The Taste of a Cold Winter's Night

Commons 275

Becky’s Room

Trenton State Campus – February, 1999

(Best if Read While Listening to "All You Need is Love," "Don't Let me Down," and "Let it Be" by the Beatles—order of play is optional)

Morning is inevitable as death is. I can taste the changing weather on my tongue—the onset of deep winter—John Lennon singing those lines, insistent, vulnerable, and pleading, "I'm in love for the first time, don't you know it's gonna last...." And Becky and I are breaking up. We both know it. But it is too cold for me to head back to my apartment off-campus until morning. We both wonder if this is the last time or if we will try again and do better. It was love. If love were enough. If only love were enough.

Tonight is not a time, but a place. Like a song. Immortalized in vinyl. It is hard and tangible and can be pulled off the shelf and held in your hand anytime you want. Nothing is ever really over. The blast of irreverent horns. The "blah, blah, blah" of monotony. The "love, love, love" of the intro. Then Paul McCartney, authoritative, gentle, commanding—tells it straight: “There's nothin' you can do that can't be done / Nothin' you can sing that can't be sung / Nothin' you can say, but you can learn how to play the game / It's easy.”

1:55 AM. The first cold Friday evening in February. It is hard to find a worthy object to excuse our sleepless angst... but we find one... and after... gazing across the interior of this dorm room lit by the dim glow of a television screen, is a boxed collection of memories made and kept. A metal frame glints off of the desktop. A picture of Becky and her mother at high school graduation. The frame is inscribed with two words - weight and length. Something Becky picked up at TJ Maxx.

The weight and length of a mother's eyes inscribed within a little girl, biting her lip, imagining the thatched rooftops of a Costa Rican village in one of her roommate's paintings. In the painting, a volcano with plumes of ominous smoke towers over the village rooftops like a cauldron of death in the hands of the almighty. Her eyes wander from old reruns of 80's comedies on the television, and her thoughts turn over the old reruns of her mother's life that have become hers. And we listen to her Beatles playlist playing low in the background.

“Nothin' you can make that can't be made / No one you can save that can't be saved / Nothin' you can do, but you can learn how to be you in time.” Japanese American. Becky is the soldier and the young Japanese girl who bucked tradition. She is the independence of strangers. She is the fated joining. Of displacement and death. The father, suffering lockjaw from a rusty nail on a naval ship—the mother a nurse who tended to him while his mates on board went down to the stormy depths—his life and hers saved by a rusty nail.

In this frame, it is not 1:55 AM. There is no time. And this frozen moment feels stolen. Risky. Sacred. The needling hands of the alarm clock freeze in place. Just for a moment. A pregnant pause. A verdictless life. An understanding coming to focus—decided in advance. An image in a darkroom burning to life on pearl film. Like the frozen exhalation of February's breath—white clouds against black pitch—ghosts lifting off to heaven in the night. This strange frigid night of reruns and photographs and paintings and haunting 60's love songs over a cheap bottle of merlot drunk from red solo cups in Commons 275. This one moment—a stem with many branches—contains a multitude of eternities—lives that might have been and still may be.

“Love has a nasty habit of disappearing overnight.” It will always be there. A recording. The theme of it is the desire to be anywhere but not alone. That theme, its notes, building from song to song, toward something sad or sweet. Who knows which? This liminal space emerges from the halls of the dorms, both full of life and empty of answers, both fresh with new passions and reliving the same disappointments. “Man buys ring, woman throws it away, same old thing happens everyday.” It is familiar. This place. Safe. Preferred. The closeness to one another. The exhilarating danger of it all.

Tiny wooden clothespins, grasping desperately for memories that are melting and becoming distorted. Melissa's photographs. Flashbacks of other points in time where life came to a halt. Waiting for the burst of blindness. Say cheese! The timeline of photos in our minds is a rollercoaster of emotions, people, and half-finished relationships, and the television's light is still green. Late infomercials advertise words of wisdom from the Beatles, let it be, help, I need somebody, something in the way she moves, all for $24.99. By the way, who is Jude, a person, or a patchwork quilt of personas and pathos?

What was it like to walk the streets of Liverpool? All you need is love. The paint on roommate Mellissa's canvas swirls into forms, pictorial expressions of someone else's reality. A liminal space. A common ground. A sacred feast. A banquet of youth. A promise of secrets. Beneath the phantom colors, other colors, beneath my eyelids, other seething thoughts. All you need is a diploma. The insignificance of the lists that fill my day timer... the curiosity aroused by the fathomless eyes of a Mexican boy, like the fathomless depth of an active volcano, the swirling white edifice that seems the perfect mirror of the plumbless sky. This stolen moment elongates like a horizon line.

The moment where the ash-black beaches of Hawaii are the same as the ash-black irises of Becky’s round curiosity. Our story's end hints at what is next. Our peace rages with the fury of old wars. Though deserts are exchanged for jungles, the dead die just the same. Where am I? Becky's room... and the lizard flicks its tongue crunching the exoskeleton of the worm. This cage, this exoskeleton, this externalization of the military-industrial complex in which war rooms are exchanged for board rooms—and corporate fiefdoms battle for territory on the backs of the young exactly as old warlords sacrificed generations over who got to fly which flag in the town square. And now, the division of labor has provided a pantheon of idols to be worshipped; you can fall to your knees before a superfluity of gods. But the broken-hearted the world over always find peace in each other's arms.

