Tonight I passed a house that I thought we should live in. Not that one, but another like it. We could build one bigger, or keep it modest so that there isn’t a distant echo between us, just our soft dyad. So I’ve come to find the songs have stopped playing and the vinyl switched to off so that the welcoming crackling of a needle-waiting-to-drop is now unrelenting silence; the equivalent of leaving the light on to greet you when you’re coming home. But I walked into the darkness of an empty lighthouse.
I’ve been trying to come home for awhile, but the days morphed into one continuous and nightmarish stream where being lost felt a lot like being free, and the unreality of my situation is that I don’t believe very much could have changed in a season; but the summer passed into this cold and I’m shivering.
It was a red brick colored house, two cascading pathways to the front of the white door with two pillars on each end. Towards the middle the space widened and a protruding balcony hovered deferentially above it. Though my thoughts then were chaste, my favorite conquering moments came when I pushed the balcony doors open to a warm summer New York breeze engulfing us in the sandy and oceanic perfume of the beach sprayed on our skin from Coney Island as you lie asleep and I light a cigarette.
Soon, with a little more wrinkles around my eyes and thinner hair, I close my eyes and hear our names from little voices that sound like ours—the sound of an empire.
This is America. Some fraction of it. We’ve all gone to look for it; but then I found you, and just like that you were gone too.
"Let us be lovers, we'll marry our fortunes together"
"I've got some real estate here in my bag"…
"Kathy, I'm lost," I said, though I knew she was sleeping
I'm empty and aching and I don't know why