A Moth

For sixteen years. For you.

I remember how I felt eighteen years ago.

Shame had learned my face by then. It followed me into mirrors. I had become a stranger wearing my own skin. I could perform myself, maybe. I could wear myself. But I could not look directly at who I was.

So I grasped.

Anything that would hold me up. Anyone who would tell me the costume was skin. Anyone who would say: yes, this is real, this is you.

And then you came.

Red dress and all, moving past the office window. I stared. You stared back… not at me. Backward, just enough for me to catch the other side of your face. Cheekbones. Dimples. The fall of your blonde bob.

Years later you would tell me you never owned a red dress. We still laugh about it.

I saw what I saw.

You stripped away my costume. I think I was naked for the first time. I remember shaking. I remember your arms around me. I remember a note passed between us:

we have known each other in a past life.

I believed you immediately.

The ground opened. I fell straight into it.

Lou Reed was there. Nico too. Cigarette smoke and black-and-white longing. We wandered inside the wreckage of being young and found it beautiful.

I loved getting lost with you.

Until it was time to rise.

We surfaced in Anza-Borrego. Desert roses pushing through cracked earth. Nick Cave somewhere in the air. Only us.

I was wearing low-top Chucks and a yellow button-down, kneeling in California sediment. Ancient layers beneath us.

I asked if you would receive my faults as I shared yours.

You said yes.

Before I knew what I was agreeing to.

Then the world kept moving. Or maybe we did.

Los Angeles. No money. Yoga mats on floors. Cheap food. I was still learning what I was capable of destroying. Still confusing hunger with direction. You watched me without letting go.

Portland. Marriage. Rain leaning against windows. Dogs. Record stores. We looked for David Bowie like someone else had already solved how to become strange without disappearing. Something in me loosened when I looked at you.

Santa Barbara. Ocean air. Bougainvillea climbing white walls. Sunsets too beautiful to trust. I kept waiting for it to cost us something. It would.

Silver Lake. Dusty light. Traffic. Survival.

I pulled you into the mud with me… not to drown, but to plant.

I burned down slowly until there was almost nothing left but holding on.

A bud in darkness.

And still you stayed.

Long enough for me to stop running. Long enough to stop confusing movement with escape.

Then Miles arrived.

Our son. Miles Ahead.

The world had closed its doors. Masks. Silence. Fear moving through streets like weather.

And still he took his first breath.

I watched you become his mother.

Hospital rooms. Machines. Holding him while he struggled to breathe. Watching clocks turn cruel. Counting time in seconds that refused to behave like seconds.

We held each other because there was nothing else left.

Then the ground shifted again.

Your mother left. Purple everywhere. Her favorite color carrying her out. And Bliss, already gone, moving through the house as though he knew something grief had not yet told us.

After that, life stopped separating cleanly.

Alive. Dead. Here. Gone.

Everything overlapped.

I remember one night Miles was in the bath.

No context. No setup. Just the way children speak from somewhere older than memory.

Mom, he said, you and I were elephants in a past life.

We looked at each other.

Who was dad?

He didn’t hesitate.

A moth.

The water kept still. Neither of us moved.

Eighteen years rearranged themselves in that silence… all the chasing, all the burning, my lifelong confusion between light and home.

A moth.

He was not wrong.

Sixteen years ago tonight, I stopped burning.

See you at The Nines.

Air and Maureen, 5/15/2010