leaving

I see your brown eyes peek out the window like an overfilled cup of tea
they teeter self-consciously on the ledge
wondering why things must fade from green to red to brown
they wander to the ground as I exhale (oh, why are you so afraid?)
And with each hollow-lunged breath goes another leaf from the lone tree
A silent swan dive from the arms of one and into another
or perhaps the vast space in-between
Coming and going softly on my blue belly as it expands and contracts

There is a coolness in the air
an annual compulsion to shed the unmade days of summertime beds
and embrace the fall
the sweeping space that exists within
the loss of a breath
and the cold, exposed bones of winter that reveal who you are, not what you have

Breathe in deep, little girl
Seep through the window and onto me and I will show you the way
Because upon your exhale, you will fear evaporation
as the things you love will inevitably lapse
and fall to the ground easy as baby's teeth
small and dead, though at one time deep-rooted and very much sweet

Exhale, dear, please don't be afraid
Let them all fall onto me!
I'll pin them all as stars to my freckled sides
So at night you may remember them
as you climb the tree, loving the loss that makes it grow tall

something i found in an old journal (over three years ago). funny how things change (and don't!)

sometimes at night, i drive around listlessly and stare at my skinny arms on the wheel. are they really mine? do i feel them? not quite. maybe, i am not sure. if feeling nothing but seeing everything is how this act always ends, then i'd rather be numb  and blind from the start. sometimes i see people riding their bikes on the street while i drive, too. i think i know some of them, or maybe that i would like to know some of them, maybe even love one of them someday. but in a moment's time they disappear, faster than those pretty purple dots that hang around for a moment after you look at fluorescent lights for too long. they have vanished, and under those roaring lights in your beige cubicle, your skin is sallow again and your small voice escapes you. banging away on the keyboard once more, you wonder if they were even there to begin with, just like i wonder if i truly see anyone new, or just different versions of a memory. maybe these things are some kind of fleeting hope, but maybe they are just a colorful con.

and then i think of you, and occasionally see you too. and you never go away, even when you're gone. you're stamped permanently, name etched in wet cement. sometimes i convince myself that i want to feel you, to taste you, to know you like i used to, to trace the mold your index finger made while writing your name in the cool, concrete corners of my mind, but i can't. i stare at my hands as i drive, now wondering what animal the bones resemble when highlighted and shadowed by the street lights above. a spider, maybe? if so, why can't they just creep up to my memory and make another web for something newer and brighter to get stuck? or maybe the thin flaps of skin between my index fingers and thumbs are like small, pale butterfly wings that tickle my interior and help me laugh once again. regardless, the joke is on me. spiders have 8 legs, not 5, and besides...i can't control what gets stuck or what flits freely from lobe to lobe and valley to valley.

do i love you?
do i know you?
do i want you?

not quite. maybe, i am not sure. bright lights flood in and out of my car as a bass line shakes away at my dusty bones and i instinctively crane my neck out slowly like a rusty weathervane, looking at all the people, amazed at how they come and go. i'm looking at someone, for someone, for anyone but you. i stare at my arms again, and then imagine a pale spider getting swallowed by a name drawn in drying cement.

next part: "identity" or "how to not be beige"

The next morning was D-Day. Rising far too early for a far too mediocre cup of coffee, I stared glumly at my bowl of cereal while my parents discussed that day’s agenda. Well, my father said, I figured we’d get over there around 11 and hang out for a bit. Come back around 4 to rest and take some pain meds, and then go back out around 6 for dinner with them. Sound good?

I was staring at my frosted mini wheats, pushing them down into the milk with my plastic spoon, seeing how long it would take until they quit bobbing back up and became so full of milk that they just sank to the bottom. My mother nudged me with her elbow. Savannah, she said, stop playing with your food. Your dad is asking you a question.

Yeah, I mumbled, sounds great.

