On July 14, 2010 in Fort Collins, Colorado, a girl named Katie committed suicide in her apartment home.
These are her blogs.
Reach into an image and call it your reality.
Fingertips against the front window glass.
In my hand a blade, an edge, a weapon, the palm of my hand, fingers against edges, a fabric, a breath into your lungs, exhale another world. Force a key in the lock, twist hard.
Step through a crack in the glass, avoid the edges, leave the physical behind, break the window, become real what’s only dreamt, only imagined, reach deep.
Kyle is knocking on the front door. He’s afraid he’s lost me and he’s found it locked. He does not know what he’ll find inside, as I don’t know what I’ll leave. When the rent comes due, overdue, past, expired, they’ll come looking if he hasn’t prompted them already and the spiders will spin their webs, hazy strands, the stuff of dreams, leftover, backwash, blood against the walls that tastes of sugarplums. And nightmares.
The monster nods but does not smile. He draws tight his dark but leaves a thread for me.
Kyle is knocking on the front door but I am not here.
It is a different feeling entirely to know there is someone on the other side of the door. It is a different feeling entirely to leave it unopened.
I twist the key.
I pull the screen against the window.
Close the computer, a screen gone dark. Keys untouched. Thoughts alone. A voice in a dark room.
A cat in a locked box.
Step outside your body, leave this place, find the unseen.
Reach for the teardrop, chase after stars.
Step into an emotion alone. Call me dead. Call me awake. Call me alive. Elsewhere. Here. Now. Forever between these three months. The future. The unknown manifest.
I roam. I remain.
Kyle is knocking on the door.
But I’m stepping out the back, shred the physical, a last glance at the front window, cut the chord, a last word typed,
.
Goodbye.
You move through the day slowly. You go for walks at dawn and don’t return until well after nightfall. You play with shadows and you study the sunlight. Tickle the skin, a dragonfly, a moth, a mosquito, a sun’s ray.
You touch the repaired remnants of the front window. You study the seat where you used to rest, watch days pass by, try and fail to know the neighbors just by watching them come and go, learning only their habits as they walk between doors, shuffling from one place to the next.
If the Stranger is still in your house, he is quiet and does not move from a small unnoticed corner, but likely he has moved on. The Monster is still in your living room, but he’s also in your bedrooms, outside the front door, waiting, and follows you along long walks the way the stars might follow you in the night.
The internet has been patchy at your apartment, but it’s of little worry. You’ll update when you need, when you feel like writing, sharing.
You’ve been here already though. You see. You understand. You know where this is going as well as she does. Touch your computer screen, study the edges, break your screen in half and admire the inner-workings, then turn around, step through a window and fade away.
* * *
Kyle only saw me once more.
* * *
I was returning from a walk, the moon high above in the sky, barely a sliver, hidden every once in a while behind slow, thin drifting clouds. I was thinking about the difference in the way the light played with the shadows in the night versus the day, how the edges were more subtle but easier to bend, to reach a hand and pull back, to glimpse through, to try to find a pair of eyes somewhere other than above.
“Katie.”
He was sitting on his front porch, the light out, barely a shadow himself against the post. Three months ago, his voice would have startled me.
“Hello Kyle.”
“I’m sorry about yesterday,” he said. But as near as I could tell in the dark, he kept his gaze firm on mine and his voice didn’t hold a hint of apology.
A silence grew between us, a knowing feeling, an argument had, and had.
“Is this goodbye?” He asked.
Of course it’s goodbye.
“Why do you have to go? Maybe if you could just explain it to me, I’d understand.”
But instead of speaking, I moved forward and placed a hand against his jaw. A few small hairs bristled when I made a small motion against it. “Have you always wanted me?”
“What?” He was startled, at once uncomfortable, unsure of my direction.
I repeated myself and leaned in closer, pressing my left cheek to his right, moving smooth skin against him. “Have you always wanted me?”
I could almost see his mental shrug in his hesitation, despite being so close. Fine. Yes. “I’ve held a thing for you since the moment you knocked on my door. I thought… I thought you were beautiful and interesting.”
Moving my head back so that our foreheads were barely inches apart, his eyes dark in the shadow but clear in their closeness. “Then you understand.”
There was at first a muddy confusion in his eyes, an understanding brewing below, the way he blinked, the way he looked down ever so slightly without seeing, the way the knowledge swirled into a glassy mirror across his eyes.
And so we said goodbye.
.
It is sweet, and slow.
At first with fingertips and lips, sensitivities and sensation, a tingling movement, an electricity. A tension.
We shred clothes, strangers, bodies new, fresh, unseen before this, awkward feelings, discomfort bringing a tenderness from us both that was primal and naked. Naked, move together, his hand moved against my breast, a smoothness, the next. The Stranger is here for a moment, I feel his touch, his smile of approval, then his leaving.
And that’s how it starts and goes for a while. Touch. Fingers. Sensation, the smell of our bodies in his bedroom, the nip of the air that slipped inside the bedroom against my neck, the sound of the house adjusting, slow pops.
Then at some point it becomes more.
Sensation to feeling, emotion. Tears from one if not the both of us, the sounds we make becoming a harmony above a rhythm of breaths, a music. Rise above and float, strain, pull back and stretch, clench a hand, a body, the room around you and the roof crumpling flat.
See the streets intertwine, see the yellow lights blinking, the red against them, a steady light that alternates in an intersection, a give, a take. A car drives through and makes a sound like a catching breath.
Tree branches down the block wave in the breeze and a man taking a walk brushes them from his face.
Intertwine, become one.
