January 13th Holden Massachusetts

Soundlessly, with all the roar of a dog whistle, settling on the thin green pines, threading needle through snowflake like ornaments eleven months too soon. Steadily, purposely, falling falling, drifting from snowman cookie frosting clouds, sprinkling frosted blades and frozen needles. Gathering and waiting on swollen pines and sleeping windowsills, where creeping eyelids rest to widen and then smile and cheer at the brown ice slush filled roads and pristine playgrounds twinkling in morning joy. Playtime rapiers hanging from rooftops, snow filled arena, and racetrack ample canvas for morning imaginations, while snowplows struggle and snowballs battle and every father lover child thinks snow day.

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It’s still dark and the vaguely morning sky flashbulbs with swirling storms of snowflakes swept up in the steady beam of dual halogen bulbs. Heaving fiercely beneath their glow, the curved yellow plow growling in search of asphalt and the icy slush and browning snow that resists its passage.

The front windshield wipers squeak and fidget beneath the whitewashing weight of the sky and Sean McLaughlin slows with every turn and squints through the glass, trying to separate the pavement from the sidewalk. He’s been out since ten the night before, and his cab is littered with empty styrofoam dunkin donuts cups and some hand warmers, plus a large metal thermos from Christine on Christmas two weeks before. The heater works only sometimes and so he keeps a seasoned wool blanket stretched tight over his lap that fills the cab with the smell of dog hair and salt from the winters before when Sammy would ride with him. Back before the arthritis and dysplasia had resigned her to the rug by the stove, back when it was for both of them younger days.

Yesterday was Christine’s birthday and they had spent the night at home in front of the TV watching the snow. When his phone had rung just before the late night news she had turned to him and said, “Go. You need the overtime.”

Storms had always been too early or too late for Sean. Either they did not know how to keep time or they plain did not care.

Now he is alone in the dark of his cab with the thermos from her and a broken heater, an old smelly blanket, and a wish for spring and the overtime check. And all the while the flakes all surrounding and falling dispassionately around him.

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Laying in bed still, the comforter down around my knees, a glass of water on the bedside table, and the clock blinking noontime.

“You car is completely snowed in. I don’t think you’re going to make that meeting.”

Water running in the kitchen down the stairs, cupboards swinging and clacking shut, and porcelain on the countertop.

“How do you like your coffee?” she calls again.

Lifting the shade the window is half covered in frost and peering over the top I can see only snow and snow everywhere. It covers my car up past the license plate and hides the mailbox post in what seems to me as marshmallow fluff. The road is indistinguishable from the lawn and I know that I’m going anywhere.

First snow day of the New Year, I think, and I call back, “A little bit of sugar, thanks.”

I don’t actually have a meeting but I hadn’t been planning on dinner and breakfast. The room smells like last night, like alcohol and flesh and frosty mornings. But at least the sheets are soft and warm, as white as the fluff outside the window and I think now about the coffee brewing in the kitchen and the woman I barely know behind it.

Now she comes back to the bedroom and places two snow-white mugs on the bedside table. She squints at the brightness beyond the window and climbs in beside me, smiling more brilliantly than anything I’ve seen in a long time. Snow day, I think again.

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I’m awake now but I don’t move in my blanket like a caterpillar in a cocoon is what they’re called like I’m hibernating and I keep my eyes pressed tight together. I feel the cold shape of the spoon under my pillow and squeeze it tightly its supposed to bring the snow day I can’t hear the news downstairs maybe they already know its cancelled they said they would call us to say for sure I hope they did I hope they did. I open one eye and my room is too bright for the morning maybe its lunch time already maybe mom let me sleep because no school today! I can’t wait any more I jump out of bed run to the window tear the blinds and my heart explodes. Winter wonderland its like that Rudolph movie we watched on Christmas at Auntie Chris’s and there’s even more coming down right now and they look like the flakes we make in art class with white tissue paper and scissors and no ones are the same because they’re all unique like us Mrs. Stangle says. After I have breakfast I can go sledding once I have my snow pants and boots on Mom said I could yesterday and a snow fort to keep the girls out and hot cocoa for lunch and I’m smiling with ears it’s a snow day!

Yesterday

First story for comp class. Expect weekly additions...

When you are lonely everything makes sense. There is no confusion, and you can look at the winter’s sky and find the little dipper as if it were the only grouping between the earth and the moon. There are of course other ways to be sure, but none of them are as easy as being lonely.

So when I woke early and found that I was alone in my roommate’s bed and that my own bed across the room was empty also, I knew immediately that I was in love with her. There were scattered papers and empty PBR cans on the desks by the radiator and cool white sunlight sliding in through the open window and I was in love again. Only that, and the hole in my head.

I was still naked except for my boxers so I kept my roommate’s comforter wrapped around my shoulders as I searched for more clothes. It was very cold with the window open and the splintered floorboards felt like icy sandpaper on my bare feet and I didn’t want to stay in the room just then. I wanted to catch her before she left so I grabbed my jacket and headed for the stairs. My head was still splitting besides and I felt like some fresh air.

