It Got Cold
untitled
Notebooks stack the walls, mostly empty, piles competing against piles to cover the most concrete; mostly empty notebooks, dead school supplies for children who left home, and unburdened by purpose they collect. Old records, coated in dust, perhaps soot even as left by the old wood stove, and left unclean, again usable, yet, no real need, analog heart left behind by purity and stone news. Memories to be brought back but never relived, each album becoming a time of life left behind, and once dismissed from the car, relegated to beneath the turntable, becoming nothing but times better left only remembered. What is still usable here will remain unused, and what was used becomes only dust, once living, now falling off the creator, forming a new essence generally dismissed as a nuisance by the modern times now occurring.
Thinking of Lori, I smoke a cigarette on the porch, cloves forming a gentle vanilla now illegal in my home state and only the good comes back, never the bad, like the gentle embrace of lying under the banyan trees in Aja, but never the masturbatory soloing; like every other track of In Case of We Die. All that she has left me is a notebook of short stories for me to read but I never will, she has left me stories of my own but none of hers. My stories seem to cling only to that desperate notion that what was had was warmth, but it doesn't matter now; the stories flow off the tongue and prove only my connotations, added for effect and for personal comfort.
The wooden walls will burn easy, says my mother, says I should stop smoking and put away all the wood stoves, both needless expenses simply to promote appearance. Someone of true class, she says, would not pay for taste, not the taste of a certain smoke nor the log cabin vogue of a living room. A stray spark and you're burning, she tells me, everything's catching and what's left?
The insurance, maybe. No chance of realizing that my memories aren't false. Everything in the fire proof safe. Maybe a couple thousand and a few stories from high school and a few rejection slips folded too many times to read.
Against a kitchen counter I relax, spooning cereal into me, dentist forsaken teeth crying in pain; sip coffee and exacerbate said pain, heat and liquid and caramelizing sugar if sixth grade chemistry is true. Still stocked with children's tastes, slowly revealing Tony the Tiger's grinning face, eyes in true pain thanks to the invading crust caused in sleep, and I wipe my eyes, and it doesn't help any.
Only concrete in the basement, a house built on a sturdy foundation in ancient techniques. The foundation laid, a full plan designed and most of the money gone like this morning coffee, the urge came to build a cabin, an old wood cabin built like Lincoln logs, to bring us back to nature, I was told. It didn't feel that way as the plows came, as the contractor and I sat in a trailer talking financing and loans; I could imagine my legs being crushed by a falling tree were I to construct this myself, but never could I imagine my knees broken and being unable to crawl forward as caused by a short, balding man in torn flannel.
In winter the cabin was finished, a true monument to antiquity and architectural development; and in debt to the bank and having no other home except our prize, we moved in. It became a torture, for the dream was built, but the dream was reality; our trophy and our creation, built not by our hands but by our money, built on concrete but not the Earth, built of hope but not actuality. Crawling into the basement, into that safe place, beneath the Earth with no exit, I sift through the boxes. Lori calls, saying the children want dinner; I call up, take them to dinner, you told me to unpack. The clothes, silverware, the toys and the electronics, the cribs and beds, they have all been reopened, reassembled, reimagined without their appropriate dressers, instruction manuals or pieces, and in the basement lies the waste, the things meant to be forgotten, or the things meant to come in the future.
The boxes for the children show labels saying "When School Happens” or "When Friends Happen” or "When Time Happens”. "When School Happens” contains the notebooks that line the wall, unpacked in gentle grace by my hand, left here waiting for use. "When Friends Happen” is cassette tapes, vinyl, VHS tapes and a few beta maxes. None of the players are in there, left to the electronics boxes upstairs. Only the turntable is left, in its own separate box with its speakers, a fossil I lovingly reconstruct, bone by bone, cable by frayed cable. "When Time Happens” is unused photo albums and disposable cameras, meant to capture every important moment. Some of them are simple frames with captions, "First Steps”, "First Day of School”; others are more complex, but having simpler titles, "Memories” being the most striking; what amounts to being golden hits collection of a human life captured only in a word relegated to high school prom names.
No pictures stain the concrete, for pictures are true; all the albums and frames are empty, no wedding photos or friends gathering, just grey and cardboard and the day glo brite so popular among elementary school students. White shows its face if you open the boxes, but I have no heart to stack those albums now, with their pink and blue ribbons and gold fonts.
The car idles in the garage. On the worst day, I was here with the doors closed. Not truly expecting anything to happen, not meaning to leave that way, and just meaning to see if it was true.
The forest surrounding is beautiful in the winter, with the trees lightly coated in snow hanging on only by nature, elegance created only by the subtle power of the universe. The same powers that brought out about life creating a scene that would be appreciated in every living room but trashed by art culture. Hotel room art, suitable for bed and breakfasts and any scenes trying to project happiness; imagine if God painted a Pollack, we'd all be mutants until we got used to it, then our old physics would become the avant-garde, give it a few generations or maybe just one and hotel art will be revivalism. Artificial happiness will become critical happiness will become mainstream happiness, then the hip will reject as the masses know, and so we'll be back with the abstracts and their ink blots.
It was the deer that became our passing vogue; making such big deals of these deer to the children and to visiting friends, a buck standing majestic in the front lawn is only so majestic so many times, and repeated ad nauseum, with the children screaming to look at the deer, with the friends saying the same, we became fox peoples. Days came when no words could be said to each other and so to feel togetherness we sat in the windows, sharing binoculars, perhaps wine, searching for foxes. The fox is elusive, the fox is not uncommon however; the fox can be found, but it blends in much better, is so much smaller, and is a truer animal of the forest. The deer can scavenge and hide, for a time, but living near domesticated peoples, it becomes docile quickly. The fox never came to us, as the deer did, searching our landscaping for sustenance; no, the fox hid, and so the fox became the obsession.
Exhale vanilla; I took up these for Lori's memory, what I told myself was rationalizing; if the kids visit, they will remember her vanilla perfume and all those wooden sticks in fragrance jars, and they will know it together with my tobacco, and they will feel home. No, it was not that; not in practice, and it only creates a longing for that togetherness; perhaps their knowledge of her intimacy, her caring, her gentleness did not extend so far as her scent; the difference between the child's and the lover's touch. No, it was too personal for them, and no comfort to be gained, but I left it be, as I need those memories, abstract yet concrete, the merging of human's and god's whims.
The sky has clouds but retains its blue underbelly; the winds blows and the chimes ring.
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