The drive over was rather tense. No one spoke, and I was trying to fill the void with a college radio station I found from the UNC campus. It was mainly noise, that avant-garde shit that I felt like I would never be cool enough to enjoy legitimately, but I had to admit that the ambient, chromatic scales and unconventional 7/5 beats did provide temporary escape from the fact that I was about to spend several hours of my life with a man who I wanted nothing to do with.

We pulled up to the house in the rental car, hearing the gravel crack and crunch violently beneath it like popcorn in a defunct microwave. Woken from my brief nap, I was immediately inundated with the collection of red cars in my grandfather’s driveway. There was an SUV, a Cadillac, and some old 1960’s convertible. It idn’t a real car, I remember him saying once, unless it’s red. Bright, fiery red. Mmhm.

My mother turned back to me this time as she unbuckled her seatbelt. Savannah, she said, this man is paying for your college. You’re going to be nice, and you’re going to talk to him. We see him maybe once a year.

Where is the Advil? was all I could muster.

She handed me two berry colored pills. Here, she said, take them and then smile.

And smile I did, at least at the beginning. Susan barreled through the door first like a bull running through the streets of Pamplona. Engulfing my face in her swollen breasts that hung low like the old, tumorous ears of a basset hound, I smelled her musky, mothball scent and thought of Grandpa Bill's underwear drawer. She pulled away several moments too late, and stared at me with her shrunken grey eyes. My, my, she said, you just get prettier and prettier every time I see you.

As do you! I lied. I smiled and entered the house. That kind of smile, as I know my father would have said, was called a ‘shit-eating’ grin.

It had been remodeled since the last time I had seen it. There was new, beige carpet and freshly painted beige walls. Packages of curtains called "American Freedom" sat stacked nearly four feet high on one of the floral upholstered couches. Bill and I have been doin’ some remodelin’ as of late, as y’all can tell, Susan said.

Bill was still nowhere to be found. My parents and I, without much of anywhere to sit, stood in the kitchen as Susan discussed her choice in curtain rods. She chose the ones with the curly ends because they looked like the letter ‘C,’ just like the first letter of my grandfather’s last name! she squealed. A song called ‘Come to Jesus’ was playing on the radio. I found myself wondering what I was being punished for.

Finally (and I never thought I would associate my grandfather’s presence with that word), Grandpa Bill emerged from the back hall. Well there’s the big guy, Susan said, cupping her hands to her jowly cheeks. Bill, Bee-yull! Over here, everyone’s so excited to see you.

I looked to my father, standing reticent. His hazel eyes were revealing nothing. Surely there had to be something to reveal, though. My mother was standing, arms crossed and donning a similar shit-eating grin as mine.

Grandpa Bill seemed a lot older than I remembered. Which made sense, given that I hadn’t seen him since I graduated high school three years ago. He walked slowly, his bald and pocked head nearly skimming the ceiling. In some respects, I felt as if I were bearing witness to some kind of brontosaurus emerging from the gates of Jurassic Park.

Nothing in his clothing appearance had changed, however. He wore Bermuda shorts year round and a Members Only sports jacket to counteract the cold. Non-matching Hawaiian shirts were always tucked into his shorts, and his geriatric Velcro shoes were made only marginally less pathetic with the white tube socks that hung low on his skinny ankles like a windsock in the dog days of summer. I had inherited those ankles. There were band-aids all up and down his scraggy legs from, as he would later tell us, the cancerous moles that had been removed rather recently at the dermatologist’s.

Well now, Bill said, look who we got us he-yuh. Miss P-Pam and Savannah, and young Mistuh Cats. (Bill always called my father ‘Cats,’ even though his name was identical to Bill’s. My father never knew why he had been given that feline nickname and for that matter never cared to ask, given that Bill rivaled Strom Thurmond in his lengthy locution and a nearly identical political ideology.)

Hey Dad, my father struggled, raising his arms mechanically toward his own father. I watched him lean in slightly but not too much, as if his limbs were made of balsa wood and would snap if he put too much pressure on them. How ya been?

