House of Windows

How am I supposed to fall asleep again tonight when she, so infinitely far away from me, I feel the weight of her cold, sinking breath? Outside my window I can hear them again; they exhale in a swelling of the air, the shivering drone of midnight-cold cicadas.

I rose and stepped out of bed. My feet crawled into each worn-down boot and slithered each thinly tapered arm through my rusted overcoat, and I thought to myself; it's time to face the sharp cold so here I go down that road again.

I opened the glass door inside the steel frame of the house of windows I had built for me, then went down the small staircase and began walking down the road that always appeared empty in both directions. It was sprinkled with the odd streetlamp lighting here and there down the icy, snow-covered pavement.

When I had this house built, I had told the builders I wanted this house to be built completely of glass and steel. I did not want any walls built from solid brick. I did not want anything resembling drywall, or any likeness of a wall for that matter.

They looked at me in a funny kind of way. They must've thought me crazy. It's not that I am really, it's just my reality was different from theirs. Where they wanted privacy and closed spaces, I wanted to see what's ahead of me and what's behind me. I cannot stand the idea of walls. There's something about a wall would imply a thing that is hiding and it's a thought I can't bear and it scares me to my marrow.

I kept many of the things we would use together. Like the table we ate breakfast at and the loveseat we sat down to watch movies until you would fall asleep beside me, and I'd have to carry you to the mattress I still own. I furnished this house with many of our things. Remember how little I slept? I still don't sleep much anymore.

It was a simple dream of mine to sleep and wake up when dawn wakes up, inside this house. Dawn would scrape her eyelid open over my house of windows, her light would spill over the treetops, stirring up the shadows of firs and ash that flood around my home.

When sunlight would dwindle down the horizon and moonbeams shone through my house, that's when I would fall asleep but things are just never what we want them to be, however. So here I am, again awake at night and remembering you. How is your scent still wafting from these mattress pores?

I remember what it was like to touch you and there are nights I check to see if you're still there. As my hand reaches into the dark, silent air beside me. How I drew your curves with my hands as you lay there in the dark. How even now, your curves, they still render themselves in the darkness!

I think to myself just how am I to know the dark like that? How am I supposed to say that, that is this? Or that, that is that? Can I not see, that I make what's possible that much more impossible to be?

It was my intention to just walk off the restlessness I feel every night when I inevitably woke up thinking of you. The grief would fill the air around me in a stench that woke me from my sleep.

Grief, I was told there would be steps to it. The psychiatrists that would console me during our sessions told me there would be seven or five maybe; a small staircase to help me track my progress. To track my way to the top: acceptance. What they failed to tell me was it's not just a staircase, it's really a mass of interconnected roundabouts.

Sure, I might reach acceptance one day only to find myself soon after locked back in the stages of shock and denial again. Is it because I want to? No! But it's those memories, really, they lure me in towards the warmth of dawn and I see them down this icy, snow-covered road I saunter.

These memories lay strewn about the road in little orbs of cold, glassy ice. I pick them up from time to time during my walk and remember us. I pick them up with so much care; like a mother would with her newborn. I cherish them the same way.

As I look around me, I see the trunks and stumps of faceless ash and firs strolling past me. I feel the judgment when their fallen pine needles point solely at me; as if still being alive were my fault.

I walk down the snowy path, the sound of the sole crunching cold echoes around each footstep and batter barks near me as I make my way down the road. The world being empty in both directions.

My restless shadow circles around me under streetlamps as I walk; it's unable to rest in any one direction, when suddenly it jumps towards the early dawn's blackish green sky. I think to myself this is a bad omen. Then I see the checkered blue scarf you wore the last time I saw you.

It was tangled around a cold stump of ash, and then I felt the surging surf swell inside my eyes. I had lost the blue scarf that night I lost you. It had blown away in the wind somewhere that night. In the corner of the stump of ash where your blue scarf was tangled, there was a small spider fighting against the cold to build her web, her own little house.

I see her, she's building it under your scarf. She seems to tear it down again and rebuild it, over and over again: I think of it as a process of creation and decreation. It's like the memories that are scattered along this roadside. I see them here and there and pick them up and they're the reason I fall over and over again. We all have an elephant's memory for catastrophes.

As the snow starts to fall faster now: February's frigid little hands that fall like stars around me; two by two, hands of white trying their hardest to pull the ground towards them, fighting against the air they push. Time felt the same way. Time always flies us forward no matter what we do.

In Mercury's wings he speeds us faster and faster towards our death. What they never told me about death is; it's a conclusion, finality, any death will outshine the sun in a sheer white glare that blinds anyone. Seeing again becomes effort.

