Weapons
I won’t let my husband keep a gun, so on his side of the bed, there’s a knife in the condom drawer, a baseball bat within reach of his pillow, and a hammer on the bedside table. For a while, I had thought that the hammer had been mistakenly left behind when we hung pictures, but after I put it away, it returns. Last night, we went into the city to meet people that I don’t know and didn’t like, and I drank two martinis because that’s what the woman was having, and then I fell asleep on the velvet couch, so the bouncer kicked us out (it was a fancy place) because he “can’t have people passed out in his establishment.” On the way to the subway, I think my husband said he didn’t want to be married to me, or maybe I said I didn’t want to be married to him, but by the time we got on the train, one or the other of us apologized, and he let me sleep on his shoulder on the way home. In her martini, the woman had olives, and in mine was a twist. The woman kept talking about passion; her four kids were her greatest passion, she said, but also her thriving real estate business, that was her passion, too. I wondered if I have been wrongly defining passion and maybe I muttered something about poetry before nodding off. It strikes me now how delightful it would be if the bouncer did let people pass out in his establishment. We could all drape our bodies over the beautiful couches, close our eyes, and let our breath move in and out of our mouths. Maybe I would wake up in the midst of it, take a photo with my phone; or, maybe I would just keep sleeping, watching dreams come and go, the images almost as real as the ones in this life.
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The Sentence
When I was seven, I left my library book at basketball camp. I had not been enjoying the book, nor had I been enjoying basketball camp, but it was nearly summer, and I was seven, and what else might a seven-year old do with a book they aren’t particularly enjoying at a place they don’t particularly enjoy? My stepmother was angry. I would say she was very angry, but she wasn’t very angry, she was just angry. My punishment was to write, “I will not leave my library book at basketball camp” one hundred times. I had never had “to write sentences” before. What a punishment! She may as well have made me ride a unicorn for punishment, because even as my hand cramped, I loved the magic of it. I could write these sentences all night! May I write 200? I asked. A 1000? Which, of course, made her want to beat me with a wooden spoon. Now she was very angry. But I couldn’t stop. I wrote and wrote, and though I would leave many unwanted things in many unwanted places for the remainder (or at least, so far) of my life, I would always return to the sentence. The subject, yes. I, I, I, I, I, and all of that I’s determination to be something; to will itself to not; to leave nothing; anywhere; and the wave of those final periods ……….. The declaration. The affirmative. The end.