Takeout and the Red Door

[Poems / Personal Essays][2021]

01.
Takeout and the Red Door

Was there a movie or a book where two lovers move into a house together and there’s no furniture yet, so they’re sitting on the floor with candles and those little Chinese takeout boxes? And they’re sitting there- so deeply in love- on their first night in their new idea of forever?

This scene plays in my head when I think of real love. That takeout on the floor moment- where there’s nothing but excitement and the idea that this is where the story begins. And it truly doesn’t matter that there’s nowhere to sit or that the lights don’t work yet. It’s a perfect thing. It’s a hardwood floor.

A psychic once told me that my life would begin after I walked through a red door with gold numbers on it. I still haven’t seen this door. Did she know what she was doing to me then, setting me up like this, coloring so much time wasted?

Or maybe I missed it and I’ve been living this whole time.

I wonder if the takeout moment is the moment behind the red door with the gold numbers on it.

I’ve lived with a few people in a few new places. It’s never like this.

I wonder if it’s a premonition. I wonder if I shouldn’t stop falling in love and moving in with people until it happens. I can even picture the exact room. The crown molding. A crimson red wall. Ancient wiring strung across the tall ceiling, forgotten and out of reach.

Or perhaps the incinerator which cremates me will have bright red handles, like the ones that lock on an airplane's emergency exit and displayed in gold will be the temperature rising on a digital screen.

Then I’ll be the thing that gets delivered in a box.

02.
Capital G

Miss D wore thick stacks of silver rings across her fingers. “I feel naked if I leave the house without them on.”, she would say.

She taught us how to write cursive letters in white chalk.

It was all so picturesque, I remember thinking even then; like I was already an old woman on a porch looking back at myself, at this seven year old girl sitting at a wooden desk in an inner-city Catholic school with broken windows and crumbling brick walls. The Catholic school with a church at the center of the building, with upholstered chairs that made your legs itch, where rows of children sat tidily fashioned in mass produced assembly lines of plaid that echoed God’s Salvation, and the unmarried, middle-aged seventh grade Language Arts teacher who lived across the street in a one bedroom apartment with his friend, Juan.

Oh, how this mighty, religious, broken indoctrination would invite home in me such a narrative, I thought to myself, even then, as Miss D marked the passing of time by looping the top-left corner of a capital ‘G’. I loved to watch her shackled fingers dance like this.

A’s lips were dark. They weren’t like mine. And I liked that. I invited her over to play so I could spend hours studying her in our play scenarios. How does A move her perfect hands? Let me find out. Let’s paint! How does A play house? Let me find out. Let’s pretend we live outside under this tree and will forever!

On Monday I was terrified. I thought everyone could see how I knew exactly what A smelled like and how I knew the exact shape of her eyes and how I knew that I wanted to kiss the lips that didn’t look like mine. I suddenly felt the terror that if anything embarrassing should happen to me, this would now be infinitely worse, because she might see and then my chances of ever kissing her would be forever ruined. I must be careful. I must be perfect. I have so much to overcome, I thought, as I looked out at the boys seated in the rows in front of me.

The plaid kilts reminded me that I should never tell anyone about my careful and perfect plan for Her.

If I begin to love who I truly want to love, then I can be hurt. And so maybe God was protecting me, I wondered. Even though I’d stopped believing in Him right around the time Miss D finished her long series of cursive ‘G’s.

Plaid veins run through me in an orderly web that enjoys very much to remind me of my mother’s religion and how badly I’d like for her to tell me she’s proud.

The plaid intersects upon itself, creating order in a grid- a noble plan. The lines foreshadow their own parallels and provide another option every few inches in the form of 90 degree angles. “You can be redeemed” the crossing line whispers in intervals to the one I am running on. I trace the lines with my fingers. The faster I run, the more often I hear it.

I think about using holy water as lube. Isn’t this body holy? I begin to distrust my mind. I begin to fear my pleasure. I begin to fear the things I feel. I begin training myself to like boys. I put a lot of effort into this. I get very good at it. They call me boy crazy and I am relieved.

And when I was 12 and did kiss a pair of lips that I truly wanted to kiss, for me only, the plaid reminded me not to tell anyone. And when I was 15 and tasted a girl for the first time, at her parent’s beach house, after drinking Wild Turkey, I told everyone at school that she was gay and I stopped answering her messages. And when I was 16 and fucked a girl in my best friend’s basement, I went to school and stole her boyfriend because she didn’t cum. And when I dated women, I made sure they never knew me. I made sure they never touched me. And one day, I hunted for myself, a man. A man who liked a quiet version of me. And when I was 30 I almost married him so I could be exactly that.

Yet A rises in me. Like a melody from some distant chamber orchestra composed of ghosts who float in tidy lines, and take marching orders from the anarchists who burn churches. And as they intersect like plaid, they pass through each other showing me it’s possible to become.

As their chamber songs swell to the surface of a carefully curated life, they cry out for me to claim what is mine. They cry out for me to be redeemed in a divine sense of self. They tell me the pain I cause others is a fractal of the pain I cause myself and therefore I can never claim martyrdom after knowing what I know now.

I tell them I’ve never known anything more true than this.

03.
Dog with a Bone

Sitting in the yard
a dog with a bone.

She has drained
all of the marrow-
from its calcium plates.

Yet she still narrows
her eyes, lowering
herself over the past,
guarding it with
a feverish growl.

As if the promise of
more of what was
were a truth.

04.
Slow Molting

When you have a big dream, the floors are never dusty in the room where the dream lives.

Dust is composed almost entirely of dead skin. Who carries their cumbersome bodies into the edges of their dreams? (Lovers.)

When you watch me sweep the floors, does the dream end or does it begin?

Or will we finally say something true like, “I am so happy to be with you in this shapeshifted body.”?

Or that these floorboards remind us of the constant flux, the endless churning. Our slow molting- where we become new as we writhe, or sit and sip coffee and talk about your Dad.

Or that these floorboards do not know who is who as one particle settles next to another, as those little flecks of us swirl down the drain of a four p.m. sunbeam. How we become one in a discard pile. How I gently gather fragments of who we were yesterday from the corners of this dream. How we all do this. How we assemble them into tiny mountains and ladle them into soft vessels. How we then usher those irreverent urns towards a cement slab where they await some larger, carbon union via Le Canyon Artifice.

How all of our neighbors do this on the same day, parading from their doorways in intervals under the guise of the mundane. Giving themselves away.

05.
Gaze

Muse existing is the object
(she)

Object in space is form
(soul and senses via the body)

Form contains function
(feeling and doing / speaking and listening)

Function is a catalyst
(in having the ability to)

Catalyst is a change
(to cause an effect)

Change proves time
(once this, now this, so there)

Time lives in observation
(look, a thing in motion)
(look at)

Observation becoming sacred
(oh, that thing is holy)

Sacred is the Gaze
(see, a holy thing in motion)
(see)

Gaze cast upon a Muse
(seeing as in uncovering)

Muse becomes aware
(I am being seen)

Awareness finds The Gazer
(I see you too)

The Gazer becomes the object
(soul and senses via the body)

Object is the Muse existing
(she)

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