The window shatters in the storm.
The glass falls to the ground, each shard like a scream against the sill, some quiet, a smooth motion, liquid at heart, before the rain bursts inside, wets the carpet, the lightning flickering, the world shredding outside, the Monster both inside and out, behind the tree, within the branches, out of sight but standing right in front of you, watch round the corner, do you see? It’s alright if you don’t, because you can feel him there, and you know just as well as I do as I grip his shoulders and press my face against his, breath, saliva, fluids.
Squeeze tight and clench, the last moment hangs, falls off, drops…
.
.
.
.
.
Tears.
.
The stars compress, a thousand points of light burst and shriek and there is a scream in the night followed closely by a second, unheard, just after. A parachute opening, slow down, drift to earth, rise into the air and let the darkness cover, each light back to its place, each eye closes.
“Don’t go,” he whispers, but his eyelids are falling heavy as he tries his hardest not to fall asleep. If this is to be my goodbye, he wants to not miss it, he wants to not disappear into a blackness, to not lose himself to an abstract lie with bright lights behind eyelids, a nightmare, a sweet dream that’s not the one next to him, the one he can touch, and feel.
His request hangs in the air long after he has fallen through while I study the way the cracks litter the ceiling, little threads of black slip through, reverse, draw back, next to the stars in the sky somewhere outside.
I’ll go in the night. I’ll leave in the dark. He’ll wake up and he’ll wonder if I’ve left him, part of him convinced I slipped out, the other part wondering if I might have just fallen away while he was asleep, my body fading like the world around him as his eyelids drifted, there at first, later gone, the memory in-between hazy, but soft, a gentle kiss upon a forehead, a touch along a cheek, words whispered like a dream in his ear.
“I’m leaving, Kyle. I can’t stay here.”
“You know, I thought you were going to say that at some point here. Some version of that.”
I was sitting inside his apartment, trying to quiet my heart while it raced in my chest, feeling like a caged animal. My parents owned a dog once and had me take care of it while they left town for a week. The first five days, she refused to go deeper into my apartment than the front hallway, and later still, after coaxing her into the living room, she refused to move into the kitchen. Whining, first taking a step before returning back to where she knew, where she was safe.
“When you say that you’re leaving…”
“I think you’ve some idea of what I mean.”
“No, Katie. I really don’t. You’re operating in a space that only you know and I can’t draw conclusions from that.”
“That’s where – and why, I suppose – I have to go.”
“You don’t.”
I raised my eyebrows at him and he shrugged, flexing off anger like water against a duck’s back.
“It’s going to be soon.”
In an outburst I wasn’t used to nor expecting, Kyle slammed a hand down on his coffee table and walked into the kitchen, his right arm twitching at his side as if with a mind of its own, trying to gesture at me, thinking better of it, fighting back again.
“Kyle?”
“Don’t ‘Kyle?’ me! You think this is easy to watch? You don’t think I have to sit here and suffer, that I haven’t been this whole time?”
I frowned.
“Katie, you’re being a fucking idiot. You’re out of control. You’re grieving. You’re treating your home, your friend, your life as if it’s some disposable piece of trash, something you don’t have to care about, and it’s pissing me off. You think I don’t matter? You think I don’t care?”
“It’s not like that – “
“Don’t. Don’t explain it to me again! I know, I get it. You’re not going to tell me anything or show me anything that you haven’t already.”
“This is something I have to do.”
“Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t, but you can’t expect me to stand by and enjoy it.” He turned and walked back into the kitchen, pacing now, back out again. “I’m not going to knock on your door in two days and find you in a pool of your own blood, fried in a bathtub, dead.”
“I’m not going to kill myself!”
“Can you really say that to me? After everything so far? This ‘other world’ you’ve found? A life outside of this one? Something abstract? Unreachable? Following your parents?”
“This has nothing to do with them!”
“This has everything to do with them.”
I stood up. “Maybe it’s better I go.”
“Fine. Go away. Leave. Avoid it.”
I did, easing the front door closed instead of slamming it, wandering out into the grassy area of the park, where it had turned almost generally to brown instead of green. I walked slowly, half-expecting him to come out, to try and make nice, to not want to end things on a bad note.
I turned around, nearly from the neighborhood and stared at the doorway.
It didn’t surprise me when he didn’t come out. I knew how hard it could be to reach for a knob and push open the door.
A few shards of glass still clung to the frame around my front window. They were small, would hardly impede me were I to try and crawl out of the window -
But if they caught my skin, they would rip deep, a gouge, tear -
I ran my fingertip against the edge and ever so lightly brushed against the crumbs of glass like crushed rock that tumbled from fragile spaces and onto the sill.
The morning breeze was cool on my face and smelled of rain. The morning was overcast and drizzly. The wind wasn’t blowing anymore and the rain didn’t spread inside despite the wide maw. But while the outside breathed a freshness into my living room, the black edges of the glass seemed to emanate a different odor, the musty smell of old smoke, an ancient blacksmith’s shop, a grandfather’s garage.
* * *
The voice told me to leave a message after the tone.
* * *
I told them my name. I relayed my building number. My voice wavered just enough when I described the night before, how the storm had raged outside and at some point in the night either debris or some rowdy college kid shattered the window, the rain soaking the floor.
I live on my own. My rent is paid on time. My apartment is tidy, albeit desolate, the lack of effort prepared on moving in now suggests some lack of personality. But were the apartment complex to send someone down, I doubt they would notice. They’d only see the struggling single girl with the sweet smile and the scared hollow eyes.