In this February air this road is on-going. It never seems to end. How am I not tired yet? I wondered to myself. I look down at my feet and see another memory of us. I pick it up. Inside it I see the last February I spent with you. When we went to the red river to skate. On thinned hardened sheets of winter's skin, we flew like birds against a serious saffron sunset.

The air clung to our mouths in a cloud of unsubstantiated white mist; winter, it always enters your lungs like a blade, we felt the sharpness of it in our chests as pickerel underfoot hurdled away from the thunderous cracks of sharpened steel blades. I was happy, you were happy.

I think to myself, travelling down this endless road, of cold and memories. I live a strange and selfish life now. All alone. I steal this cold air around me from others that need it most; especially those that cling to it with their bony fingers.

I don't think people realize the art and science that goes into wandering through one's own mind. Thinking is as much an art and science as any other task. There's a pressure to doing it well and a way to do it wrong.

Introspection does not come easy to anyone, but these long, cold nights give me time to think. The cold is my fault, ice and snow belong to me and no one else. In this cold and meditative walk, I attempt to find myself again. To find one's self is a task; it's forensic, cold like the air punching against my skin.

I walk down the roadside picking up more memories of us. My head bobbing against the hefty, cold air with each step. In thousands of tiny adjustments my mind moves through the air and the air moves me and I think to myself: this air, this road has its own rules, and you must obey them. You either walk or walk no more and breathe or breathe no more.

Miles away from my house of windows and my own mind, I look back and watch its unfamiliarity from the distance. It always seemed to me, the farther you are from yourself the more differently things unfold. I walk down the road against the cold air that bites into my lungs; time ties itself to my mind and I feel my mind swimming through the air; but there's a thickness to it, it's filled with my grief. It's like swimming in a stone, an ancient structure of earth. I feel the history of it push against my bones.

I've lost myself in this single, narrow road. Breathing in its frozen molecules. I come to realize that this road has no interest in me at all. It does not care whether I live or die. It does not care whether those I loved have lived or died.

I look back towards my house again into the darkness behind me. I cannot see it anymore. It may be just one narrow road but I am lost in it. I just wish to sleep again. Why should I be denied such a simple request? Should dawn wake up soon too? I feel like I've been walking for hours but dawn still has yet to fully show itself over the horizon.

Making the decision to press on towards the east, horizon-faced, I walk hoping to find the warmth of dawn. I continue to see memories of us scattered along the roadside. Each one I pick up gives a strange warmth inside me. I pick up another one; like a fish drawn into a shiny lure.

This one is of the night we spent on a rooftop, watching the stars retreat across the sky away from the sun. We talked about our future and our dreams. How you wanted to be an astronomer, like your hero Vera Rubin. I told you mine of just wishing to live in a house I built myself, lost in the middle of nowhere.

Our dreams were perfectly matched together. We could one day build a home in the middle of nowhere and we would watch the perfect dark sky reveal its mysteries to us and you would explain them to me. We would sleep so perfectly together and wake up again the next day to repeat the same thing again, and again.

I'm here as the cold bites chunks of nerves off me that sting with a kind of burning numbness. I don't know if this road will ever end. I don't know if I will ever see dawn. People love to say that time flies; and yes, it does, but grief and tragedies, they rip off time's wings and until they're able to grow back it's hard to feel as though I'm moving forward again. 

Am I? I don't know but I'm moving through something resembling time and space. I come to the conclusion that this road will not end.

Should I finally confront myself with the night you left? I see the single memory of it appear along the side of the road. It was near some dank, dark ditch. I almost missed this one hiding under the tall grass. I picked it up with three gentle fingers, afraid to break the delicate glass orb that held our memories.

This one felt colder, and more brittle than a sheet of ice. I peered into it and saw the night we were rushed to the hospital. How the rooms reeked of the sounds that only reminded us of how alive we really were. In some dazed confusion I saved whatever breath I can so I could give them to you.

But the descending beeps that halted every second more had you turning away from me. Until I finally heard the long drawn-out tone of you passing. I felt a gravity in my stomach sink deeper yet into my bowels, the gutting pain of you leaving my world.

I remember too much at times and I wonder why? Where, just where am I to place these memories down? Along this roadside where some vagrant might pick them up one day? Would he treasure them too, the way I did? These memories always oppose the coming day like a wall.

As I walk down the road I slip into the endlessness of this road, left rather wonder-wounded wandering down some wayward path. Wondering who will remember us when I'm gone too? The muffled drone of cicadas now far behind me; too far to hear now and this road, will not end… I repeat to myself:

I cannot break away from the path. I might ask the road where it goes, gazing far into the horizon, but a road will do what a road does.