∞

It’s August and it’s time for you to go but the light is all wrong for leaving. 

The school year starts in August pretty much everywhere now.  Back when you were in elementary school, it started on the Wednesday after Labor Day.  You remember now how it magically seemed to turn cooler that day or at least by week’s end, even if it had been blistering hot or Indian summer just the week before.  If you try you can remember the wet comb plastering your hair to your head and ducking away from your mother’s thumb, wet with the saliva that could tame cowlicks and erase a milk mustache. It’s just as easy to recall that nervous anticipation, that excitement, to start a new year with a clean slate and unknown opportunities.  Who knew what kind of honors might be won or what winning runs might be scored?  Who knew where you might find yourself when your singular distinguishing moment arrived?  It could be in the classroom or on the playground or in the echoing alley between the school and the rectory.  And what form would it take?  It could be the correctly spelled word, the stolen kiss, the ounce of energy you didn’t know you had.  It’s been years since you were young and now school starts too early.

August is still summer and still hot and while the other teachers complain in faculty meetings about how wild the kids are when they come back and how they have no attention span and damn the Internet and video games and satellite television, you’ve never bothered to voice your opinion that the light is just wrong and it’s too soon.  You’re sure that a few pairs of eyes[1] would roll at any suggestion from the moony English teacher and you’ve sworn to yourself that if Masters gives you that look one more time, you might just say or do something that makes everyone uncomfortable, not just you.  Still, it seems pretty obvious that school simply starts too soon, cutting summer too short.  Students return distracted by unfinished games and by swimming pools still full of warm water, sporting suntans and bruises and other signs of hard play that can’t be hidden with short sleeves and open collars.  The light coming into the classroom windows is all wrong for grammar and writing and short stories and sonnets and you think if any of them just thought about it for one minute they would see that. 

You remember her face in your hands after that first bold kiss in her classroom.  You remember bits of her chalk notes on complementary angles superimposed on her sweater after you’d pressed her back to the board.  You remember thinking that it had been so long coming, that kiss, that you’d circled each other in a holding pattern forever, so awkward for grown-ups.  The kiss held too much of your pent-up passion and it embarrassed you when both pairs of horn rimmed glasses went askew but she laughed, her whole body shaking, and in answer to your ‘what?’ she told you a joke.  She asked you how two porcupines make love and was laughing so hard she could barely respond to your ‘I don’t know, how?’ with ‘very carefully!’  She said the two of you were like nerdy porcupines and you kissed her again, more carefully, thinking that you’d finally found the secret door and it was open. 

For all your love of words, they stayed stuck in your mouth no matter how badly you wanted to spit them out and share them with her.  Over that first Christmas break in the no man’s land between Christmas and New Year, in lieu of declarations you worked on pressing your lips to every square inch of her body.  It seemed to stretch afternoons into whole years, lying with her and kissing her and talking silliness but when your thoughts turned serious and you desperately wanted to say something meaningful, you came up dumb.  All of these thoughts and emotions she’d given you for the first time in your whole stupid life and all your love of words and you couldn’t string even a few together to tell her about gratefulness and reverence.   And so she liberated you with a small tissue-wrapped leather bound journal next to your coffee cup one morning, a sticky note attached that said:

Jim,

We make such a good couplet, but a math teacher needs proof.  Give me a sine!

Write to me,

Sarah       

So in between physical consecrations and devotions, you poured out sonnets – your own and ones you loved[2] - and you wrote brief thoughts and observations on her eyes and skin and hair and you made plans in that journal that you passed back and forth.  You scolded her for using it to say mundane things like ‘We’re almost out of dog food!’  and she responded with a poorly drawn Labrador retriever with mouth open, tongue hanging out, saying I LOVE YOU JIM SARAH SAYS IF YOU LOVE ME YOU’LL BUY ME FOOD THX JEEVES

And but so now it’s late which you can tell by the light and you’re surrounded by boxes of books in your haunted living room.  Everything else has been packed and loaded and moved.  This is the last of it.  You wanted to load the books yourself.  You can’t resist it, this scab-picking, this wound-opening.  You can’t just tape them up and cart them to the car, shuttle them off to their new home and their new place in new bookcases.  You have to reach your hand in and take out the last journal to read the last entry (yours)  to twist the knife to keep it fresh to remind you to forget the new life you want or you think you want because here is your life, your grief, your soul’s companion.

