedding. I sleep well on the floor, although on account of the single-pane windows my throat aches mildly every morning.

~

What matters I keep to myself. You think I'm going to write about what matters—that I have the courage for that? Here, I evade. I digress.

~

I live around the corner from Belmont's library. I write there now, mostly, surrounded by books. Two days ago I was hurtling through a scene in my novel and a woman with Downs Syndrome sat across from me, despite the unoccupied tables around us. She leafed quickly through a fat US history book. After she'd turned through every page, she went to the shelves and picked out a new book. And again sat across from me and read, after her fashion. She breathed loudly; I could smell her breath.

For nearly an hour she flipped pages, while I attempted fiction. Sometimes she would look at me, as if hoping that I'd speak.

I wondered that I didn't gather my things and move to a different table. But I'm not that kind of man. My inability to move—or, to see it another way: my decision to stay—explains all that's wrong and all that's right with my life.

~

Not many birds. Mostly crows.

A crow's intelligence scales nicely with our own. I find that everything crows do, as I watch them, makes sense.

This morning as I pumped gas I watched one of them pecking at something in the middle of the street. Nonchalantly it walked out of the way of an oncoming car, declining to fly.

~

The night's are extraordinarily silent. More silent, somehow, than the night's in Half Moon Bay. Certainly I'm more silent—as if I were traveling through a foreign land, ignorant of its language and, as a consequence, unwilling to speak.

~

Two bedrooms. Nothing—not even love—is as expensive as optimism.

~

Tonight I won't see them in their Halloween costumes. But tomorrow night, after their grandparents have left for Michigan, they will, I hope, come for a visit. I'll make spaghetti; we'll sit on the carpet and watch a movie. They won't spend the night—they never do. Home—life—is elsewhere. They wonder about me. They ask themselves, looking at me, at my apartment: Is this what it means to be a man? Is this how a man lives?

Yes. I don't know.

No comments:

Post a Comment