It was just after eight then and her train was leaving at eleven I thought so I could probably see her still. She had to go to the city this morning and that was why she was gone when I woke up. And I didn’t know what I was going to do or where I was walking to really but it didn’t bother me then. When you love someone sometimes you just need to do things and that’s all.

Her dorm was across the campus from mine and I was glad I had my jacket. It was even colder outside than it had been in my beer-stained room. Apparently it had snowed last night. The criss-crossing walkways were all sloppy with ice and slush so I made my way diagonally through the quad and snowy grass. The snow was fresh and forgiving and it was fun to walk without thinking and to know there were tracks to follow. I continued along, watching my feet sink into the snow so that I didn’t hear her at first when I came to one of the plowed paths again and she called out my name.

She was walking along the walkway opposite to the one I had just come to. I waited for her as she finished walking its length, then down another connecting our two paths and then finally over to where I was standing. Her ivory-gold skin looked strangely pale against the snowy backdrop and her long brown hair was completely hidden beneath a ribbed grey hat. A long woolen scarf that she had knitted herself covered her neck and chin and she smiled at me from beneath her layers. She looked older than I remembered but that may have been the cold.

“What time do you leave?” I asked her.

“I’m on my way to the station now,” she said. “Last night was fun.”

“I enjoyed myself.”

“Me too.”

“And Dan gets in today,” I said. “I’ll wash his sheets for him. You get back on Monday?”

“Yes. In the afternoon sometime.” There was a pause, and then she added “I’ll give you a call when I’m back.”

“Yeah, sure,” I said.

“Good.”

After a moment I looked at my phone and she said she had better be going. We hugged goodbye then and I watched her follow the walkways back to where she had been going before and off towards the temporary parking lot, where I knew her cab would be waiting. Another person leaving another building as she passed by called and caught up with her, and I could hear their laughter echoing as I turned to walk back home.

The way back to my dorm was easier the second time through, and I didn’t feel the headache so much or even the cold of the empty quad anymore. The world outside seemed stunning with freshly fallen flakes and it reminded me now of a snow globe breaking open in the street where you can’t tell the unique from the plastic. It was still close to freezing but yesterday’s grey had been blown away during the night, and the spidery cloud of my breath and the sharp blue air were refreshing and clear.

The weather seemed to me then like winter’s answer to those warm sun showers on sticky summer days. Where no one really minds that it’s raining, even if they pretend to.

When I got back to my room I shut the door and took off my clothes again. I moved over to the bed and lay back down and closed my eyes. I wasn’t finished with last night yet.

Stand By Me

Your face is a salty teardrop. Not the graceful slow rolling down the side of your cheek kind but the blotchy and swollen hiccuping on your breath that is only sometimes fun to see on grade-schoolers. And I don't think that you are the prettiest thing I have ever seen when you say oh hey with your sunglasses pushed up to keep your hair from getting wet when you walk back from the showers and you smile at me just a little.

So when you see me singing when I see you it's only because lately I've grown tired of always whistling, just so we're clear.

Thoughts from Indoors

My spine itches.

The top

................ver

.......................te

............................brae.

I try to scratch it but all I can reach

is my skin.

It's like I am wearing a plaster cast

and it protects me so I can heal, I guess.

But beneath the organ and tissue and blood,

I itch.

Scraps

I've developed an unfortunate habit of starting stories and never finishing them. That's why I never have anything to post anymore. I still read everyone else's blogs though and I'm afraid the relationship is becoming a bit one sided. I feel like the blog world equivalent of a voyeur. But not as unwanted, I hope. So these are a few things I've written since at school, maybe some day they'll go somewhere.

DeLong sat by the window and counted the number of times the miniature raisin buzzed into the glass square. It was now half past seven and was, admittedly, becoming rather difficult to follow its movements between the shadows of the windowpane and the queasy pale of the light from the storefront below. It was an hour earlier when the last of the toyhouse people had replaced their teacups and with much politeness and fussing, had taken their overdue leaves. When the evening wind had swept the last of the offending diminutives out of sight, DeLong retired to the pale green folding chair. The padded foam beneath his posterior and buttocks had long since failed to lend any support to his knobby frame; its function now limited to as much an ornamental purpose as a mulish one.

DeLong sat by the window and tried not to think about the last time he had swept the floor. It was not a particularly difficult task for DeLong; he was always forgetting to sweep the floor.

"I miss having the woods to walk into and just get lost in."

"What the fuck are you talking about?"

Nothing.

My roommate moved out yesterday. No kidding. I came back to the room and his clothes and books were all thrown out in the hallway and he was gone. I didn’t think anything of it then because it was pretty late and I had had a thing or two to drink, but when I woke up the next morning and saw his stained, empty bed I knew he wasn’t coming back. I didn’t know what the hell I was supposed to do with all his things lying in the hall though so I called his phone. I must’ve still been drunk then because I could hear it ringing like it was in the room somewhere even though I knew he wasn’t. Anyways, it was starting to give me a headache so I hung up and moved my chair so I couldn’t see the mess outside the door. I didn’t sit down though, but closed the door and lay back down on my bed. I wasn’t finished with last night.

