August 21, 2012

• ghosts on distant trains

  We spent those summer evenings in outer space, in the field down the street, in our minds on a sloop tied to a dock where we were forced to sit and stare. We just sat in the sloop and we never went anywhere.

  In the field your arms were shaped like a lozenge behind your head as the crunchy yellow grass cracked beneath our backs. I laid there not asking a lot of questions.

  The stars shined like the deep solemnity of monks that we could never live up to.  Like visitors staying in our homes that never said a word, that we would never question for fear that they would leave.

  “We are cursed with an infinite capacity,” she said softly.

  She was sadder than I was.

  “I feel either naive or brilliant around you.”

  “It’s sad when two people get together,” she said with a slight touching noise between her lips. “Then you think, Oh there was that much more to that person. That much more that I couldn’t see of them.”

  I was always far behind her moments.

  “Someday people will live in a world with no pain.” I said this with my eyes narrowed, trying to see it, like I could if I squinted.

  Her eyes widened with dismany and distance. “Pain is who we are. If you take pain away, you do not even have a human. That feeling, that deep agony, is what we are.”

  “Some people feel nothing.”

  “Despair is to forget.”

  I wanted to follow her around to see if she was infinite, to see if she ever was used up, but I knew that only death would end the experiment. Maybe that thought was why I knew she was wrong.

  “So many new people,” I said finally. “I feel like people eventually have this voice, like they’ve talked to a lot of people, and you’re just one of them.”

  “I’ll never be as important as my friends.”

  I knew everything I needed to know, I knew the height of the sky above my broken body, the distant memory I was to most people, the fact she was still here, and I wondered, I wondered as she might have wondered, is it enough?

  “Why didn’t we work out?” I breathed weakly.

  Some things you cannot say, just as she said nothing then. And yet she did say it, for the very fact that we could not communicate in silences was the reason.

  Her hands were folded on her stomach, her thumbs touching just above them. I remembered everything from the parking lot that night before she left for college. As I listened to her deep silence the pain wrapped itself quietly up into everything.

  It is sad to know about an infinite place that you can’t be let into.

  But she was there on the sloop with me. There are things in our silences we can’t give to other people, but we can at least sit with them. I always imagined there not being a sloop at all; but then there wouldn’t have been a place to sit.  And in that thought I realize maybe I’m none of the people I imagine I am.

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