What do you do when a pretty girl asks you to write a poem about her? You lumber back upstairs, jingle the keys in your pocket and find the skeleton key that was sticking down out of the hole in your pocket. You crack open the shackle that’s yoked your creativity these past years, literally years, and let the air rush in though the open ceiling panel. The wind subsides into…is that Mozart? What’s up here? The record plays on your father’s old player, the one with the broken needle, the needle a law that you broke. It’s now a crime scene, the one he accused you of, that you confessed to silently with your eyes and down-turned head. It had a diamond tip. A diamond at the end of a fragile wire. Music was important to him, or at least Opera. Even now as he turns up his hearing aid to hear his new high end speakers, but I can’t figure out how the remote control works. I fumble with the music in an uneducated way, the lyrics and melody blending together in that defected part of my mind that blends sounds into a chorus of noise like an invisible voice at the end of a bar table, her head tilted as she drags a finger across my watch and talks about her boyfriend, I think. I am brought back to reality with an unknown playlist streaming into my wireless ears, eyes closed as I float past that memory.
What else is up here? Several photo albums caked in dust batter reach out from a peeling vinyl pressboard knee-high shelf. You’ll leave them because the pages have turned in the humidity, greening with a toxin that gets into your heart through your fingers. The pages smell like cigarettes, scented shampoo and bumblegum lipstick. One of the albums is electronic. The immortal voice chip only requires a new battery to hear her 23-year-old voice say, “You look cute here,” with what I can only describe as a lilt. The audio is crisp in my mind, despite the Adam Jensen trying to drown it out with lyrics about bad dreams. I only catch a piece of, “They won’t know I’m missing…”
Beyond the albums lies an empty portfolio, formerly filled with hand-developed black and whites of everyday alphabet letters, hiding in a mall, a chair, the porch blinds, inscribed on the back with heartfelt dedications to my family, photos that were left behind after the holiday or birthday or whatever had passed, left curling at the end of the dining room table on the floor like a copy of the Constitution for an Eastern-Bloc country that no longer exists. We were never… Oh, how banal.
I realize now I’m at the end of the room, turn and look back.
Is this all that remains up here? A trip down forgotten lane? Time to crank up this playlist that I created while driving into new memories, literally driving into new memories toward and later away from a girl with soft edges, hard sharp corners and a depth of pain that I should have known better than to pass so close to. I thought by shining my torch into her cabin that her own attic would remain closed. But upon first light, she flung it open and it spilled out into the water surrounding her houseboat. The anger. The desperate emotion of longing that I could never quench with all the waters of my moat. I was shocked, understanding and moved, as I left. The music list is great, inspiring, but these ear buds are starting to hurt. I’d never delete it, but maybe if I trim away that part of my vision, I can leave the cut out piece of my eye here next to the record player.
I wheeze out a breath, coughing out the memories sticking to the wet parts of my lungs. Everything around me reminds me. It’s like a city where all the streets, even the diagonal ones, the crooked ones, from the ones named after trees to the ones they lost interest in and started numbering, all of them lead toward her. Or her. But mainly her. You. You there. My crooked Gandalf finger points out unattractively as I hunch over beneath my crooked witch hat and my gray long beard which covers this white shirt. I cut the buttons off out of spite just to show that I can use these shaking scissors I found over there. I don’t, have never, needed them. I just thought I did at the time. Mom’s stories from the other side echo in the room, about the men she left behind who, “loved her so much,” like a recurring punch line of a charm bracelet. How many wires do I hang from invisibly on the wrists of betrothed ladies as they carry their children, pray with pressed palms, wipe tears while looking out upon the wide green field? Or is the bracelet inside their own, her own attic?
Click, click, click. My sister’s Minolta. I look down at its glass hopeful eye. I blow it off and bring it to my own eye. The image inside is proportional, centered, lines converging as the light flows attractively across the floorboards through the foggy window. The blue-gray of the record player gleams with nostalgia. The portfolio is now antiqued leather. Even the shelf has been painted pink. The click beats inside my chest like a rhythm, boom, boom. I relive my teacher’s kind words of encouragement. Boom. Boom. The one thing I was always good at with almost no effort, no effort that I didn’t want to expend. It’s the most important dark box in my world of dark boxes. And I don’t even know where it is because my hands are empty now and I reach out scratching the air. Fuck it. I’ll go acapella. I relax into the pose in my mind and activate the shutter once more, a little louder this time. Once more. Now louder. Once more. Louder again. Boom. Boom. Is it loud enough? Will you hear me? Will your wrist tingle? Will you refer to me in the past tense to your Now Life, high key or chiaroscuro?
I look through the viewfinder again and there’s the pretty girl, the one who asked you to write a poem about her. Let’s see what you can do, she says. Well here’s what I have…
Zhōu
Sailing into storm.
Bailing water, tied to mast.
Sunrise brings new hope.
The keys jingle in my pocket. The light from yonder window begins to rise from the floor. The darkness begins to take on that blank canvas appearance that the ghosts love to press their painted impressionistic faces against. The better part of valor and I’m stepping down backward onto the cream carpeting and boughs of the red-bowed mini-Christmas Tree. Up goes the ladder and up goes the lock. But when I reach for the key, I seem to have left it up there. Hmm.
Oh well.
