Up To Their Birth, Shooting Like Stars

(A work in progress.)

The morning light caused me to stir, but I awoke with a feeling of peace. The thick curtains, hanging by an iron rod, brush the wooden floor as a gentle breeze comes in through the open window. Their fiber, the color of heavy cream, mutes the light, allowing me to pass through the world of dreams into reality with ease.

I close my eyes and stretch my legs, turning over so I am facing you. You smell like sleep, sweet and calming. I can smell it on your skin, milky in the shadows of morning. When you exhale, I smell it on your breath. I marvel at your eyelids, a thin film of skin and lilac veins embracing the pearl of your eye. Your eyes see a place far away from me. The one place you will go that I will follow.

The old quilt had fallen away in the darkness, and I pull it back up around our bare shoulders now. Its pinks have turned to whites, it’s yellows to grays. Worn thin from sleeping generations, its little stitches have become strangling threads. I bury my nose into the soft fabric and think of home.

I let my head stay enveloped in the white pillow and let my mind get lost in the white vastness of the ceiling. Time slips away down through the cracks in the floor. My train of thought saunters with the seagulls in the harbor. I can hear them in their flight, threading between dock posts and sailboat masts. The distant foghorn is the steady beat behind their rhythmic calls. I know that a layer of fog is covering where the land meets the sea. But not here. Here, there is light.

I see your feet stir under the folds of the quilt from the corner of my eye. I am warmed by the heat of your skin as you draw me close to your bare chest, gently kissing my hair, and in an instant, I am brought back.

My head rises and falls as you take your first breath.

“Need to go into town today. Running low on wire, need to pick up a few more lures. And my prescription.”

My silence is my concession. The haze of the morning’s magic slowly begins to break as you sigh these first words. The light seems harsher now and my muscles begin to feel restless. No longer does everything seem to fit together quite as well. Silent harmony falls to soft cacophony.

I roll out of your arms and let my legs swing over the side of the bed. On the nightstand is a stack of books, upon that, my teacup from the night before. I take it now and drink up what little tea is left at the bottom, cold and grainy in my mouth. The liquid leaves a ring, stained along the inside, marking where one day ended and the next began. What has been and what now is.

I place the teacup back on my tattered copy of a compilation of poetry entitled “What You Are Thinking But Cannot Say”. Next to that, an open notebook, with the single line written in blue ink,

“up to their birth, shooting like stars”

I must have woken up after a dream and instinctively grabbed the pen. It was becoming a habit. It was rare that I could recall a dream in the first place, but if I did, I struggled to find a connection between the hazy content the remained in my memory and the few words on the paper. It was as if they appeared by magic.

The grandfather clock down the hall chimed 7:00, beckoning us to get out of bed and begin the day.

I shivered as I let my bare feet drop to the cold wooden floor. Quickly, I grab my sweater, two sizes two big, limp at the foot of the bed, and pull it over my head.

“When will you be back?”

You sit up in the bed, rubbing your eyes.

“Before dark. The fog is supposed to roll in heavy at dusk. Want to try and beat it.”

I nod, searching under the covers for the pair of socks I was wearing the night before. When I find them, balled up and inside out, I sit on your side of the bed to pull them on.

“Please. Make sure you call the harbormaster too. Make sure there is a slip for you.”

Now it is your turn to nod as you slowly make your way out from under the quilt. You sit on the side of the bed with you head in your hands. I turn and run my fingers through your mangled head of hair and kissed the top of your head.

“I know.”

I pad across the bedroom floor and down the hall into the kitchen. We tell people we bought this house for the kitchen. It was exactly what we always wanted; old hardwood floors, a small marble island, a large bay window encompassing our kitchen table. The bay window leads right up to the boulders that make up the escarpment leading down to the water. At night, the beam of the lighthouse sweeps across the table and through the kitchen.

I ski over the wood floor in my socks to the table, covered with a red -and-white-checkered tablecloth. In the center was a single daisy in a Mason jar. We usually only kept two chairs at the table. That was all we really needed.

Like almost every morning, you cannot see out the window past the escarpment. Dense fog covers the shore and sea like a weightless blanket. The horizon is nonexistent. Only the first few rays of sunlight are beginning to break through.