My turn was next. I trudged slowly forward to this old man and was reminded of the days when I was little and didn’t like to eat vegetables, and how I had to close my eyes and hold my nose when consuming a single, cooked carrot. The mere thought of them made my insides churn. The act of greeting my grandfather wasn’t much different. Grandpa Bill, I cooed, it’s so great to see you.

I pulled away as soon as I deemed socially acceptable and watched as my mother went in for hers. She was the most patient of the three of us, even though my grandfather still referred to her as Mrs. Cox despite the fact that my parents had been divorced for over ten years and that she had never taken my father’s name to begin with.

Susan decided to show us around the house to see all of the work that they’d put into it. New stainless steel sinks in the kitchen, new granite counters. A new country-Christian song was playing on the radio as my eyes fixated on a large eyesore in the corner: two TVs, stacked one on top of the other. Bill had already planted himself in his recliner and was watching Nascar. Come on, y’all, Susan called, I wanna show y’all the rest of the house. Billy, I wanna show you your old room!

We made our way through the narrow hallway where there was nary a family photo but rather a multitude of framed pictures of Ronald Reagan and various quotes of his. A piece of the Berlin Wall here, an American flag there. But no family. My father twisted the doorknob to his old room. It’s a lot smaller than I remember, he said.

Unfortunately, he could barely open the door all the way before it hit a queen size mattress covered completely with rifles. My father’s childhood wallpaper was almost completely stripped from the room, save for a tiny piece in the top corner of the room. Well, Susan giggled, we’ve kind of turned your room into a storage room, Billy. And right now, it’s holdin’ all of your daddy’s guns. Aren’t they pretty?

I felt like I was in some kind of David Lynch film. I remembered the time after Grandpa Bill had a stroke and there was yet another death scare, so the three of us made a trek to North Carolina. When checking him in from the hospital into his nursing home, we had to unpack his things. While doing so, we discovered three loaded shotguns, a 12-pack of Trojans, KY Jelly, and cologne that was allegedly an aphrodisiac. I was twelve at the time and mistook the tube of lubricant for toothpaste. Thank God my mother swiped it from me before I pulled out my travel brush to remove the cheese gunk that had accumulated in my mouth after a stress snack of Cheeto’s Puffs. The relationship between a man and his penis is one I will never understand.

Anyway, Susan and my mother continued on the rest of the tour of the house, but I remained in the bedroom with my father for a few moments longer. You know, he said, I don’t recognize any of this anymore. It’s like I’ve never even lived here. I always wondered what Mom would have done with the place when I moved out, but I don’t think she would have done this.

I don’t think most people would have done this, I said. I watched my father as his eyes scanned the shelves, just looking for something he knew. After a few moments, I spotted something shining in the distance beneath a holster and an unopened ceiling fan box. Hey, is that your old toy zeppelin hiding up on the shelf? I asked. I climbed on the bed and on top of the guns and pulled it down for my father to see.

Well I’ll be damned, he said, examining it. It sure is.

I smiled. We should probably continue on this lovely tour, don’t you think?

He rolled his eyes. If we must, he said.

I think they’re in Bill and Susan’s bedroom now. I wrinkled my nose. Susan’s probably talking about the beige garters she wears to entice Bill at night.

Somehow, Savannah, my father stated, I don’t think they’re doing much of that.

Why’s that? I asked.

Well, Dad began, besides the fact that he now rivals trilobites in age and sediment composition, right before my mom died, she kind of gave up on those don’t-kiss-and-tell rules she had set in her mind for so many years and started revealing some about her and Dad’s relationship. And that's when I learned that maybe it wasn’t so much that she didn’t kiss and tell, but that there just wasn’t that much to tell. She and Dad would have sex twice a year, once during the holidays and once on his birthday. Merry fuckin' Christmas, right?

That’s it?

Well, yeah, he said. They just didn’t have anything to do with each other. It was probably a mutual thing, but hell if I know. And if you can’t sleep together, what the hell can you do together, you know?

