The single childhood bed. After the nuns taught the word eternity, I’d lie awake struggling to grasp the enormity of forever. Pale-faced and sweaty with the thought of carrying this badness for all time. Eternity was a springy snake in a can; once I opened the lid I couldn’t fit it back into my head.
At fifteen, I lay in the dark on my hand me down double bed. Listening to an album Matt gave me, Hall and Oates’ Abandoned Luncheonette. Again and again, She’s goooooooone, oooohh, I and with my glasses off and crying, the stereo’s green and red lights are huge orb that blink and overlap.
Matt left Philadelphia and moved with his mother to San Diego when I was sixteen. He was twenty-five. He would only come back once to the city he loved. His mother thought that by taking him away from his junkie connections she could save him.
I was going to him the first time I left home. Nineteen years old. That’s not what I told myself. On my first flight from Pennsylvania to California I sat by the window and watched as the country unraveled below me and in me so that by the time the pilot announced descent everything I had been was stretched out behind me, leaving me all hollowed out and waiting to be filled.
I’m standing by the baggage claim wearing red pumps. Something about the red shoes make my legs feel brittle, like wooden match sticks with bright red tips. When Matt arrives we hug, I’m on tippy-toes, both arms around his neck, my heels lift round and naked out of the red shoes... I think we must look like lovers... He’s a beautiful man, women notice him. He’s tall, a full head and shoulders taller than me even in heels. His hair is inky black with curls that crackle when my cheek brushes by them. His teeth when he smiles are a pure flashing white with incisors so perfectly pointed it seems he must file and polish them. For a moment I picture the Big Bad Wolf, a mangy grey summoning from a childhood storybook, but then the image is gone.
That night sleeping in the guest bed with Matt just down the hall, I dream of dancing with a man whose face I can’t see, just a diffusion of pink skin, razor stubble, the smell of body oils mixed with cologne. And as we move, in degrees I’m falling in love with him. But the important part of the dream, the part that lingered was the space between our faces that held everything.
In my twenties there were all the New York sublet beds where I’d lie alone in the middle of the night, unable to sleep, writing poetry. Writing always to a ‘you’ I couldn’t name.