Honea Express

Archive for the ‘Tricia’ Category

Like most days it started with a song and sort of wandered off from there. There was a breakfast table surrounded by boys and windows, and the latter was covered both inside and out.  The inside held bats and ghosts and assorted ghouls grouped more by the restrictions of a child’s reach than status or storyline. The outside was layered with a morning fog fresh off the mountains and bullets of rain that ricocheted into the flowerbed below.

The boys sat with their backs to the window and their attention in their cereal bowls. A car drove past and between a grinning skeleton and a winking witch I saw my tired neighbor driving home from her last round of radiation. She drove slow enough that I could just make out the twinkle in her eye beneath a brow that has been too heavy for too long.  She looked exhausted and victorious.  She glowed through the fog and the rain between us.

I dropped my wife and the boys off on the curb in front of the airport. The white zone is for the immediate loading and unloading of passengers only. Our hugs were tight and quick.

I drove home with a little boy’s tears wet on my shoulder. I had no place else to go.

There is a sudden silence in a house without children.  It is haunting and lonely.  It is also clean for extended periods of time.

Still, it is better loud and dirty.  The ghosts and ghouls know it. They are ignored so far below eye level.  Even the smile carved across the pumpkin looks forced. There is a sadness where seeds should be.

The street is quiet and the neighbors are sleeping. The rain will fall for days and it suits me fine.

Inland was warmth and sunshine and days of summer stretching wearily. The coast, however, was 20 degrees cooler and worked in so many shades of gray.  The sky fell into the sea and the waves rolled across my cold feet before running up the stairs to take their place at the end of the line.  Clouds waited patiently.

The rocks in the ocean were the size of ships, and ships were the size of small birds flying off in the distance.  There was a cave on the beach and in it sat a family around a campfire.  Their dog ran free and happy, a green ball held tightly in its mouth.

She stopped in mid-sentence, her words lost beneath the beat of a tide rolling in.  I hadn’t been listening.  I was writing poems in my head as I am prone to do, and then promptly forgetting them as that requires much less effort than actually writing them down.  Most of them were rubbish, but one may have been damn near perfect.  I watched her watch the ground.  She was brilliant against the sepia shore.

She bent down and picked a drop of red out of the surf-trodden sand. It was a ladybug, caked in grains and left for dead.  Suddenly, the beach was alive with polka-dots in reds and yellows and the polka-dots were, in turn, covered in dots of their own.  We sat on our knees in the sand and dug ladybug after ladybug from their collective coastline grave.  Our shoes, which had long ago left our feet and become something meaningless to hold on to, became the soles of rebirth. It was on the bottom of my left flip-flop that one ladybug found breath and another was once again able to crawl.  It was somewhere opposite where my big toe would be that a ladybug shook the sand from its wings and flew away home.

It seems that they live in the trees that tremble from the side of steep ocean cliffs, and when certain winds blow the way that certain winds do, the ladybugs are pulled from whatever life they have known and dropped without warning over deep waters and hungry fish. Assuming they don’t drown, are not eaten or lost at sea, they are marooned on beaches not 50 feet from the trees on which they started.  But they are pounded with ebbs and flows, and they are forgotten amongst shells and bits of seaweed.  All in all, it’s no way to treat a lady.

And so we gathered those that we could and we carried them on flip-flops covered with newfound meaning to a piece of driftwood just below the tree line. The ladybugs wandered aimlessly and probably thought things about mortality and what to make of second chances.

Every so often one of us would say how much the boys would like this while the other would nod, skip a stone or stare out at the sea. They were on a different beach in a different state looking over the same nothingness and the endless everything. Our day was a glass half hollow, half lined with romance. We played the percentages.

Then we walked back across the beach, our shoes once again empty, our feet still cold and bare.  We passed big rocks, small ships, a family around a fire and a dog with a ball and the constant need to wag.   Our car was waiting for us, and beyond it a green forest and blue skies and something pretty on the radio.

We got sand everywhere.

