Lines, Part II
I’ve lived in these cities long enough now that I can see all the lines without even looking for them.
Little beads of time that crash into each other almost expectantly. The cars and cabs and pedestrians and dogs, all walking their own paths and somehow (most usually always) managing to navigate around each other in lines that are neither far for straight, nor anywhere near simple.
Loving him and him and him and them and her — it was all an uphill battle.
So I stood there on the street corner, my head buried in my hands, strangers all around me watching me cry, sobbing out my weakness but not knowing that my little heart was fossilizing into rock that now, we have both realized: cannot be broken so easily.
And next? Wipe the tears away from my face, look determinedly at the don’t walk don’t walk don’t walk! sign flashing angrily in front of me, and decide in that moment, that no one would tell me what to do ever again.
Close my eyes and run across the street. And when I got to the other side, raise my hands up. Channel the black magic from my cracked/broken/shattered heart and turn the lines that I’ve drawn around me into walls that were miles and miles and miles high.
So that no one could ever scale the fortress of my naïveté ever again. And now I am afraid: that perhaps even I will not be able to get to the other side of these lines. That I have unknowingly, mistakenly — oh god what have I done here — barricaded myself into a world where the smells of freshly-cut grass and summertime rain don’t exist.
But what else could I done, my love?
Tell me: what should I have done?
You had your arms around me, the two of us curled up in the guest bedroom. The memory of me falling asleep listening to your voice and thinking that you were my favorite person in the whole world, knowing all the while that yes, I didn’t even know all the people, and yet this I knew to be a capital T Truth.
Mama, this is how I remember it happening:
You tell me how I got my name. About a woman years ago who may or may not be real (the thing about myths: they can be as real as you allow them to be).
This woman was exiled to a forest where she lived happily with the birds singing all around her. They told her to stay inside of the line — imagine them taking a stick and walking around the perimeter of their house, saying: don’t cross this line, not even a single toe on the other side.
And so, what could she do? Stay inside of the line day after day, until one morning — a spark of something worthy of her pursuit. She had spotted a golden deer in the forest: a flash of hope, the glint of light, the glimmer of a dream worth chasing.
Cross the line, and her whole world came tumbling down.
Mama, you never told about the line. The one that was drawn all around me, a circle of my own doing and (eventually, someday) undoing.
The paradox of helplessness: sabotaging oneself just so that you can set yourself free.
I am losing count of all the miles we have walked together.
We walk down sidewalks together, your stride longer than mine but your feet beating to the same soundless drum that is the noise of this big city that we have both been boxed into. With each step, I hop over the cracks in the path. Don’t you know that they are canyons? That we can’t slip into them, can’t fall — don’t let go of my hand, I’ll pull you up if you happen to plunge down that steep slope.
We pull each other close, protecting one another from the crevasses that we’ve imagined in our minds: the ones that no one else seems to know exist. Our feet are on the ground, and our hearts are soaring way up above — up, up, up high in the clouds — with dreams filling our minds that would make no sense to us if we were to hear them repeated back to us tomorrow morning.
And I tell you how this place makes me alive. The smog, horns, honking, the shattered glass, always-overflowing gutters. They remind me that I am here in the middle of this painting Someone Else is still working on. I say that it makes me feel like a Work In Progress: any given minute, I could shift and turn and suddenly the line that I am walking on and you are walking on are no longer the same one and you will have to let me go even if you don’t want me to.
And I tell you how I want to feel it all. Even if it’s too much — the stress on my shoulders, the sweat on the subway, the concrete rubbing against my bare feet when I walk home drunk with my strappy black shoes clutched in the palm of my hand. The way that my mother used to feel the pebbles on her feet when she ran down the dirt streets as a girl.
And I tell you about my mama’s feet. The way that she has run and walked and flown, and how if you looked at her heels you would see all the places that she has been. (The places that I want to go.)
I wonder if you are listening. Or if, instead, you have diverged. And in the matter of seconds, we have become two people who are no longer parallel lines walking alongside together.
And I see it all unfold in front me, this rhythmic beating of life, pulsating back and forth, forwards and backwards, up and down — lines in every which way, shooting up and out, in directions that I didn’t even know existed.
