Reading aloud

I am trying to remember when I first learned that love looks differently.

I fell in love with the place like paint peeling off an old doorframe. Slowly, in small strips, until I realized I’d been stripped bare. Cracked and incomplete, I wondered what I was without those layers I felt had come to define me. This was of course, my own confusion; central tenants of my being, those I’d held to before my arrival, still remained. But it was as if I had found what filled me, experienced entirely new emotions, linkages, and connections.

Reading certain passages aloud felt like pouring my soul into the waiting chest of another individual.

My roommates were piled on my fluffy white bed, limbs entangled in the mannerism of lovers. He leans his head back to laugh, and his hair singes in the candle on my windowsill. We only even realized when we noticed the smell of burning hair. There are six of us sprawled across my comforter, and they cease their giggling to hear me softly recite Yrsa Daley-Ward, her images and emotions spilling across my bedspread in a quiet hush and a dark stain.

In a tent on a rooftop terrace in Manhattan, she listens as I feed her Didion’s Blue Nights:

“because at the time I began it I found my mind turning increasingly to illness, to the end of promise, the dwindling of the days, the inevitability of the fading, the dying of the brightness. Blue nights are the opposite of the dying of the brightness, but they are also its warning.”

We lie on two twin mattresses squashed side by side: the mattresses swell at the tent edges like sausage casings. The air outside is warm and still and the rope lights strung across the tent’s edge form an arch over our feet.

Now I sit on a partially shaded porch in Newton; on the table next to me sits a copy of Annie Dillard’s Abandon and a glass of ice water sweating slowly in the sun. It leaves a ring on the brown wicker table top, imprinting its own absence.

I’d read the lines “It had been like dying, that sliding down the mountain pass. It had been like the death of someone, irrational, that sliding down the mountain pass and into the region of dread. It was like slipping into fever, or falling into that hole in sleep from which you wake yourself whimpering” and had yearned for someone to read them aloud to.

I did not know the place would change me: wrap me up under the cloak of its warmth and pluck at the feathers I didn’t know I was shedding.

I did not know that poetry can be instilled with meaning by sharing it with other people.

Today the laughter fades in differently. In random bursts, crackling through my cell phone. Sometimes, I’m on the train, and the call drops unexpectedly.

Tell me you want to hear poetry over the phone. There won’t be candlelight, a tent, or intertwined limbs, but maybe it will still feel the same.