empty

late at night, i am disoriented,

spatially at sea.

the music in my head is a metronome,

counting out the hours, the minutes,

the seconds thrumming by like the locusts in the trees.

the color of my walls is so neutral i forget where i am.

bedrooms blend together: the thick silence of snow in milwaukee;

the brittleness of boston, scratching outlines of october into the walls;

the weight of the air in florida, muggy with fecundity,

heavy with decay,

punctuated by honeysuckle and saltwater, drifting in from the blue-black, from the water.

sometimes, in the late night, things coagulate,

thick and brittle, heavy, punctuated with salt.

for a moment, the walls are the same,

a record of the lives almost lived, each postcard a what-if,

each drawing an alibi, to say i was here, i am here,

taping sketch after sketch into the corners,

staring at the map of the places i haven't seen.

my walls are dull beige, curtains the grey-green of the atlantic

as it licks along my skin, impatient,

waiting for me to find the right colors,

to remember where the corners are,

for the door to be a friend,

not an answer.

it's nearly dawn. for a second i freeze:

my head is filled with direction, with orientation;

the window faces east, over the bay,

soon, the sunrise will hang itself, practiced,

lurid, idly plucking the yellows from its palette,

the oranges, the reds, painting its own watercolor backdrop.

i describe things, if nothing else --

if nothing else. i search for the right words,

to talk about the sunrise, to explain my walls,

to explain the lives etched inside them.

the corners are the same, but i stare at the angles too long,

chewing on my fingernails and demanding the math,

the resolutions, the cleanliness,

geometry bustling in and clarifying the corners, naming the shapes;

trigonometry is gentler, she takes my hand,

she draws my index finger down the hypotenuse of my life,

if it were lived in right angles, sliding down the x and the y.

my walls are the same color, the same corners,

the same silence, a tick-tick-tick,

goading me to describe it, to paint color,

to draw my own hypotenuse, salt-pocked and dripping snow.

someday, maybe, i will find the color of my walls,

the color that sets the sunrise on fire, that coaxes her shadows from my elbows, from my throat,

sitting with my silence.

my life is drawn in shaky hands, colored like a bruise,

filled with corners that don't fit, light scattering in the wrong direction,

math like i missed every class. i fixate on the certainties,

the holes i tiptoe around, unsure of what is missing.

but there is softness too,

the kind that doesn't dull the sharp edges,

that doesn't turn the shrieking into silence.

there is, sometimes, a sunrise that enjoys herself,

sweeping her hands in watercolor across the sky:

we ignore each other, mostly, but she leaves me gifts,

drippings from her windows of something unearthly.

i think about pythagoras, i romanticize math,

a life lived in straight lines, in clean corners, measurable, predictable.

i think of the girl that could have occupied that outline.

i saw the sun go out. i lay on my back in the grass,

bored but happy,

children twirling their cardboard glasses.

and then the sky inverted, vivid in its absence;

briefly, abruptly, i slipped

into an emptiness without edges,

a gentleness of nothing.

i am still disoriented,

still staring at the walls,

at the bones in my wrists,

at the suggestion of dawn outside the window.

i don't have the right words and i never have the math, i never have the art,

i have not found the shape of my own silhouette,

the lives that lived inside her.

but maybe,

maybe i can sketch myself out in stasis, for a little while,

maybe i can ignore the fractals tingling in my fingertips.

i still count out the minutes, the hours,

the endless blue-black sea waiting for me,

shapeless and scattered,

searching for my music, my math,

searching for something in the colorless wall.

but sometimes i shift, i blink,

i stop for a second.

the sky is empty, neutral,

seeped in its pre-dawn hesitation,

but i don't need to describe it,

to decide on the shade between blue and grey,

to sketch out the sunrise, the way it lurks this morning,

crawling over the bay with a yawn.

sometimes the math is just holding my hand, giving me language, pointing out pathways,

sometimes briefly, i think of my life as a whole.

i will never have the right words, i will never have the math or the art.

but maybe i am not all sharp edges and shrieking and silence,

stillness without stasis.

sometimes the sky stretches out like a cat,

indifferent to the definition of her color, indifferent to the clarity of math;

even the tick-tick-ticking in my head is muted.

my walls are the color of skin, pock-marked like my scars,

but tattooed with art, with letters, with ragged postcards, a map of the world hanging over my head.

i am still disoriented; i think about the lives i might have lived,

a life fleshed out in the first person, full of adjectives and adverbs.

but my life is full of descriptors, even when i can't describe them.

i stomp verbs into the floor like a bingo card; i am replete with adjectives and adverbs,

and sometimes they are unhappy, but always they describe, they tell my story.

i live my life with minimal nouns, existing in descriptors, sometimes in verbs; i walk, and maybe i am a person.

i look around, the art on my walls and the photographs, signs of an existence, of a life worth describing.

the silence slides around my body like a blanket; occasionally, i don't need to say anything at all.