For the past two years my wife and I have both worked from the home.  It took its toll on us.  We found ourselves arguing about the little things that shouldn’t even be mentioned, let alone at decibels that only the neighbors could hear. We bickered over the bickerless and grated the nerves of the other like so much cheese. Familiarity led to the lack of it.

Recently, my wife took a job out of the house.  Once again we have our own space.  We are able, each of us, to be our own person and no longer feel ourselves defined by the other, or the situation, or the fork that she tried to stab me with (not really).  There is room to breathe.

It kind of sucks.

With my wife’s new job taking her out of the house I am suddenly alone with them.  You know who I’m talking about.  They demand constant attention — something we had once volleyed between us like beach balls in a stadium now smacks me squarely in the head as soon as I dare look in the opposite direction. I’ve become that guy that gives the beach ball to the security guard, and everyone knows that guy is a total jackass. Go on, boo me. I’ll wait.

The thing is, I have deadlines and a 50+ hour per week workload, and frankly, it’s hard.  Sure, I know others do it all the time, and yes, I can do it — and I do it well, but that doesn’t mean it’s awesome.  I’m a writer. My job requires quiet, heavy drinking and random bouts of pornography, all of which are now impossible and/or widely frowned upon.

I had a meeting this morning, just like I do every Tuesday. It’s a group call on the phone with a bunch of people that can fire me.  I was 10 minutes late because I had to get my oldest ready for school and put breakfast in the bottomless belly of the younger.  I joined the meeting in progress while running, yes, literally running, to my son’s school.  The bell rang as we hit the crosswalk.  We stopped by the office for a tardy slip, walked briskly down the hall, and suddenly it became my turn to speak and all I could say was, “I love you. Have a good day.”

I finished my meeting on the walk home and nobody cared that I was out of breath, full of stress or that I had forgotten to make my son his lunch.  They wanted what they pay for and I gave them what I could, hoping that they wouldn’t ask for change.

My job is getting less from me.  My children are getting less from me. It’s a one-two punch.  Hit the wallet.  Hit the heart.

Even now, I write these broken words around sudden stops, tending to the humanity of it all with sternness and the promise of consequence.

Take the punches and roll. Take the money and run. Take it easy.

Even now, I write these stern words around sudden stops, tending with humanity the consequence of broken promises.

Just take it easy.

There is a beach ball floating across waves of cheers and paperwork, and it is headed straight for me.

Nine years is a long time. Things change. Children are born. Loved ones pass. Moving boxes are packed, unpacked and then packed again. Nine years is a long time, but the montage is quick when you get to the end.  The soundtrack is exactly what you would have picked.

We were married in Tucson on a warm spring day with beer in our bellies and friends on our arms. The memories are as clear as they are blurry.

In nine years we have been many places and many things. We have fought battles, faced demons, sighed relief and laughed deeply.  We have walked in the sunshine and danced beneath the moonlight.  We have also done things not so cliché.

There are moments cherished and those lost forever.  They are the makings of a love story and the stepping stones to happily ever after.

Today is our nine year anniversary. We’re only getting started.

When we left the sunrise was at our back. We drove through dark and ice and the sound of boys falling in and out of sleep. The tundra was frozen and redundant. The sky was lost and forgotten.

The airport was alive with the non-dead. Sleepy travelers boarded dreams. Weary passengers stumbled through gates like so many sheep. I stood there and tried not to count them.

My wife kissed my cheek and peeled the children from me. It took a little skin. I watched them walk away until they turned from sight and then I walked to the car and into the darkness. It was exactly like I had left it but slightly more so.

When I returned the sunrise was my horizon. I drove through twilight and ice and the sound of emptiness traveling just over the posted speed limit. The mountains glowed gold and bright. The sky stretched and yawned and rubbed sleep from its eye. I started to say something but there was no one there to hear me.

All that was left was time and an eastbound highway. I thought of a plane somewhere behind me, turned on the radio and like a moth to the flame I followed the sun until it engulfed everything but the shadows.