Sarah –

Let’s go to the lake tomorrow if it doesn’t rain.  I’ll pack sandwiches and wine and books and it’ll be just like it was in the beginning.  Me reading you my favorite poems and you telling me how wrong I am about everything.  I’ll kiss you a million times and that still won’t be enough.

Until tomorrow, here’s your beloved Neruda.  He can speak for me. 

Forever yours,

J

Sonnet XLV

Don't go far off, not even for a day, because-
because-I don't know how to say it: a day is long
and I will be waiting for you, as in an empty station
when the trains are parked off somewhere else, asleep.

Don't leave me, even for an hour, because
then the little drops of anguish will all run together,
the smoke that roams looking for a home will drift
into me, choking my lost heart.

Oh, may your silhouette never dissolve on the beach;
may your eyelids never flutter into the empty distance.
Don't leave me for a second, my dearest,

because in that moment you'll have gone so far
I'll wander mazily over all the earth, asking,
Will you come back? Will you leave me here, dying?

All the other pages are blank, mocking echoes.  You stare out the window at the waning August sun and you know this light is all wrong.  It’s August light and it’s still summer and it’s too soon to go, even though you had stayed on another year, clinging to mind-whispers and nothing.  You stayed for a year having fallen in love with your heartbreak.  You stayed, irrationally rooted to where she could find you if she came back looking.  Some part of you, of course, knew she wasn’t coming back but what if, what if, even if it were just in dreams, she would look here and find you, soul dead and paralyzed.

It’s not that you didn’t know how to live.  You knew how to live, what to eat, what to say, how to know when something’s funny or sad, what clothes to wear, when to close your eyes and sleep, how to start a day with an alarm clock and coffee and shuffle through each step like you’re under water or under glass. So it’s not that you didn’t know how, it’s that you didn’t want to know.  At the end of each day, you made a desperate turn for the house, not thinking to stop for food or clean shirts at the laundry, just rushing back after holding your breath for the entire day. 

Here in the house you could stand in her closet and bury your face in her dresses and sweaters.  You didn’t have to pretend that you weren’t dead yourself and you could miss her and long for her as much as you almost couldn’t stand and not be ashamed when grief bowed your back.  You could touch pieces of jewelry like worry beads and spray her perfume onto her pillow so you could lay your own head there and sleep. You could loosen a strand of hair from her hairbrush and wind it around your finger until it cut off the circulation.  And but for as much as you withdrew and became silent and exerted only the most minimal energy to live – to your utter disgust and despair – you simply went on living.  You’d managed to go on living and you lived long enough to stop wishing that you just wouldn’t. 

So, now it’s August again and even though the light is all wrong for it, you will open your books and start teaching grammar and writing and short stories and sonnets at a new school in a new town. The other teachers won’t regard you until you do your time and learn how things are done at St. Mark’s and the students will be wary until they have the book on you, Mr. Halpert, the new English teacher.  They won’t know anything about you and they won’t know anything about the math teacher you were engaged to, such a shame, that pretty teacher named Sarah.

The living room is sifted soft and dark.  Last box, last light out.  Door closed, key in the mailbox for Mrs. Thompson.  Five counted stairs to the walk, to the car.  You start the engine, cursing your irrational fear and your magical thinking.  You lingered too long and now your drive will be in darkness. 

[1] Mr. Pollard, the industrial arts (when did that stop being ‘shop’?) teacher who you secretly call Popeye because of his disproportionately large forearms, Mr. Fitzgerald, the gargantuan Social Studies teacher who literally has to crouch to enter his classroom and who enjoys intimidating students and teachers with his freakish size and booming voice just a little too much, and Tom Masters, the quintessential gum-chewing, whistle-toting, spandex short-wearing in January PE instructor slash coach who always manages to look at you with a shake of his head and a silent benediction you interpret as ‘you poor dickless bastard.' 

[2] She had favorites but she was open to listening to or reading just about anything.  You loved her for that and you loved that she hated Wordsworth and Tennyson and merely tolerated Keats and Yeats.  Neruda, on the other hand, made her swoon.