The volcano swirling, molten rock, reshaping the surface of the earth, reshaping the surface of our psyches. Moments echoing in time like cymbals in an orogeny—a cathedral of mountains—layers of pain, my father's problems mine, the slavery encased in capsules of freedom—the panopticon in which we are weighed and valued for our adherence to an unspoken code of order from chaos... and what are we really concerned about... love is all... clothespins and infomercials, photographs, rehearsed stories to go along with them... fiction. And when the broken-hearted people living in the world agree...

Climb another stone step, follow someone else's stone footsteps. Step into shadows. Outgrow them. All is new. All is the same. Families pass their burdens down like bequeathed photograph albums or the origin stories of relationships retold until they are canon, rusty iron nails, and hospital beds. The outcome is the same. Who among us sees the face of God before our time is nigh? Strong rays from the Yucatan sun burst forth from the canvas flaming in an imaginary sky and burn through my body, setting emotions on fire. A fire that remains within and surfaces late at night, refusing to be smothered. My heart is a furnace for your love. This fire breaks the monotony in the dried clay that is millions of years old, older, and our lives are just pyramiding blocks, life laid upon life, laid upon life, each new life, each new block—the vertex of life—facing heaven alone and defenseless. 

The painting perfectly captures the innocent face of a Mexican boy, staring out across a golden field of corn, beyond which a famine-stricken desert of rippled sand seems to eviscerate a smattering of settlements, with some forgotten Mayan temple like a talisman in the far distance. The boy holds a basket of fruits and vegetables, which together with his skin, the full-bellied sun, and the inch of the blue sky provide the only color to contrast the desolation. The twang of George Harrison finger-picking the solo. Soft fingering of the piano. Desert sands blowing in perfect ripples. Clouds moving by at the speed of light, age this clay and my thoughts in a matter of moments, the shutter left open for long exposure. Black and white are shattered by a beam of orange that enters—a refraction of light on photographic film—a mistake? a blemish? the point?, and the piano's rhythm skips a beat, representing just another first footstep that will follow mine. For though they may be parted, there is still a chance that they will see...And when the night is cloudy there is still a light that shines on me...

My eyelids closed, my mind shuffles off, and my dream world crashes through the veil. But I clutch and grasp for one last moment. The taste of winter, the cuddling sweetly in the cold of the night, the smooth touch of bare skin on bare skin, the taste of not being alone, a warm wet mouth that softly whispers the words in her sleep: Don't let me down... So tired. I cannot say what is more real. Reality or the dream. But, it is 3:24 AM, Commons 275, and time's sovereignty prevails over me.

I can taste the changing weather on my tongue. Morning is inevitable as death is. I can hear the liminal space close in on itself with a pop.  Mother Mary comes to me... I know that the things we lose can be found again someday but they can never be unlost. In my hour of darkness... I can smell the nascent scent of her pheromones, which I have clung to with pleading heartbeats so resonant I can hear them in my temples, lose their hold and give way to the light and drowsy smell of clean linen bedsheets and lavender and dreams. She is standing right in front of me... I can feel the silk of her hair against my face, her backside to my front, her arm on my arm. The comforting warmth of her body and the soothing rise and fall of her undulating breath mixed with mine. Tonight is not a time, but a place. Tonight is not a question, but a belief. 

It is the same place where a little girl sits practicing scales, the same place a boy with a composition notebook writes stories of knights and dragons and princesses and talking frogs, the same place where four boys from Liverpool sell into the Western need to deify, opening a Pandora's box of pop culture icons, or is that not it at all? The truth is that love is possible. The truth is that no night ever looked like a patient etherized upon a table—but we feel it anyway—impotent, quiescent, immobile, uncertain, halting, unsettled—that the pregnant desires of the night may be stillborn in the morning's rays. The truth is that you need more than love. That beauty blooms unexpectedly in dark places and life rises from the soil of war like poppies adorning gravesites on battlegrounds. And all love ends tragically in due time. That a boy looking off into the distance, as if remembering dreams to come, somehow holds all of the mysteries of life in his gaze. All the yet-to-be genres of his days. The romances. The adventures. The horrors, more horrible than anything Stephen King could write, with war and cancer and blight and tyranny—enough for a thousand lifetimes. The mystery and awe and magical realism of a cold winter's night, remembered. The urgent suspense of new ideas, and children, and the careful tending of a thing brought to life, with its own unique histories and fairy tales. But most of all a driving hope like a back beat, behind every note and every narrative flourish, the echoing, constant heartbeat of the story. That all the Becky's and all the John's have a room of their own... a space out of time... an image of stillness and slow time.. framed and captured... in the mind... whisper words of wisdom... let it be... and there's a small Sunday mass pipe organ interlude, and then George Harrison goes in on a yearning mournful solo that strikes a chord inside that says there is a protection from the curses that befall us—there will be an answer—and a reward even if is not yet, but we will come to it in time... let it be.