* * *
Catch your reflection in the glass on the floor. Find where the shattered window ends and the water begins, reflection shimmers, a mist before, a pretty girl smiles back, but then she’s gone too and I wonder about her.
* * *
Step forward, a bare toe against a solid piece of the glass. Press hard into the carpet. The glass gives but does not warp, sinks, but does not break.
Look closer, there is an image of a gray storm cloud outside and a tree with leaves sagging under the weight of the water, a curve beneath them as if to study the sky and give a hopeful glance in the direction of the sun.
I reach forward and, where the window should have been, touch a solid surface in the air unseen. I close my eyes and run my fingers across the surface, feeling where the fringes come to rest, fraying, fried, crispy.
I press my knuckles against the glass hard into a smoky world. The glass gives but does not warp, the surface grows cold and a condensation breathes from the other side, but the glass does not break.
* * *
Beyond, someone moves out of a door, reaches to unlock their car, notices you in the hole in the wall, moves to hide curiosity and confusion, bends a questioning frown to a wavering smile and nods.
You don’t wave back, but he knows you saw him. There is no longer a mirror in between. There is no longer a membrane between you and the outside, no longer a separation between a darkness and a light, a reflection of one side against another, one way.
* * *
Type, scribble, get thoughts on paper, let your images run wild and dig for meaning.
* * *
After he climbs into his car to reverse, wipers slash rain from the windshield, I can’t see him anymore. I rise to the tips of my toes to see if I can’t catch my image staring back in the glass, but the angle is wrong and instead is only front doors. I watch his car as he drives away, straining to catch an image, another image, another reflection, only further away.
* * *
Pull the pieces together, mop up the tears.
Scream and see above, rise up.
* * *
Maybe I can see you. Maybe if I rise high enough and move close enough, look deep into your eyes, blink, and in the smooth teary surface, a black pit, an image of myself looking back. An image of you in mine, a leaf, a blade of grass, a song.
July 6, 2010
Yesterday the clouds rolled thick into the night, another bridging gap between the day and the twilight, as if encouraging me to run forward and try again, to reach for the lightning that lit the front range.
The storm moved from the southwest, first deep clouds threatening before the sun fell early, unnatural night, the interpreter is going rogue.
Low hanging clouds invite an inky blackness that swallows the city lights that otherwise reflect from its underbelly where the rain drifts and swallows the light.
The hills flicker below the constant display of the lie. Unnatural illumination, violent, a connection, a brightness that tries and fails to expose the shadows, bright light, a shutter held open and flash, a white blind.
When the rain begins, it falls hard. My front window, layered in cracks, creaks, the streams trailing in shimmers, the lighting washes the apartment buildings, cars, trees, bushes, blades of grass in that white blue light. But in the instant that the outside is thrown into the lie, the window blurs, the outside world warps, twisted. It’s easier to see through the window in the dark.
Wash me in yellow light that lights up the water drops like individual insect eyes and the glass becomes too cluttered to see, thick with mirrored surfaces turning every which way, winking in and out, shining bright for a moment like a backlit fractal
before the darkness surrounds and the view is crisp, clear again, the edges in focus, as if not a drop of water washed across the glass.
I pressed the heel of my hand into the cracked surface and the glass creaked and the water leaked in the open hole and spread across my hand, a cold trickle, a lover’s invite.
* * *
Outside, the rain washed over my body. Clothes, no clothes. Heat, cold. Wet, dry. The water runs over my eyes, across my face, a claustrophobia that presses against me, holding me back, surrounding me, a bubble safe, secure, restricting.
Break through, Katie. Break through. Tear it apart.
The lighting shattered the grassy area. Buildings and trees were forced into a colorless starkness, a brightness shot, ambiguous, indistinguishable.
Scream. Sing. A voice breaks through the storm, a voice its own.
* * *
Press, a new spider-web reaches for the sill and frame, as if outrunning a shatter, the crack itself outrunning the split, the break, one half from the other, the left from the right, the id and ego, alpha, omega, God, and God, your world and your world, life and death.
* * *
Reach for the edges, Katie. You know what they feel like.
There’s voices and murmurs in the falling of the rain. The shadows of the leaves of grass scream at me when the lightning slams. A setting sun caresses gentle, summer storm bringing early night and violence.
Catch the next bolt. It’ll come crashing in moments. The thunder will roll, grab the sky, twist the burned edges, ignite, sing, call out, shed a tear.
* * *
A tear, a rip in the glass.
Transparent shatters, falls inward, the heavens scream; a sirens call, a banshee wails. An invitation, a welcome.
* * *
The edge has a slimy sensation, wet cigarette, press it to your lips and breathe in, spread the lips, and reach forward,
Close your eyes. The frozen moment of the lightning will be too bright. Pull closed the edges, reach out with a hand, the same hand you used to wipe away your mother’s teardrop,
Tear, drop,
Fall inside, a finger extended, coarse black skin and a deep crimson,
Burnt orange and black, white teeth smile, his eyes are the stars and he’s laughing at me.
I’m not sure if I’d know he were here if he wasn’t laughing.
He claps with glee and the sound echoes as if it were a cave.
* * *
Rainwater pours through the open window, soaks the sill, blows back the black fly corpses, wets the blankets, couch, carpet.
* * *
Close your eyes. See with me.
* * *
Climb out of the window and into the storm. The tree is thrashing, leaves fly through the broken glass. If I cut my arms I don’t feel it. If the blood flows, I don’t feel it. Stitch up the edges when the storms ends.