You could tell she was into it though. I mean, when you’ve been with enough girls you sort of get to knowing when a girl’s feeling it or not, and when she’s just a good dancer or something. And believe me, this girl was feeling it. I mean obviously not the whole time. It’s damn hard to hold a girl’s attention the whole time the two of you are dancing, especially if she’s a real looker. I used to play baseball with a kid who could do it, but he never gave up the trick. You’d just ask him about it and he’d throw you some line about listening and really caring. Believe me, I care a helluva lot. But most nights that isn’t enough to get you back with the girl you really want. And it definitely never helped me get girls back the way he did. Not that he did it as much as other guys. I never understood that. When you got a trick as clean as that and you’re not getting it every night, well that just seems like a shame and a waste to me. This girl was definitely into it though. Trust me, you can count on that. Sometimes you can just tell.

Untitled

Hello blog world. It's been a while. As others have said, "college is not conducive to blogging". Or writing. But here's a poem. Does someone want to name it for me?

Conceited, I

Float through the stares

And the inquiring nods;

Refreshingly aloof and inviting.

Some of them who know me do not see what it is I present

And I am comforted and thankful.

Perception is not my only motivator

But it is the most alluring fish.

She flicks her hair and there under the sky roof

The luminescent arc caresses caresses

And as I watch the moon pouring gently

Gently over her shoulder and onto my lap

I no longer care what she thinks.

Sometimes there exists a plane between

Knowing what I know to be and what I know is being.

I am as real as what I think they think I think,

But someone knows that is not the moral.

You Don't Understand

Have you ever had a dream about someone you didn’t know anything about, only when you woke up you felt like they were your best friend or something? That happened to me last spring. She was a year or two behind me and I didn’t know anything about her but I had always wondered. She had long black hair and I remember she walked like she knew exactly where she was going. She wrote me a poem. In the dream, I mean. It said, “I want to feel the warmth of your hand against my own I can tell that you’re that type of guy even though we’ve never talked before your eyes catch my smiles.” I don’t know if anyone’s ever written you a poem before but I thought it was the sweetest thing I had ever read and in the morning I felt like giving her a call and I would have but I didn’t know her number. And I didn’t ever get around to calling but I never forgot about her. I mean I did, of course, but not forever, so I think that’s close to the same thing. The reason I remembered now is because today was her funeral.

Sometimes when I am driving I begin to feel sad for no reason at all. All of a sudden this horrible longing will crash into me and I feel like whatever was good in my life had just slipped through my fingers and shattered all over the floor and was gone. My whole body aches and suddenly I don’t know what to do. I could be driving to my own goddamn wedding and I have to pull over lost. I get out in a convenience store parking lot and walk until the policeman grabs me and shoves me out of the road and says he has better things to do than deal with drunks who won’t take care of themselves. He’s there directing traffic because she died and that’s when I heard that she died and that’s when I remembered that I think I loved her that morning.

I was still wearing my tuxedo so I went inside and sat down in the back of the hall. The entire room was staring at me. She was lying dead in the front and suddenly I was the goddamn center of attention. I felt like throwing up. You could feel it in your skin the moment you walked in there that none of these people even cared about her. Not like I did. She never wrote a poem for any of them. The blotchy eyed man at the front of the room smiled at the room and then at me and started to speak again, his voice cracking tragically. He rambled for a few sentences - real sincere and sentimental like. “You could search all your life and never find a soul kinder than hers… making everyone feel special and… only eyes I ever… loved you all.” His eyes started to well up and he waved his hand humbly and so damn graciously and sat down again, the rubber necked bobble heads all nodding furiously.

I felt like going up to him right there and – well, I don’t know what I wanted to do. He was just one of those guys who - one of those guys who if they made a fantastic catch in football or something would say something stupid like “Well, I dropped enough of them today”, just to show how goddamn humble they were, right when everyone was congratulating them and all. I felt sick again and watching him parade around when she was lying dead not two feet! away and I felt like hurting him cutting him. Never mind that she was lying there dead in a room full of vultures and I didn’t think I could take them all on there were too many some of them would get by I couldn’t protect her from all of them needed me how did they all get in here they shouldn’t have let them in why wasn’t I called the only one why wasn’t I who cared who loved she needed me now but I better wait she knew that there were too many I had to think couldn’t possibly catch her now but she knew of course without words she knew but she wasn’t warm now

There was nothing else to say and they all started to stand and file out of the pews and I stayed in mine watching carefully ready to spring forward. They were still watching me through their beady eyes their talons sheathed in black gloves and I waited. When they were mostly gone the blotchy eyed man stood and started walking towards the back. I saw him glancing my way and smiling through his blotchy eyes. He stopped to embrace a teary elderly man in a white suit and I turned and left the hall before he caught up with me.

I walked outside into the stuffy air and the close phantasmal mist and couldn’t see anything past my own hands, practically. The others were all leaving and I remembered I had my own church to go to. The ceremony hadn’t started yet but it was on the other side of town and I knew I wouldn’t be able to make it there without driving like a goddamn maniac so I decided to just not go. They wouldn’t understand why I was late anyways. I knew then it wasn’t the place for me; it was really only a fling.