Little Weirds(20)
Later, while my friend and I sat upstairs in the house we were staying in, her sweetheart and the dark-haired man went outside in the Arctic midnight sun and went skinny-dipping in the ocean. I watched him go in. “That’s his butt,” I said to my friend. “Yes,” she said seriously, “that’s his butt.” Then the next day I had to go home because that had been the plan. I said goodbye to all of them and I felt very odd. Something had happened but nothing had happened, really. Nobody touched me but it felt like I had been touched.
On the way home to the United States, a man on the plane spilled his coffee on his seat. He got up and showed it to the flight attendant, and he pointed at the spill with a smile that was shy but also had a little light in it like he was thinking of a funny memory but knew it would make no sense to anyone else if he were to laugh into the air of the plane. She wasn’t mad at him and understood that he didn’t want to sit in the coffee puddle, and they figured out how to deal with it.
Across from me, a girl with a silver sparkly scrunchie was looking at pictures, and even though I was far away and I couldn’t make out the face in the pictures, I could tell that it was her in the pictures because the person in the pictures also had a silver scrunchie. I really liked her for looking at her pictures of herself.
I cried a lot on the airplane home, come to think of it. My life was not in place. Many things had jabbed at me during my trip. I was affected by seeing how other people lived and what they thought was normal. In my own life, a lot actually seemed off. I wanted things to be as easy as when I saw the lady buy the hot dog. I wanted things to be as satisfying as the baby with the big bag of chips and the sips of a drink that made it say “Ahhhh.”
I thought about how I could not bring my eyes to meet the man who painted the blue flower.
I looked into my heart for the first time in a long time and I saw a door to something. I thought my heart had been close but it had been farther than I thought, like when we went to the island and it was not as near as it seemed. But we got there. I thought about how I was wanting to get to my heart and wondering what shells it had all over it, what things lay ready for discovery for me and someone else. Or would I just be a nubby lighthouse saying “Don’t crash!” to other people who were only passing by? I thought about it on the plane, and about how I’d had my eyes cast down on the trip but I’d still seen a butt, and then I was on the plane and I was crying too hard on the plane.
I tried to write down how I felt. I recently found the note I wrote to myself, and all it said was “I’m too overwhelmed to say any more and I’m too scared to say any more and I feel too foolish, but I must not forget this, so I’m writing this down and this is the best that I can do.”
Hillside
My house was built in 1912, which is so very long ago that I imagine the house was born as a tree and then grew wider and higher and breathed in so much air that it made pockets in the wood, pockets like caves that then made themselves into rooms with hard corners and floors.
The house was born as a tree because that’s just the fact. The fact is that my house was born as many trees, and the trees lived for so long and had roots in deep dark brown earth. They had their own barks all over themselves. Animals climbed all over them too.
They were part of a forest, an ecosystem that is perfect because of its wide variety of species, dominant because nothing is not allowed to be there. In the forest, everything that is inclined to thrive really does, and has a job, and some jobs are to grow things up and some jobs are to take things apart and everything is accepted because there is no notion—among bacteria and moss and busy mice—there is no notion of who deserves to do something or be in a place. There are only lives to be lived, and they are everywhere.
That’s where my house was born. It was born as a million billion small medium and large live things, and then someone came and got some of those many live things and made them into pieces of an anticipated whole and then that all became my house. And for over a hundred years, people lived in the house. I don’t know who died here, or how many people might have been here at once, sleeping in the rooms. I don’t know what soups might have been made in the kitchen, or if there were ever robbers or maybe a surprise party, or where the sex happened, or if there were things like a bird in a birdcage or a piano in the living room.
The house is on a steep hill, but I don’t have a view that looks out and down, like most people want to have. The road that I live on is a notch in the hill, like a part in a hairstyle. It is just a ridge in a slope. I have a front porch and for over a hundred years it has been looking across at the rest of the hill, and the hill rises right up in front of your eyes. It is covered in wild vines and bushes and cactuses and bougainvillea. There is a bedroom on the second floor of the house, right above the porch. It has very large and of course very old windows. If you stand in the hall and look through the room and right out the window, all you see is different greens, the wild ropes of leaves and the bends of willowy plant life, everything bowing, braiding, climbing on each other. You stand in my house and see a green overgrowth of ivy and saplings and flowers and eucalyptuses that, when they are wet or moved, sigh out with a minty blue fragrance.
I bought this house for myself and my small old dog. I bought it during the one trillionth time that I’ve had my heart broken. I saw that someone had carved initials in the basement floor in 1969. I had heard that an old man had shown up here, walked into the kitchen, pointed to the refrigerator, and said, “Why is that not the stairs?” He told the real estate agent that this had been his grandparents’ house. What were all these people doing here?