* * *
He stops laughing, composing himself. Reflect back a curiosity, an image reflected, an echo in a cave, a black empty space where the sound is lost.
He turns, beckons me to follow.
“Where?” I ask.
He’s laughing again, and I can hear him, and it’s louder this time and the sound travels farther and there are other empty spaces standing further away, watching, a curiosity reflected again, incredulity, satisfaction, anger.
He laughs and laughs and laughs and turns back to me and the sound is loud, his mouth is wide, uneven rows, red, a deep red, the sound of saliva against enamel against skin, a bubbling in a throat.
Pull tight the black curtains, shadows around you, disappear behind the lightning, witness invisibility, an impossible effect, evaporation. The water outside falls, inside, ascend.
* * *
When I open my eyes I’m in my living room but I can’t see. I’m on the soggy floor and my eyes are open but I can not see.
So I let go of the drapes, a claw’s caress, an invitation to return, suggestion.
When I can see again, I close my eyes and let the mist of the rainstorm blow across my skin.
The fourth began with a low-hanging black bank of clouds that crusted the underside of the sky, sealing off the sun from the surface. As the day wore on, passing noon and into the one o’clock hour, the sun made a retaliating movement, burning off much of the cloud cover into a steamy haze that filled the gaps between the puffy clouds and the larger, darker ones that loomed in haphazard fashion from the hills to the plains.
Kyle was driving and I was sitting in the passenger seat of his chevy, a small car from sometime in the last few years, the dashboard smooth, the knobs controlling a screen on the dash that told the time, volume and bass levels. Cool air that smelled of new car seats and air conditioning blew on my face, but I rolled down the window with a press of a button, the warmer air slipping inside the car, buffeting my face and throwing my hair back around the head rest.
The gravel crunched under his wheels when we pulled into the parking space in the small lot. We were between two cities, off a small road linking the two, desolate, devoid of houses for a good couple miles between. The trees in the foothills stopped before the plains. It wasn’t far from here where I’d pulled over some weeks ago and scribbled madly in my notebook to record my impressions of the twilight evening.
“I don’t like the looks of this,” Kyle said, narrowing his eyebrows at the churning black sky above. You could look out across the plains and see the storms bubbling into fruition up and down the mountains, spreading out into the east.
I grabbed my water bottle and closed the car door, setting off toward the west.
Kyle didn’t say much as we set out on our hike. We planned to take a trail up the foothills, one that Kyle said wound back and forth until it crested the peak of the hills, overlooking the better parts of the two cities, the lakes broad, spread out, blue masses.
It took the better part of an hour to reach the overlook at the top, passing holiday hikers descending, runners trying not to slide along the pebbly path as they made their way down.
The land stretched away and into the clouds in all directions. Behind us more hills and mountains rose high, scraping the bottom of the thick black clouds drifting nearer. Far against the plains, lightning flickered in the south.
Kyle frowned at the clouds and I took a seat on the small bench to catch my breath.
“This doesn’t look good,” Kyle reiterated. Clouds seemed to be surrounding us from all sides, stretching from the west behind us to the north as far as we could see, descending on the city like a charging army, and approaching from the south as if to flank our other side.
I shrugged. I wasn’t worried.
The blue breaks between the clouds deepened into a yellow haze as the sun fell further, a threatening non-light blanketed the land not yet shadowed by the clouds. The look of the plains made me shiver.
“Maybe we should go,” Kyle said.
I turned to him on the bench. “We’re staying here. I want to see this. It’s a celebration.”
“It’s a holiday that’s likely to get cancelled because of this weather anyway. It’s not worth risking our lives.”
“One way or another we’ll be fine. Like I said, I want to see this.”
Kyle took a deep breath and tried to settle down, eyeballing the clouds, the curtain of rain falling far to the north near the state border, then studying the trees further up the hill, likely wondering if they’d stand up to hail and violent winds.
Below, roads ran at right angles, disappearing behind small bunches of trees, seeming even less real than small models. Neighborhoods thickened away from us, dividing into small squares, disappearing in favor of square patches of land, some green, some brown, filled the way you see from an airplane, the human element shrinking and disappearing, inconspicuous, insignificant.
I stood at the edge and looked down at the slope that took us to the parking lot. At once I felt atop the world, more important, larger than life, omniscient. Thunder rumbled, the sound growing from the north and jetting into the belly above us, a slow, quiet sound that grew in intensity before fading the way it had come.
“I never liked thunderstorms,” Kyle muttered. “We lived in Fort Morgan once when I was a kid. The storms that came through there were terrifying. You never knew if your house would be there by the end of the summer. Do you know what that’s like to grow up in?” He shuddered.
As if not hearing his comment, I said, “Watch the world be torn apart.”
“What?”
But I didn’t repeat it. We’d watch.
* * *
The lightning brought the rain, but not after it had opened the show. It flickered under the clouds, along the bottoms, at first crawling across the underbelly of the thunderhead, then echoing inside, as if the storm itself were speaking, coming alive, a twisted ethereal experiment in reanimation gone rogue and abstract, building.
When the bolts began to impact the ground, many of them north of us, the thunder roared almost as soon as the lines connected the ground in violent fashion, people too close, shocked, fried.
“We’re going to be killed, Katie! We’re too close! We’ll be shocked! Fried!”
But I’d already felt the hand of God, twice now at least. If it blew me, smoking, out of my shoes it would be because he was carrying the flickering lights of my soul away, somewhere else.
“What are we doing here dammit?”
The air smelled of ozone and electricity. If you raised your fingers to the sky you could rub them together and catch the humidity and static between the tips.
