december (ONE through SIX)

do you anticipate sentiment and poetry and reverie?

do you expect passion and stimulus and melodrama?

-charlotte brontë

ONE: home. west coast.

he leaves for the airport early in the morning.

before we fall asleep he says, 'do you believe in ghosts?'

i hear a clang on our fire escape that i know are the little metal hands of a ghost.
i think of the little boy who lived inside the electricity of my previous home.
i think of the devil i saw in the barn on the hill as a child.
i think of the expensive house on the cliff-edge with the ominous corners. we heard the ocean all night long.

these are some of the important haunted stories of my life. yet in many ways i've never had to question anything.

'yes,' i say, 'i think so.'

but when i think of the people i know who have died they are, in fact, very far away. back when i practiced being a smoker for a week in my early twenties, j. shared his cigarettes with me. we sat close in the cab and on the stairs of the subway. he helped me with my jacket like men do in the movies. when he died he was far older than me and now he is far younger. he said he'd kiss me when he knew me better, but we never knew each other better.

i don't mean him when i think of ghosts. though maybe on the night in the country when i was sewing a hot pink button back onto a hot pink coat and we talked about him in the few weeks closest to his death. when i think of him it is dark blue. it is that night walking. it is his dark hair.

i don't mean a., who i can only picture petulant, hand on hip, beautiful, teaching me dance moves. teaching me self-defense.

i don't mean anyone i've known who was alive once.

'who do you mean then?' he asks.

i think of the 1800s and murder. i don't know who i mean. like so many things, these stories are for the living people.

on the airplane when they bring the oxygen tank for her, i start to cry. her fear bothers me more than my own. i watch the kardashians. and that's weird too. her child sits wide-eyed between his parents. later, he has fallen asleep. i wonder if he will remember this when he is an adult.

at what age is the first time you question heaven. i forget.

the only quality of time is actually timelessness. the slow turn of the ceiling fans in the sun-warmed wooden ceiling. the december corner of mission and 20th that is so beautiful i just have to take a picture of the sky even though i know it won't translate. the plywood painted gunmetal. i need to think that it is beautiful enough to keep. and try.

or his road trips with girls on highways i've not traveled. i can conjure the palettes of them. pure blues blasted with sun. the right details for the time. the muted hues. the confusing life of a spy.

or the photos of my father when he was 16 that i've never seen before. the photos of me i've never seen before. maybe eight years old. hula-hooping on the brick patio in bare feet. that's the thing i was trying to describe all this time. what that felt like. literally bare feet on brick. i guess i wasn't wondering about what happened after we die.

in order to fall asleep i must press my feet between his ankles. this is a habit from before we lived in separate cities for a time. i wrote him a letter on wrapping paper and folded it into his pocket. his wedding ring came in the mail today, on the last day of the year with its burnished silver and secret diamonds. i found that letter recently and it said, the brightest routes.

in order to fall asleep i must turn to my back and put one hand on my heart and the other on my stomach and contemplate...i don't know, everything, i guess. that first slow spark of sleep. my dreams are layers and layers and layers.

the smashed screen of an iPhone. him, a lot. wandering the most incredible architecture, both of buildings and of water. being in the future. episodic things that make perfect and complicated sense.

eight vignettes of a marriage. biting. risotto. sake. the bookstore. tequila bar. the dress that won't let us get out the door. parties on roofs and stairwells that are cement like college and strung with lights like college too and lingered at too late.

TWO: home. east coast.

immediately i don't want to wear my own clothes. i want to wear the soft gray t-shirts i find in my mom's closet, my grandmother's burgundy socks. i want to wear black dresses i find hanging in the shed at the dump, i want to wear izod sweaters a shade of green i would never choose, and 1970's leather over mini-dress nightgowns. i want costume jewelry to laden fingers and wrists and neck. i want to buy new underwear, red lace and black shimmer. i want to not wash my hair and wear red lipstick and listen to haunting music on repeat and photograph myself in fuchsia on tree stumps and in yellow party dresses in the dried grass by the empty wintertime pool. i want to search bookshelves for what i wrote when i was seventeen. sift through antique necklaces. tables piled with mink and lamps and nathanial hawthorne and lace and boxes of nails and juice glasses with the pale red outlines of vintage cartoon characters. i guess i want to find things. but also something else.

to be antique something must be 100 years old.

you can hear the other worlds best at 3am. the ones you hope are there. the ones that must be.

you can seek and leave some of the mystery.

if you are awakened every morning at 4am you have missed it by an hour. but still the fog outside the window might be this odd sort of red, and you might take a moment to hear the echoes of sleep falling away, the dreams lingering to see if you will be returning to them.

i think about:

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(i can't say).

the fire fills up the cabin with heat.

one thing i wrote when i was seventeen: he is thunder. i am lightning. i count the seconds in between.

then the global warming warmed up magic hour fills dusk with this perfect light and air.

i fling my feet out from the blankets.

i open the windows.

catherine and heathcliff are wandering the moors. it's getting so good and juicy.

they are promising to haunt each other. promising to fling themselves on the grave of the other.

also, the boys of the wire are getting sneaky.

it rains.