My father held his zeppelin for a few moments more before placing it back on the gun blanket. Come on, Scamp, he said. Let’s go see this love shack.

beginnings of: "identity," or "how to not be beige"

Somewhat recently, my family made a trip to North Carolina to pay a visit to my dad’s side of the family. When I was younger, I never really knew that much about them. It was always my mother’s side of the family we had Thanksgiving dinner with, always my mother’s side of the family we would call first when I received all A’s on my report card, and always my mother’s side of the family who I thought of first when it came that time for my mother to chide me about purchasing cards for my grandparents on Mother’s and Father’s day. Nezzie and Bopper (the names I gave to my mother’s parents) were all I knew and all I needed throughout my childhood, and I was perfectly content without knowing much about fifty-percent of the blood that streamed through mine.

I did, however, remember Aunt Kate, my great-grandmother on my father’s side. I remembered her withered bow legs, the mint green, polka-dotted dress she would wear every time the few instances we would come for a visit, and how she called the refrigerator an icebox. She pronounced it ahs-bawx. I remembered the craft jewels she would glue onto her bobby pins after suppertime, and I remembered how in that icebox there was always a round of cheddar cheese that was larger than an overdue infant. 

I didn’t remember my grandmother at all, though. My dad’s mother, Lurli, had died of stomach cancer when I was barely two years old, and when shown pictures of me sitting on her lap years later, I had to ask my father who that old, sad looking woman was. Well Savannah, he would say after a few moments, that’s your grandmother. She was my mother. I remember him taking the picture soon after and tucking it into his shirt pocket, messing up my hair with his hand and then walking out of the room. Only now do I realize how my words must have affected him.

My grandfather may as well have been dead to both me and my father, too. When he would come to Florida for visits when I was a little girl, he would speak of three things: cloud formations, niggers, and his Honda Goldwing. He didn’t know how to interact around me, nor I around him, and I grew to fear looking him in the eye. I referred to him meekly as Grandpa Bill when forced to address him by name. My father called him Dad, but each time that simple word escaped his mouth it seemed as if it were laced with acid. Years later, my dad would tell me that he called his father Bill for the majority of his childhood. Never Dad. He couldn’t tell me why.

Anyway, Grandpa Bill is a tall man of around 6’’5 with watery blue eyes and pocks on his head from where he once had hair transplants. Bill enjoys being a Democrat, but only because they did not want to free the slaves. Since Lurli died, he has dated many ‘bitties,’ including her cousin, Viva. His current girlfriend is called Susan, although he refers to her as Lil’ Susie. They collect copper pennies together, and she thinks that cumulonimbus clouds are just the cat’s pajamas. They look like those extra stuffed marshmallows you can buy at Harris Teeter, she’s told me. Susan is a retired nurse who enjoys artificial flowers and the color beige. Susan is also two years younger than my father. Her hair is dishwater blonde with dark roots. She has a porcine face and wears metallic fuschia lipstick that runs off into the cracks of her lips like a faulty pipeline. Her breasts are the size of size-12 bowling balls, and they must weigh close to the same considering their tendency to drag to the floor. Once, when describing a Hispanic driving a motorcycle very fast and nearly causing her to veer off the road, Susan used the words mexi and crotch rocket in the same sentence. I hate Lil’ Susie.

Knowing that these two were in store for me, I was not greeting the decreasing mileage on the highway signs with a grin. Neither was my father. Why are we even going then, I muttered into my magazine, if you hate them?

From the front seat, he turned his head toward mine. Look, Savannah, he said, you’ve got to see your grandfather. He’s not been doing so well lately.

I rolled my eyes and continued reading. They were playing the death card, which is one of only tricks an old person can turn toward the end. I had to comply or else I was condemned to Hell. And I couldn’t go there because that would mean an eternity of Bill and Susan discussing coins and clouds. 