“I want to learn how.”
“How to do what? I’m not standing out here in this without a good reason.”
The wind brought the first few drops of cold rain to my face. “Because sometimes seeing is believing.”
* * *
The trees joined into the celebration, waving their branches and rustling amongst themselves. I likened the sound both anticipatory and frightened; it didn’t surprise me when Kyle sat beneath their branches and looked up at the rolling clouds through the leaves
swirled and gusted free of the branches, blowing across the slope, past my legs and into space,
where for a moment they hung.
* * *
The sky above roiled and rolled dark, a light wisp broke away and moved along the base of the mass like a general rousing the troops, or just a frightened soldier seeing the coming battle and running, scared. Then the rain came down, all at once, without hesitation. Strike. Fall.
The drops stung my skin, plastered my hair to my face, soaked my clothes to my skin.
I threw my arms wide and took a step back from the edge. The wind made the rain fall at an angle.
Kyle was yelling something.
* * *
Lightning still slammed down, the air electric, mingling with the water, sometimes in harmony, at other times as if the two meant to end each other, the rain at where the lightning would land, the lightning and the rain.
The booms of thunder seemed to bring the trees down in a way the rain could not. The ground shuddered.
The storm reached over the city, hiding it, drawing the curtain closed, off limits, alone, private, excuse us, we’ll be through in a moment and this isn’t something you should be seeing. I knew that we were unseen too, from the road, a hill disguised in falling rain, cut off the distance, gray clouds thick, the heart of the moment in white.
* * *
A white blast took the ground somewhere near us. Somewhere to the right. The lightning itself made the sound, the thunder a part of it, a voice free to travel into the ground itself as it struck.
An explosion. Blind white light.
Open your eyes to it.
Slow motion, the rain stopped, each drop with an energy all potential, not enough to force itself into the skin, but somehow does.
The world turned white. Overexposed, naked. Kyle face behind me lost all feature. He didn’t know what was happening yet. He didn’t start screaming for another two seconds, until he’d recovered, until his brain had processes what had happened.
The lightning tore a hole in the world behind us. Hold the bolt, study the way the edges of the air curl black around the striking white rip, reach inside and feel, tingle, let loose the black.
A connection made, the heavens to the earth,
where the lightning met, black shadows spilled out, at first like an ectoplasm, a gunk sliding along the lightning, a black ink from above, but the stuff slid into form and writhed along and into the ground, going with the rain, sliding down the hillside.
I ran for the lightning bolt, I ran for the crack between the two worlds. If I could reach inside, if I could catch an edge of the world, hold back the shutter, squint and see deep, find a Truth and hold it inside my hands.
As I ran the rain froze, drew deep a breath, then began to fall harder, each drop picking up speed.
Feet away now. Meters alone. The earth sizzled. The weeds burned. The water boiled in the air, against skin, slow motion bubbles bursting, leave the body behind.
I touched the edge and the world exploded.
* * *
Raindrops and hail slammed deep, an instant, a white world turned black and blinked out, blind eyes,
Hand reaching across skin, block raindrops and slick, clawing at me, some dragging me forward and forcing me back,
voices whispered in my ears, flickered, the hissing sound of rain hitting the ground and the plants burning, my skin sizzling against the water
they were calling my name, they were telling me to stay back and come along and see
screaming, a lot of screaming, everyone was screaming, I heard my parents, I saw sparks,
eyes were watching me, black eyes that would switch to white, back and forth, spiral around me, who was this girl, why does she want to come,
but I’d touched the edge, I knew what it felt like in my hand. I could feel it against the back of my hand still, the way a blanket rests against your skin in bed eternal, embryonic fluid, oxygen
Breathe deep.
My lungs filled. My hand clenched.
* * *
There was still screaming, hands across skin, shouting and voices. My fists were clenched and I was shaking. Something smelled funny and sharp, a malignant odor. Someone bad was here.
The rain had lessened against me but I could still hear it, I could still feel it spray.
A stinging pain.
Sharp.
Against my face. A slap of reality, return to the physical with a new grasp.
katie, they call, katie katie katie come back with us come on you stupid stupid girl, come back with us, to us, to me, to us, come on back COME ON.
“KATIE COME ON!”
The world was black.
Not black, blue.
Dark blue, a blue doing a nasty, dirty waltz with the yellow sunlight, as if arguing for the earth itself, send soldiers, comply, interfere, a subtle takeover, elicit victory, eternal interaction, unseen.
“KATIE COME ON!”
Yeah, yeah, come back to Earth, see with the same blind eyes.
This time the pain stung my face and I felt it.
“Kyle?”
Above me, hair dripping and sticking out at all angles, a horror etching lines across his forehead and cheeks, a hard look in his eyes I’d never seen. A horror blend with anger, fear incarnate. A drop of water ran down a cheek. It could have been from the rain but I didn’t think so.
* * *
We could see across the plains from under the tree.
I was curled in his arms, shuddering madly, out of control, but watching, my mind calm, unable to speak much.
* * *
When I next came to, Kyle was leaning out from underneath the tree, feeling the impact of the rain, kicking aside a few of the hailstones that hadn’t melted yet, studying the clouds that encased us.
I pushed myself closer to a sitting position but my head was spinning and I almost vomited. I felt my stomach moving below me and my tongue was thick in my mouth.
Best we just stay for a while, I think, I tried to tell Kyle, but the words didn’t come out, the sounds thick.
He’d obviously come to a similar conclusion. He sat again and took me in his arms and held me close and I burrowed deep and it was warmer and I was gone again.
