The feel of burnished oak under fingertips

I tried to think of the last time I saw you naked, and I couldn’t. The way your jeans fell off of you at the barest provocation, your breasts that you always said were too small and engendered a sense of ungender. I thought that they were pretty okay, and that’s the best I knew how to say aloud that they were God’s own perfection, that there’s the proof against my unbelief. You never forgave me my understatement.

Did I take note of these things the last time? It seems important that I did, so let’s just say that I did. Let’s just say I looked for you and I found you, that last time, you either stepping out of a shower or in bed on a Saturday morning with the sun streaming in and interrupting the best kind of sleep. Or, if I get to choose a last time, which I think that I do, I choose that September afternoon when the power was out on account of a glancing hurricane, you sprawled all the way apart on the wine-stained carpet and laughing, because what else was there to do in the muggy open-window heat but laugh about nothing making sense when you try and tell a life like it’s a story. Which that’s always the mistake that we were making.

And now (and now) I stand there in front of him all sworn in and knock-kneed nervous reading my prepared testimony when I sputter like an airplane engine flaming out, and I stop, and I say Your Honor, I guess it’s that things like this are never really finished. And he says I know, and he thumbs through my papers, and he waits for me to be ready.
_________________________

I've decided that the time has come (and it's been coming and coming for awhile now) to stop posting weekly vignettes to this blog and start focusing on turning this book length project into a real book.  I've been doing this for over a year now, I have well over a hundred vignettes written, what started out as a way for me to fictionalize and process my life (a false autobiography, if you will, but then that's most fiction) has become something significant to me outside of the context of my personal history.  It's time to move forward.

I will be sending out some of the vignettes for individual publication in various places (and feel free to solicit them if you happen to own a literary magazine or website or something or know someone who does), and I'll be shaping them into a novel, and I will keep you posted on all of that here.  I'll also post vignettes here and there when I feel like sharing or whatever.  Your feedback, as always, is appreciated (in fact, I wish there were more of it).  To those of you who look forward to Thursdays: I'm sorry.  I'm still here, writing, doing what I love, and you'll still get to see it.  I just have to focus on making sure it's presented and presentable in the way that it should ultimately be presented, and I feel lousy that I'm holding back my favorite or best vignettes for a "real" venue, but there it is.

I hope you all continue to share this blog with people who might like it, even though updating will be more sporadic, and I hope you'll still continue to like what I do.  And... that's it, I guess.

A fugue meant both ways

She was yelling at me what have you done and I kind of stared at her dumbly with blood on my hands not knowing really what I’d done but guessing it had to do with the blood. Sometimes I would forget things. Also I have a tendency to misplace my keys, but that isn’t relevant to what was going on right then.

I was the kind of person who told his stories slant or not at all. I liked to invest things with extra meaning, changing the truth, smoothing it over, making it more resonant to the cycles of my brain. The blood, the smeary fact of it on my shirt front, and of course I would have to be wearing a white short-sleeve button down on a day like this so I looked straight out of a major motion picture, told a story I didn’t much want to tell.

I quoted a joke from a tv show we both liked and smiled. She stared at me in frank-faced horror. I said I might take a shower. She said nothing. I said nothing. Then I took a shower.

What could I say? I woke up this way in an alley not knowing what had happened? I think I should go to the police? Have you seen that movie Teen Wolf, because it’s maybe kind of like that? That I am capable of many things that I don’t ever think about, and one of those might have happened today while you were at work? Any explanation would just be more unacceptability. I was standing in pink water sluicing off my body. That word. Sluice. It’s a good one, infrequently used but worth the trouble when it is.

No vignette this week, as I'll be at AWP trying to convince people that I am actually a writing professional and trying to get George Saunders in a bear hug.

Couldn't tell you why I cried

She has the clay on the table and she is working it, using the weight of her body, her forearms probably sore and certainly firm against the work, while I watch and drink coffee and say a little thing here and there or don’t. My speaking, it’s not the kind of thing that matters.

She has mud all over her jeans, her arms, her forehead. It is good to see, how it proves the value of a thing well done, or at least done with more care for the thing than for the self. She will not go to the wheel today, where the making becomes a matter of magic and pressure, impressive and sexually charged, sure, and never quite understandable except by the hands. Today it is something simple, made at the table.

For her I am sure this is an act of remembering, each motion done so many times over so many years as to become one long experience of ceramics classes, pots found cracked from drying overnight, a man with bone dry hands making humble admissions in the way he searches her skin and finds or does not find what he is looking for while the kiln’s flame makes proof out of their intentions. And that’s a shame, maybe, because of the way that expertise becomes a kind of dishonesty, and because this moment itself is so very beautiful, how it proves that the things that we do are worthwhile in and of themselves.

Would she make the trade, the years for the chance to see it all anew? Would I? It’s a good question that will go unasked as I watch and smile privately into my cup of coffee, my simple mug that is slightly uneven if you run your finger up the inside wall. It was a gift. Many things are.