So I complied. I never much respected the man, though, especially when I learned from my mother all the things he had done in his younger days. He never spoke to Lurli, never once played a game of catch with my father in the yard, and although he was a pilot earning a high income, he would never support Lurli financially. And so, as a Sunday school teacher, she had to buy her car completely on her own. My dad told me a story about how once he had driven from Florida to North Carolina to visit him for Thanksgiving dinner, and when he arrived after his 13-hour drive, Bill had already eaten. He suggested instead that the two make a quick trip to the gas station to pick up ham sandwiches and some chips. They were out of ham. And so my father spent his Thanksgiving in a Speedway, chowing down on a pre-packaged cheese sandwich and Ruffles. 

My heart sank when the highway signs began to include Raleigh. That was where Bill and Susan lived. Apparently my displeasure had a sound, because moments later my father told me not to worry, my slow and painful death would not be coming today, but rather tomorrow. Today, he said, we were going to visit the country, the place where he spent many summers of his childhood. We were going to Rolesville.

Initially, my dad couldn’t get over all of the subdivisions with faux-rustic names that had sprouted like wild mushrooms over the past forty years, replacing the hills and farms with identical, 4-bedroom 2-bath homes. How sad, he said, that this kind of shit’s made its way here, too. I thought it would just stay in Florida.

It’s all over the place in Kentucky, too, my mother chimed. You just can’t escape it anymore.

Growing up a generation or two after my parents, I couldn’t really understand that wistful longing for a yesteryear filled with fields of wheat, or since we were in North Carolina, fields of tobacco. True, suburban sprawl did spread like a disease and was a homogenizing factor that made place hard to discern, but the majority of the fields they replaced, in Kentucky, at least, had been out of commission for years, harvesting more weeds than they did product. Different kinds of weeds to replace older ones, I guess.

Once we drove through the identical strip malls and shopping centers that appeared to be the heart of Rolesvillian culture, we began to see more signs of gentle pasture that my parents seemed to love. The clouds seemed to hang low in the sky, as if suspended by an invisible string that God himself did hold. 

The innumerable crosses and Jesus Saves! billboards only confirmed this thought. The six-lane super pass had now narrowed down to two, and farm fields were beginning to replace the once-bountiful drug stores and discount shoe outlets. We drove for some time longer, and all the while you could see mules so skinny that you could mistake their sides for xylophones, just staring blankly at the few passing cars. It was sad, watching them watch a dilapidated road and all the cars that passed as if it were a Sunday feature.

But before I knew it, the car stopped. We’re here, Dad said.

Aunt Kate’s house had burned down a few years ago, he told us. The people who moved in after her death ran a meth lab there and well, accidents happen. All that remained were a few, charred cement porch steps that led to nothing. It was hot outside and I was sweating like a menopausal woman in a sweatshop. Oh my, I said, this is where Aunt Kate used to live. Can we go now?

He pretended not to hear me and my mother responded forlornly, shaking her head at me. This is important to your father, now shut up and deal is what her eyes said.

I watched my father as he continued on the path beyond where the house once stood. Above, there was a kettle of vultures circling and I wondered what the hell they had found to scavenge all the way out here. He stopped in front of a small pond. And I, in turn, stopped a few feet behind him and listened. 

Wow, I heard him mutter, it still looks the same. I watched my father closely as he put his hand to his forehead, the other raised to his side. He stood there for a few moments until he took a stone from the ground, examined and dusted it off, and then tossed it into the water. It made an eerie plop sound that made the hair on my arms stand up. My father watched the pebble as it hit the water, standing there in silence until it was no longer visible among those cattail-filled depths.

(I later asked my mother why the he spent so much time at such an indiscriminate pond, only for her to tell me that this pond was where my father’s cousin, Michael, had died when he was thirteen. One hot summer day, Michael dived into the water and hit a rock smack on his head and drowned. One second he was flying like a bird, my mother said, the next he was dead. Apparently my father had been behind him, eagerly awaiting his turn to jump.)

My father left the pond relatively quickly after watching the stone sink to the bottom and then called my name. Scamp, he said, come over here. I wanna show you something. Over the years, I had grown weary of whenever my father would say this to me (especially outdoors), because it usually meant looking at a dog turd that bore a strange resemblance to Mother Theresa or watching pigeons fuck. Swallowing my breath, I meekly followed.