* * *
“Why we even came up here in the first place. The way these storms are going, like committing suicide. Signing a death warrant. Christ.”
He was talking to himself. Night was falling early because of the storm. An impossibility real. Block out the light.
My mind felt sharp again. The air was crisp and the rain had lessened, stopped.
“Kyle?”
“Katie,” he leaned toward me, studying my face, his hand on my trembling hand still. “How are you feeling?”
I tried to draw spit into my mouth. Seeing this, he reached for his water bottle, nearly empty and poured a little between my lips.
“Better?”
I nodded and tried to sit up.
“Take it easy.”
“I’m alright.” And it was true. My stomach and my head felt fragile, that kind of on-edge feeling you get after being sick, a tremble in my hand. But I was sharp and awake.
We sat for a while. He wasn’t ready to have me try to walk and I wasn’t ready to leave.
Behind us, the sun crashed from the sky and threw relief to the clouds and the sky and cast a color bright, a pale purple, a green to the other horizon, but the rolling black caught it, intercepted the light, turned it sick, gray. The rainstorms alit white in the cities across the state, and then the sun was gone, hiding, asleep, dead, again.
* * *
When I finally pushed myself to my feet, night had fallen. The cities below cast light to the low-hanging clouds, highlighting their curves, revealing them in the face of their shadows. They didn’t seem to mind. It rained and sometimes that obscured the cities into a further blurry blackness.
Explosions ripped as far as we could see. Bursting into the air in streams of bright light, raining colors back to earth, trying to overcome, at first a backwards reversal, gravity overcome, before falling again, only a fountain, an attempt to reach, failed.
Sometimes small explosions popped above small neighborhoods, tiny sparkles of light one after another in slow succession.
“Okay,” I said. “Okay, lets go.”
* * *
Driving through the city, my eyelids heavy, leaning against the window, I watched the way that the smoke hung low with the mist. The asphalt steamed against the night so that we were gliding against an earth too hot, boiling over from below, something ethereal beneath the surface.
Explosions ripped from streetside neighborhoods, the light casting the houses like jack o’lanterns, leering long shadows and a kind of solitude of a city going to sleep, the rain closing tight.
There was a ghostly, empty feel, driving through town back to my apartment.
Bright lights in the night seemed inappropriate, unfitting, each hand with a sparkler waving in celebration like a hole in the world.
* * *
Kyle tried to convince me to go to a hospital but I stood, holding up a steady hand, the color back in my face, only my eyes tired and my breathing coming in shallow breaths, exhausted.
“I just need sleep.”
“Then I’m staying with you. I’ll take the couch and check in on you during the night. Lightning is not something you fuck around with. You might be in shock.”
But I wasn’t cold and I felt alright. Enough to smile. Perhaps not enough to argue. I let him crash on the couch that night. I told him to keep a light on and I left my door open.
Under the covers, I played with the fabric of the sheets, running my hands flat across their surface underneath until it became too hot and I threw them away, sprawling out beneath the cool breeze through the open back window near my head.
Lay awake in bed, body shut off asleep, numb, frozen beneath, limbs still, unmoving, a force pressing down on my chest and lips brushing my ear as the voice repeats over and over, repeats,
My name,
“Katie. Katie. Katie. Katie.”
You could tap out a tune, rhythmic beat, a persistence almost a lullaby, lose consciousness to this world and into the next.
“Leave it.”
* * *
I walked to the Old Town area of the downtown, found a bar and went onto the patio, a beer at hand. I only drank half. I watched the sun sink lower in the sky, the daily ignition, the sky aflame, even if just for a moment, even on a single cloud, the bottom sparks as the sun fades, the sky blooms into a transitory celebration, a green creeps a greeting, purple throws wide arms, the clouds erupt.
Our culture has become lost in science; the earth rotates, the sun stays stationary, still there when it falls, enter a calculation, affirm the second it will peak the horizon.
But it’s our roots that underlie our belief and experiences. We generate creationist stories, tribulation, mythos for the unknown. Our children still grow up fearing the dark. We still wish upon shooting stars as a random ejection of rock hurtles to a flaming hot and beautiful destruction. There still be dragons where we haven’t reached.
The setting sun was dragged by a chariot across the sky, day in and day out, the gods presiding. It’s not so different.
When the sun falls, we cannot trust that it will return. We cannot know we will be around tomorrow to see it rise. We can destroy the world and stop hearts.
Perhaps if there were more poets, we would remember and notice that there is a celebration each time the sun drifts to the water, a white spark, sizzle. We trust what we’ve seen, that it will rise again. We trust that for someone else on another side of the world, unseen, it is shining for them.
But when one life sets, we grieve.
* * *
A man with a collared polo shirt walks over to me and offers to buy me a drink. He’s smiling and laid back and there’s something behind his eyes the way he holds my eyes.
“No, I’m fine with this one, but thank you.”
He tells me his name and I promptly forget it.
“I haven’t seen you around here, are you new to town?”
No, but I feel like it.
“I only ask because I’m here a lot – work here on the weekends actually, and I haven’t seen you.”
I just look at him. The way his mouth turns up and he keeps his arms at angles.
“I thought it looked quiet here, that I might grab a beer and get out of the house.”
“I dig that. You should get out of the house more often.” He tilts his chin up and looks down at me, as if to set up the subtext of his words, read between the lines please, a wink would be too trite.
“It is a beautiful city and time of year.”
“I know, right? It’s very fitting for you.”
I tilt my chin up and look down at him, now, a slow motion, a level gaze, and smile a little.