THREE: the city.

i miss having a roof. i have gotten good at this cinematic thing i can do. this secret heart and secret cinema. in the moments where reality leaves off, i can see moments (hours) beyond.

it is how things feel, for one. but also how they look. and how i imagine them. often the world is impossibly beautiful, thick with colors, with things happening.

lush. tilting toward intimacy. shoes taken off.

a little less afraid. but it's hard to say if more or less is at stake.

it is easy to forget ourselves when there is so much to be.

cul-de-sac.

it's 2am and i'm...

FOUR: the country.

so, say i get the dress that someone left hanging there. it has a low-cut back in a v-shape, and small black cloth covered buttons that trail up it. it has a long slit up the thigh and a silk sash around the waist.

i am going to wear this. i wore it on the last night of last year. and i will wear it on some nights in this year when i will be 33 years old. i wore it on the roof and looked out and no one else was there.

i dream i have 1,000 dresses. you can see me in them, right? it is why i am taking the time to describe the best one. this is important.

FIVE: the suburbs.

i am diesel trucks and beaded pearled vintage capes and mantras and 4pm wine and fireplaces and the wind outside.

our private lives. the day-to-day. the up-close. who knows? we all might punch each other in the side of the head. tell love stories. admissions (make them). bite each other's fingers. knock things out of our hands to kiss better in our kitchens. buy the latest translations with blue lace across the cover. but then you can zoom out too and wonder wonder wonder.

wonder at childhood and 30 year marriages and adultery and happiness and the sense of smell or sound. wonder at time and ghosts and landscapes. i joke, but i'm serious too. i'm serious, but i'm joking. the temperature and the fetish. how something might shatter. how you might walk the u-shapes to the spy bridge in the dark, to where the diamonds were left, the secrets sold. there is no way to predict. you can only do your best. have your reasons.

what is essential. what is excess. what is too much to ask. i consider how my diary will be misinterpreted in later centuries. the footnotes no one will flip to. the language that will be outdated. the initials that no one will be able to place.

SIX: new year's resolutions.

now might be the time to talk about resolutions, a thing i like to do (both the making and the talking of them). i think the ritual is important, even for those unkept ones. maybe especially for them.

my grandmother said to travel a lot and take many lovers.

driving 211 often at sunset. you never get any older except in relation to other people, other times of your life. houses that inch closer and closer to the river. each year older i feel differently about getting older. this year i feel that so much is constantly in states of beginning, that so much is exactly as i'd always hoped it would be.

at the restaurant where it was too early for anyone else to be there i imagined i was a victorian woman running away, when it was hard for women to do those sorts of things, when they had to tear through the orchard at night in the rain and catch a cold that killed them and that sort of thing. the male waiters hovered and flitted about and called me, 'ma'm...' and i tipped them a lot and went off back into the night.

imagine piling your kids in the car and taking off. imagine the future as it prepares itself for you, and you predicting it, unwitting, impossible.

for now it is sunset, this hot pink splatter everywhere. it is his hands, his beautiful eyes, the two of us.

two days in, resolve is natural and easy.

no one really knows anything.

i dream i meet his family.

then, that we have a baby.

that i know how to hold her and care for her and that this makes him love me.

we are also trying to escape.

someone jumps from an impossible height.

we are on a ship.

we are in a hospital.

where was i last night?

it is the future again, everything metallic and foreboding.

it means what you want it to mean. fantasy and compensation.

OK, but back to resolutions:

here is what i promise.

what will be more. less.

the attention i will pay. the care i will take. the work i will do.

there are these towns with quiet roads.

there are all these different cities.

there are stretches of suburb with ordinances for beige.

there are rivers with names. hazel. rush.

there is a map that tells us how many thousands of feet we might plummet.

but again it turns out we don't.

there is analogue and sex and neural pathways.

i want him to be happy, but i also to think of me, which is something different from a happiness, though not its opposite. that's not a resolution exactly. looking at less screens. spending more time with my heart over my head. no facebook in the morning while my brain is its softest and most creative, that sort of thing.

i think i might be an urbanite forever. i unpack, piling all my clothes on the floor. thrift store dresses with hot pink flowers or gray stripes. we meet for brunch. we laugh so hard my hands go numb. we stand outside in the half-rain saying goodbye for a long time, making plans, talking about our days. we are glad to be together again. later we will text about our week, what parts of it are free. we will get dressed up and go out. we will stay in.

these days are our life. and the end of our year.