We continued for some length until we stood in front of this twisted and decrepit frame of a house that looked like something out of a Faulkner novel. Ivy had slowly taken over the walls of this home for what had to have been at least 100 years, and there were few remaining walls. A single shutter dangled from one of the window frames, screeching like a dying bird with the occasional gust of wind. I was afraid to go further, for with all of the weeds I couldn’t even see my own two feet, let alone the venomous snakes that were bound to be lurking below. What is this place, I asked, wiping sweat from my brow.

This, he said, drawing closer to the would-be door, is where you come from. This house has been part of the Hagwood family for years. No one’s lived here, obviously, but man. Isn’t it cool?

Not really, I muttered.

I heard that, he said.

I took one more look at that house, haggard and haunting, before turning around and heading back to the car. I didn’t know if I wanted this place to be where I was from.


Later that evening and back at the hotel, we all got a bit liquored up. My parents sat me down at a table far away from the bar and returned with what they thought was a real delicacy: a single beer. They eyed me, grinning, as I took my first sip from the bottle. I feigned a slight ‘this-5%-alcohol-beverage-is-just-too-much-for-these-virginal-tastebuds’ face. I’m sure that with my underage years they considered themselves ‘modern’ and ‘progressive’ parents. I didn’t have the heart to tell them that this same girl had recently fallen into a glass table and shattered it after a deadly combination of bad pop music and tequila.

There was a wedding about to be held in the atrium of the Holiday Inn where we were staying. My father, a cynical man and an even more cynical drunk, began his rant on the many joys of marriage, one being starting off in immense debt thanks to weddings. All marriages are bound to fail, he said, and it’s all the sooner with these goddamned things. ‘Hey honey,’ my dad imitated, ‘let’s take a big leap together and fall into an infinite pit of loss just so we can eat a fancy cake!’ That remark made my mother uncomfortable. She took another swig of her beer.

I couldn’t help but respond, commenting on the badly-recorded Pacabel Canon that resounded about the lobby, reverberating from the fake palms in brassy pots, and aired my disgust with all the snot nosed children smearing up the glass elevator with their boogers and grime. Par for a great wedding and life together, eh? I said. How long, I asked him, do you think it will take before the music stops and these people see each other without all the mist and veils and for the imperfect people they really are?

He stared down into his now-empty vodka sour. A year, tops, he said. He swirled the ice in the glass and then shoved it down his throat, chomping on it vigorously.

My mother stood up from the table. Well, she began, I’ll leave you two alone to talk. I looked up at her, hoping that I hadn’t offended her, and she waved her hands and smiled. And then she left. My parents had been divorced for years, I thought to myself. What did it matter anymore, anyway?

My father and I stared into our empty bottles for a while until he finally stood to order more. Now, he said, smiling, what do you really want to drink?

I ordered a screwdriver.

Once the vodka had nestled happily inside both of us, my father got to talking more about his mother. 

 Do you know, he said, that before she died she made me go coffin shopping with her?

What’s so weird about that? I asked.

Well, he began, that’s not so strange in itself, but when she started climbing into every goddamn coffin, seeing how it felt and how comfortable it was and talking about how she wanted her dress to match the bedding, I felt like I was watching her die over and over and over again. I asked Mom why she was doing that, and all she did was smile and say that I would understand someday. Well, it’s almost twenty years later, and I still don’t understand. I still don’t fucking get it and I don’t know if I ever will. He took another swig of his drink. She was an odd woman, your grandmother.

I didn’t know how to respond to that. It was clear to me that my father was a human knot when it came to love and death. I wanted to ask about his cousin, but I was scared of creating more mess in this veritable Pollock painting of a mind. So I didn’t. I wish I could have known her, I said.

He stared down into his drink. I wish you could have too, Savannah. I wish you could have, too. All she wanted was to see you go to school. She thought you were the brightest and strangest thing. She loved you, though.

After a few moments of silence, Mom called, asking where we wanted to go for dinner. Mexican, my father said. Let’s have Mexican.