“You like the outdoors then? Was that a big reason in moving out here?”
I scratch my cheek, prop my head on my fist and look toward where the sun would be setting. “It’s very different than the big city.”
He nods, as if he knows exactly what I’m talking about, that he’s with me so far that he doesn’t even need ask what city I’m from. “Look, I know a place up above the reservoir that’s really a magical place to watch the sun set, and the lights come on in the city below. I wouldn’t mind showing you sometime.”
I fix him with another gaze and he swallows, but grins, a glint. “I can even get you back by bed time.”
And he’s leaning in closer, conspiratorially, sharing a secret, two friends, moving fast, the thought of sunsets and sex standing in the little air between us like his breath against my cheek. It crawls, and I’m still sitting two feet away.
Tear the world apart and leave here.
A teardrop on a cheek.
I couldn’t even remember his name.
I look at the beer on my table, half finished, glimmering in the sunlight, the foam clinging desperate to the sides of the glass.
I open my purse and pull out a five dollar bill, leave it under the glass. His eyes alight, but he doesn’t smile. He sits back, angles his head and nods slowly.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “But I’ve got someplace I need to be.”
The look on his face falls and he scrambles to his feet. “Can I get your number? I’d love to get together with you sometime you know.”
I give him a pitying look and shake my head goodbye.
* * *
A few days ago there was smoke in the air. The sunset burned with a rust color between the clouds that I’ve never seen before. I wondered if the mountains were on fire, but I never turned on the television to see what the news had to say, and the next day it was gone.
The rest of the week rolled by in a funny kind of haze, at once vividly clear, a sharpness of mind I haven’t felt in months – likely since before my parents died, and as a strange blur, images blurring with other images, thoughts and ideas that spring up shattered and changed again, as soon as you think you know something, you think that you’ve found a truth, you realize you’re wrong, stumble, pick up the pieces, walk forward again. An open mind is mandatory when exploring new realms.
I sat down at my front window, a day or two after the events on Sunday night. The window was still cracked. One piece was still missing from the top near the frame. The last few days hadn’t brought even a hint of threatening weather, but I couldn’t help but wonder what a good storm would do to the whole window. Wind blasting at it, rain lashing down. Would it stand?
I ran my fingertips over the cracks in the glass, barely detecting where the ridges had changed against the other side of the fracture. The cracks were too small to detect with just your touch. Run a finger over the glass with your eyes closed, you aren’t aware of the flaws in the surface until you run the whole way to the top, stop, sharp edge, a knick of blood, a throb.
Open your eyes, look out the window, watch two lines not add to one, a split, a difference, a funny break and a contortion, the world not adding up, a straight line veers, two and two are five.
You hit something hard enough and it will shatter and spiderweb.
Hit it again, slam at it with your wrists and your knuckles until the glass come crashing down. Maybe you’re not strong enough, maybe the window relents.
I pick at the cracks and wonder.
* * *
Wandering down the street, some hidden neighborhood, spaces that weave between two main streets, lost lots behind storefronts, homes and cars lining two sides of a narrow lane. Whole hidden sections of community only known by those who have lived within them.
Watch the world flicker, study the edges where shadows and silhouettes blend to white contrast, hot concrete lit up by the sun, the edges of clouds, round swirls and curves, a dark underbelly, where the sun angles, where the shadows start, where the dark rain sits waiting, indifferent to the light.
A thunderstorm grows, surrounds, weak, failing, but growing against the light, dark, its own beast. The white is above, unseen, lit by the sun, the back sides dark in shadow, the rest dark with a determination, defy the light, block out the sun, cast the world in a shadow not product of the sun, a gray summer rain, turn the world into a space between night and day, form a sickly colored yellow on the horizon, a unity broken, a line drawn then widened, an unnatural balance, a rivet, a median, an in-between, an interpreter gone rogue, begin creation.
I sit down on the curb and run my finger in the space where the two squares of the sidewalk try but fail to meet. Dirt and a small weed have taken asylum in the space, unseen, safe, protected on two sides. There’s safety in the cracks, go in-between, reach deep and pull apart two edges, that cigarette-singe, the world peeling.
I stare forward and try to see between the cracks, those smoldering edges, more than simply contrast to define shapes, a definition to make sense of a three-dimensional world and a two-dimensional representation, a line to make sense, to see, a distinction, a space in between two points, bring it close, blend the two. Turn off the lights, lose the separation, and tear it apart.
A man is standing across the street on the sidewalk, staring at me. He’s dressed in all black, and stands against the line separating the tree and the siding of the house. The dark seems to blend into him, the right side of the line. The left, the bright, seems to backlight him, hiding in the light, as much a part of him as the dark.
So I wave. It feels childish almost. Amusing. Good to stand up to something that otherwise frightened me.
He does not wave back. He isn’t here to interact. He is here to watch.
I run my finger through the crack in the sidewalk next to me again, feeling the concrete crumble at the touch, little beads of rock falling from the edges, settling below, hiding with the dirt.
The shadowed man twists and walks a few steps closer, seeming to shimmer, but keeping on track between my eyes and the line. For a moment he blurs and I look harder, shifted, transparent, he disappears for a second, seeming almost to slip behind the tree despite the distance between us.
I reach out my hand again, as if to wave, but instead to touch him, as if he were near.
For a moment, a burning sensation, the flame of a match run down the stick and meet your fingers, shake out the light. The room is again plunged into blackness and he appears again, in front of me now. Near enough to almost see his eyes.
