Keys are in the tray, stove burner is off, TV is humming somewhere deep in the basement, dishes are in the sink, car is still ticking in the driveway. The bedroom is stuffy and only faintly smells of her. That’s the part he hasn’t been able to hold onto. For her smell to linger, she would have to be here. But it’s been fading slowly and steadily and he’s been lying on his back, trying to remember it.
Every single night this month I’ve been sleeping on the couch.
He gets up to open the window instead of stumbling out into the hall to move the thermostat down. His fingers rest on the window locks as he gazes out into the yard. Fireflies – One or two of them, out in the yard. He watches one blink on, then off, then the yard is dark, then another one will blink on and off on the other side of the yard. It’s calming. But something bothers him about it.
It’s too cold out, he thinks.
He leans in close to the glass – fingers no longer resting on the locks, but are pressed full onto the cold window – and narrows his eyes. The brief glow of light, then gone, then again elsewhere, now gone. Only now he sees that the glow is not yellow-green, as fireflies are, but orange. Almost like a match being lit and blown out.
Makes me feel like we’ve just had a fight and she booted me out of the bedroom because she can’t stand to be around me just yet. So I go to the closet and pull out the afghan she made for me for our anniversary, and I lay there until the TV lullabies me to sleep. Right when I’m on the edge of drifting off, I can convince myself that later that night, somewhere past midnight and before dawn, she’ll come down there in her nightgown and her bathrobe wrapped all tight around her and she’ll touch my face and I’ll stir and look up at her face, lit only by the blue moonlight filtering under the curtains and she’ll mouth “Come back to bed.”
I don’t know if these are dreams or not. I don’t know if she’s really gone.
His eyes search the yard for a pattern, a movement, any kind of shape moving across the grass. He sees nothing. The yard is blank for a long time. Then the clouds move from in front of the moon and the yard is lit dim blue and empty except for a foot receding into the line of trees at the back of the property.
The world is an experience of the world. It exists, but if it weren’t experienced, they maybe it wouldn’t exist. Experiencing something is like a pattern in your brain. Nerve endings firing in your fingers shooting up your arm defying gravity moving closer towards the gravity that your brain holds over feeling. The neurons flare and synapses light up and you are experiencing the heft of an orange in your hand.
No matter he can see his breath when he opens the sliding glass door. No matter he is barefoot and clad only in a pair of shorts and a t-shirt. He sprints across the lawn, careful to remember where the sprinklers are set in the grass. It’s a good hundred feet to the edge of the trees, and he’s breathing hard when he gets there. His chest fills and empties like a bellows. [Wheredidshego?]
You are not just holding the orange, you are experiencing the orange; The temperature, the surface, the weight, the curve of the skin, the dark place where the tree was attached. Then suddenly you know it. You understand it. You get a feeling of warm leaves moving slightly somewhere in Florida. The smell of sweaty leather gloves. Dirt. Bugs dancing about over your head. Aching feet. This is part of what I mean. You don’t just hold things, you experience them.
The moon has disappeared. He feels as though he should be remembering something.
You are sitting in a chair. There are two parts to this. You are sitting in a chair, but you don’t know if you are or not unless you are experiencing it. There is the act of sitting in the chair, which can only be seen from someone outside the experience-me-and there is the actual act of experiencing the chair. That’s what you get.
You don’t actually see things; you just see the light reflected off these things.
The woods are thick – thicker than he remembers. The path isn’t there anymore. There used to be a path leading down through the trees to the edge of the property and past it, past some large boulders moved there by who-knows-whom, past the stand of evergreens, and down to the edge of the lake. But the path is gone. He doesn’t know if this is even the right way. He stops for a moment. All he can hear is the closeness of his breathing. So dark. The cold is so tight around his skin. He stands still and holds his breath. He closes his eyes and starts walking. He smells water.
Likewise, you can be sitting in that chair, but not experiencing it. You could be a thousand miles – or even years – away from here and now. You could be sitting in that chair and watching your son being born. You could be getting beat up on the playground. Watching rain slip down a window. Attending a funeral. Watching a neighbor kid kill a lizard in the crook of a Willow tree. Counting satellites move across an early Spring sky. Digging your fingers into sand crowded with coquinas.
He’s almost to the edge of the tree line.
I’m talking about the stuff that consciousness is made of.
He opens his eyes.
I’m talking about why dreams seem so real when you’re dreaming them.
The woman turns to him.
I’m talking about the substance of memory.
He smells of pine and sweat and dirt at midnight.
What if there is a difference between sitting in that chair and experiencing sitting in that chair?
She’s there.
What if you can live forever in a memory if you want?
She’s smells like peaches and limes and mystery.
What if you can experience a moment and keep on experiencing it?
He sees something move on the other side of the lake.
What if you can choose
She’s dead and gone and composed of all the memory that is with him constantly and oh please just once more
What you experience
can he brush her hair
wouldn’t that be nice