I bought dark cherries at the farmers market on Sunday and they are so ripe that it takes no bite at all to split them. I try to ration but I am greedy and I want all of their fruit, more, in my mouth. The pits grow on my counter in a blue pint container that once held strawberries, and when I pull the fruit from the plastic bag they are in, like thin silk, the smell is so full that the room is bowled over.
I made my way home teething cherries and spitting the pits out in front of me, like I was making a pathway back or at least a trail for someone to find me. Perhaps follow me. Which comes first, the one who follows or the one who is found? I once wrote a letter to an ex describing how I walked across a bridge while spitting pits out into the water, tiny stones. I remember that he was in love with the detail, told a writer friend, said something about how lucky he felt. As if sight was prerequisite for witness.
I have wanted my poems to validate me and I have wanted the eyes reading them to be the witness to my life that I no longer had. I have wanted absolution from want and absolution from fear, and at times, confused the two. I have allowed desire, my own, to be unimportant. I have now stopped denying myself nourishment.
A pattern emerges in my life: when I love something, I make it twice. Perhaps three days in a row. Multiple nights spent caramelizing onions or roasting chickpeas until they split open into tiny rattles. Or perhaps stemming mint leaves, making a lattice work of red cabbage until it I pucker it with balsamic vinegar. Last night I pan fried toast in butter and watched the blooms sizzle. I cooked onions and cherries in a pan with butter and wine and ladled it atop my bread, pressed feta onto it with my fingers, used the last of my mint. Did you know the way you keep mint from browning is by keeping it between aluminum foil, with the ends open so the mint can breathe? A vendor at the farmer’s market told me that, and I’ve used the same piece of foil for each new bundle. I store these new words like old secrets I’ve finally remembered. I love that I am a person who walks home with beet leaves escaping out of their bag.
Tonight I made the same dinner as last and watched the butter gloss my pan and bubble. The color of the hawthorn blossoms I passed the other day, walking home from finally finishing The End of the Story (again) at a park I didn’t know existed. Now it is my favorite spot, a wide swath of field where children play soccer or tennis with their parents and dogs catch tennis balls in their teeth. There are no mosquitoes here in Seattle, or almost. Sometimes when I catch the light up the hill, every shadow and plant stem looks like the grass in an Andrew Wyeth painting, the time of day when the light against the houses perfectly mirrors and makes a direct copy in charcoal. I suppose what I am trying to say is that I am surprised by the depth of quiet inside myself and at the apex of my life, and am drawing gratefully near. I count the days left in Seattle by wondering when will be my last time for each ordinary Sunday evening walk. How many park sits and stops at flowers alive with their perfume, and the bees, insistent lovers.
I have a poem about that. I have a poem about cabbages. I have a poem about sea turtles and heartbreak and it’s not what it seems. My poems have started getting better as I’ve stopped asking for witness, absolution, whatever it may be, by the reader I want to make any eye who sees me.
Yesterday was my birthday and on my way to take my June photo booth, I ran into a friend whom I hadn’t seen since I was in Paris, and she bought me a gin and tonic, and we sat on the porch of this strange bar in my neighborhood, and talked like two memories who know each others’ strangeness. I am reminded daily of the crevice that has widened to a gulf between my life as it was and as it stands now. Grief I no longer think is merely a door, but a stairwell, a hallway, some long room that leads to a different home. I have brought all my ghosts with me, and the ones I forgot I see on each street corner, every restaurant I shared noodles with the person I loved. Old poems for new lovers. It is too soon for me to share, but I am already thinking of how many boxes I will need when I go, which is itself a way of making metaphor what we leave behind.
I love my photo booths for this, that I take the images of these people I have been with me, that the act of these images has always been for me. The photos have always been for me. In each, I am my own witness. I am over a year and a half in of watching transformations, Didion’s kind wherein that silver is an “amniotic stillness.” I am positing more irreverence and trying to parse away self-importance. If the booth had not stopped working after the first strip, I would have taken a second set, flashing my tits in the third frame.
I walked home tipsy and thought about endings and how surprising and sudden it is to feel okay, even good, hell, that rumble. Put on more lipstick, met Sophie and Thomas at the corner where we walked to a restaurant. We met my sister on the way, her body illumined by the sun, and Sophie laughed at how she thought it was me walking towards myself. Isn’t that what we’re trying to do? Chloe brought me cookies and pie and a card she had signed in post haste, all love, a beautiful bowl that I plan to eat KIX cereal out of. Look sharp I said in a text, and everyone at the dinner seemed the best of themselves: Paul with his blue sneakers and Vanessa wearing a black cap and Sam with a matching two-piece ensemble and glasses larger than his face. Somehow, everyone fit at the table. I drank red wine and licked honey from my fingers, passed cheese down towards Michelle. It is specificity that I love, and the teasing and talk turned me into one grinning sound. When I laugh hard, I sound like my mother.
Later, there was pie and candles, chocolate, more wine. A birthday song someone thought to video, then stopped. How will we remember, another asked, and Paul tapped his head. Up here, he said. The memory of light like the memory of light. One small flame in a blue candle on a piece of pie and beautiful faces outstretched towards me.
At the end of the night I locked my front door and went to sleep in my own home, in a quiet muffled by noises I know: my neighbor shifting through his apartment, the bus passing its stop across the street, an errant dog startling at a sound.
When I woke up in the morning and hurried to work, I carefully ate the cherries left on my counter, one by one, and spit out the pits. If you are quiet enough, you can hear them resound on the pavement. Their tiny thuds on the grass.