And in that moment I know that if I were to see his eyes I might go blind. Blind to one world, awake to another, lost, two black sockets on a face, stumbling into walls and trees, searching for cracks and distortions, a way to escape into an abstraction.
My heart slows in my chest before accelerating, twice as fast, a mad staccato across my ribcage. My blood runs cold, adrenaline dumped, ready to react.
Breathe deep.
He cocks his head and looks at me.
I blink, close my eyes.
He sharpens when my heart races and becomes clear enough to be a man in a suit, his fingers too long, and he’s speaking to me, a voice croaks out.
“March 27, 2010. You were there. Philadelphia. Stay gone. A gravesite. 2028, for two months. A black smoke. Many deaths come September from now.” He looked around. “Valentine’s Day two-thousand and ten.”
I shiver.
His voice is a stream of dates and tidbits, numbers with little meaning. For a while he only repeats a chain of numbers book-ended with the phrase, spoken in a childlike voice “Listen up. He doesn’t smile. Seven. Two. Three. Seven. One. Three. Four. Four. Four. Seven…” And onward like this for some time.
He’s muttering like one of the homeless people you’d walk past on your way to the bookstore in downtown Philly, but with a mechanical rehearsed manner.
Rise up, see further, two ends of the tunnel and rooftops. There’s more happening on the rooftops.
“Excuse me miss,” he says. “Everything alright?”
Is he talking to me?
Then he’s gone, into the cracks, fold two smoking edges together.
“Excuse me miss,” A man’s voice from over my shoulder. “Everything alright?”
I grin wide at him, looking up. Some kindly man in a gray t-shirt and a bandana around one arm is looking at me with a concerned expression. “Of course. Quite alright.”
I offer no explanation, even as he seems to expect one, but my smile is reassuring, and he wanders back into his yard again.
After a few more moments, I finally get up to walk home before the rain comes.
“Can you prove this to me?”
“It’s a matter of seeing.”
“So show me, can you show me?”
“You’re doing it wrong.”
“I’m doing it wrong?”
“It’s not a matter of sight.”
“But it’s a matter of seeing?”
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry, Katie,” he said as we walked out of his apartment door and into the bright afternoon sunlight. The grass had started to die around the trees. The rain we had the week before had been good, but not nearly enough. I wondered if it would only get drier. “I’m just not sure I can’t wrap my head around this. It’s too… out there. This stuff doesn’t happen.”
“Not very open-minded of you.”
“You’re asking me to take a big leap.”
“Being open-minded is not a big leap.”
“It can be for some.”
“But not you.”
Kyle shrugged. “Some days I wonder.” And in an instant I knew. I imagined him waking up, hair tousled, yawning, dragging himself to the kitchen, pouring a bowl of stale cereal, turning on CNN to run in the background while he woke up and showered, collecting his school things, looking over the reading he didn’t do the evening before for class, walking to campus, sitting, walking back, later, rinse, repeat. Only in class did he think outside of the box, and even then there was a kind of desperation, visible in his test taking, a hand over his forehead, a small bead of sweat under an armpit and a steady tapping of his pencil above the essay questions.
“You know I used to be a political science major?”
I didn’t know that, but it made sense, a further clarity. A frustration with the box, a logical understanding of the world, political, earthly.
“It didn’t really work out. I hated it, so I got into philosophy.”
But he wasn’t a philosopher. He didn’t live it when he wasn’t in school. He studied hard, he thought correctly in class, but politics to philosophy is a jump, a forced widening of a mind sometimes impossible.
“So I like to think I’ve a bit of a more open mind than most.”
I nodded.
“But I just can’t help but seeing easier explanations. Why not visit a doctor and get yourself checked out? Then when you’re fine, we can make further steps. You know, eliminate the alternatives, leave the impossible.”
“Give a problem to a doctor and he’s going to look at it from every angle until he figures it out. There’s always a cause right? There’s no cause for this.”
“A checkup. You don’t have to demand god damn Gregory House.”
“Who?”
“Just – nevermind.”
“See, though,” I said, finally sitting down beneath a tree, in the shade of the branches, a touch of cool in the heat. I lost my train of thought when I ran my hand over the blades of grass at the edge of the shadow and laid my hand in the sunlight where I could almost feel the rays pressing into my skin. I shook my head. “See, that defeats your whole argument. If you do think there’s something wrong with me, why settle for a mediocre once-over? It’s a problem that will never be solved.”
He shook his head furiously, as if trying to force a thought into some kind of overbearing logic that would force me to pay attention. “If there’s something wrong with you, how could you not want it to be fixed?”
“Because there’s nothing wrong with me.”
He clenched his jaw. “It’s not easy to watch someone suffering and refusing to do anything about it.”
“I’m not suffer – “
“In denial about it then. I can’t watch this eat at you.”
I gazed at him, the sun too bright against his pale skin, an overexposure I squinted my way past. “You won’t have to.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” His look of concern deepened.
“There’s more to this. I want to explore it.”
“God, Katie, this isn’t safe, this – “
“There’s a beauty here. I want to chase it.”
“It’s a one way ticket.”
I smiled. “Maybe.”
“I can’t listen to this,” he said. “I can’t listen to this close-minded irrationality. I can’t do this.”
Turning to him, I placed a hand on his. Something deep told me it was a bad idea but I wanted to be reassuring. He looked up with a funny glimmer in his eyes and said, “Katie?”
“I’m leaving, Kyle.”
We stayed like that for a while, sometimes looking at each other, sometimes not. For a while I watched the sunlight play on the green leaves of the tree above me. There wasn’t much more to say. Both of us had made up our minds.