Noises commence. The soft cacophony of our mornings. The faucet in the kitchen squeals as I fill the coffee pot, the sink in the bathroom where you keep your toothbrush echoes down the hall. Ceramic clatters as I bring two plates, two cups, and two mugs down from the shelves. Silverware clangs. The radio in our bedroom hums, perpetually streaming advertisements and heart-breaking news. Refrigerator bangs. Coffee pot rumbles. Orange juice gurgles as it hits hollow glass. Toaster pops. Knife chops. A sneeze. A yawn. A sniffle. Knife scraping against toast, spreading strawberry jam.

The radio is switched off. I hear you walk down the hall, into the kitchen. I turn from my work and grin. You walk over to the counter and place my dirty teacup in the sink. You pick up the coffee pot, still rumbling and gurgling and steaming. No longer do you smell like sleep, but like soap. This smell has corners, edges. It awakens my senses. I know, though, that as the day goes on, these corners will soften again, beaten down by other scents of life, like the sea and the fish and the coffee you now pour into the mugs. When you come home tonight, you will just smell like you.

            “Time to eat.”

            We carry over the mugs and the glasses and the silverware. Two plates holding toast with strawberry jam. A bowl of strawberries and chopped bananas. A tiny blue pitcher of cream. A tiny jar of sugar with a tiny spoon. We sit down. As I reached for the cream, I catch you looking at me, smiling.

            The fog has almost completely cleared now. You can see the water over the escarpment and catch just a sliver of sea. The water in the morning is beautiful, the way the soft yellows and pinks of the rising sun cause the waves to glimmer the way stars do in a cloudless sky. I can see a few sailboats now, just leisurely meandering. It isn’t very windy. The American flag hanging from the back porch was lifeless.

            “You’ll have an easy trip,” I say as I pour the cream into my mug.

You nod, gazing out at the water, munching on toast. I can see crumbs caught in the stubble on your chin. You take a long drink of orange juice without removing your gaze.

“Beautiful day. Tides are timed just right. Just pray the fog doesn’t roll in too soon.”

I stir the cream with a long silver spoon, the white mixing with the black, a liquidly yin-yang settling into that beautiful shade I see every morning.

When the plates are empty and all that is left at the bottom of our mugs is cold, forgotten grounds, it is time for you to go. I scrape scraps off dishes as you lace up your boots. I rinse the dishes in the sink as you shrug into your tough field coat, the one lined with soft red plaid.

You slap your palms to your knees and rub your hands together.

“Time to go.”

We walk out to the porch, pushing open the glass door, pulling open the screen. I push the glass door as far as it can go, placing the hook nailed to the back of the door to the loop nailed to the side of the house. You let the screen door slam behind us. I take off my socks and leave them in a lump on the doorstep.

Now the sun is well on its way. As we walk out of the shadows and down the porch steps, I can feel its warmth on my neck. The narrow path that leads to the edge of the escarpment is lined with hydrangea bushes, big, round flowers flecked with every shade of blue and purple possible. You can hear the hum of the bumblebees as they attack and retreat the nectar of the buds.

Standing on the very edge of the escarpment, you can see either end of the island, the points where the shore turns to touch the other side. Small waves lap upon the sand. Boats rock back and forth on their moorings. Sail clips clang to the masts. Clumps of seagulls bob up and down in the waves, silently, sleepily. Long, wispy clouds stretch high across the sky. They seem to curve above me, winding paths along a limitless dome of blue expanse.

There’s that line from “White Fang” you love to quote, “sole speck of life journeying across the ghostly wastes of a dead world, he trembles realizes he is a maggot’s life no more.”

            The wooden stairs that sit in the side of the sandy cliff creak under our weight (or just you and your boots). We trudge across the sand, soft and cool between my toes as I place each foot inside the imprint of your boot. Standing on the dock, you can see the down to the bottom of the water. Along the sandy floor, shadows dance as schools of minnows frantically dart back and forth. On the surface, a dozen little boats bumped and tottered together as one unit. Some rubber, some wooden, some with motors, some with oars, each attached by a dirty rope, all tied to a single clamp. Ours is a red dingy, only big enough to hold two adults, possibly two and a child. Its rope is a bit longer than the others, so it tends lingers in the back of group. It smells like low tide.

            You reach down and rub your thumb softly along the back of my hand, interlocking fingers.

            “See you later?”

            You smile and lean down for a kiss. You brush a stray hair behind my ear, and then you are gone.

            Stepping off the dock, you balance yourself in the closest boat, then using each boat as a stepping-stone, you make your way over to the red dingy. You settle onto your knees and lean over the bow. I bend down to untie the attached rope and toss it into your outstretched hands, setting you free.