I notice I’m cold, then I notice I miss you. Facts come in pairs, stumble on the heels of one another. Like we lean on each other like cats as it rains. I sit in a window in what little sun comes for me. After I’ve finished washing the dishes, I run my hands under the hot water a few extra moments. Your smile, low light, white face, what people mean by apple cheeks. You’re knitting your dreamy transcription of the book I am reading to you and the stitches get confused. You call me in the morning, during your early evening walk. When I hear your voice through the phone as I’m half-asleep, I rise up, I turn transparent, I feel like I might be inside one of the trees you’re walking through.
Above all it would be warm
But we would keep our heads all
Clear as Winter, storms would be
A sight to make us shiver
But without the chill
I remember the book I wanted to write when I was 14. It would have a girl, a little younger than me, who wore pajamas, drank chocolate milk, and read poetry. It would have a tall sickly young uncle who looked a little like my older brother or what I imagined Seymour Glass might look like. He had dark hair and was dying. And he would give the girl the poems. He owned a bookshop. There were very few details to the story, only shadowy corners and flashes of sunlight, but I felt somehow confident that the entire book was already there in my brain, I just had to excavate it. I wrote letters from the uncle in my English notebook. I remember thinking at the time that when I was 4 I had been taken in my stroller through Las Vegas, which was a town full of golden statues of cherubs. But then I realized nothing like that ever happened, because that’s not what Las Vegas looks like. I knew that already, but somehow the two facts had never met before. I remember wishing I’d come up with “for the angels have slipped through our landslide and filled up our garden with snow.” I heard beautiful songs for the first time and strained for the words like they were pieces of something transparent and fragile dropping one by one into darkness, chips of ice into muffled velvet. I went to bed ecstatic all the way down to my feet, my eyes wide open, a shine curving over them. In a near-lightless room I can imagine I am in that bed now. If there is no difficulty, if I imagine it gently. If I let not just my eyes but my entire body unfocus. I can transform this darkness into any darkness I used to inhabit. I feel my arm could span the familiar distance to a light switch. But I keep it beside me.