HOME/GOING
Waking up in Florida again, I realize I’d forgotten: the smack of wet heat, the green of leaves and Spanish moss through the bathroom skylight in the RV sunk wheel-well-deep in my parents’ backyard mud. How different from the skylights I’d left in New Mexico, glowing blankly like miniature, ceiling-set suns, ringing cloudless blue and dry.
Everything here is wet, everything buzzing like an estuary; my plane flew in under a double rainbow that ended smack in the city. We sat on the tarmac for half an hour to wait for the lightning to clear.
Boarding, I’d wandered past the first-class couples who drank their sparkling water widely, wondered at the exact set of circumstances that had led them there: the draping skin of the old women and the draped blouses they wore over it, the fleshy faces of their balding husbands. Here, the consequence of some bargain made between beautiful people decades ago. I spent the day flying east, chasing nightfall—retracing in hours the miles that had taken me months on the road in a series of listless, hungry vectors. I crossed back over the Mississippi and felt my stomach shift. I was going home, for some value of the word home.
On approach, I watched the stands of trees get bigger, passed the houses crouched low in circular clearings, all struck through with river-glimmer and the thirsty-looking red of country roads. I looked out at all that verdance after flying out of my desert, thought of rot and of growth. Thought: look how everything gathers together.
I figured out where he’d be down there below me, looked out and away toward where he lived. I was on the right side of the plane to do it. But the clouds lingered low over his hometown and I thought insipidly about The Lion King—the warnings we’re given about wandering into darkness. I pulled my attention back to what the light could touch.
When I got to the airport—still. I still scanned every face, though it’d been a year since we’d spoken. Like enemy territory, like on your guard. Like on your mark, get set, go. I imagined what would happen if I did see him, entangled in her arms or else waiting to fly out to her. Would his face still hold that soft, stupid magic, that indelible cosmic glow?
I wonder if my body remembers all its bruises.
Of course he wasn’t there. I waited for my checked bag, delayed after our delayed flight. I climbed into my parents’ car and we drove an hour south in a dissolving rainstorm. I slept the night in that bed where he’d more than once held me down.
It’s always a surprise, how quick it comes back—reaching half-asleep through darkness toward the certainty of nightstand, the familiarity of light switches, of sink. Like I’d never left, like unbroken. Like the only thing wrong this constant hum, the aggressive green of everything; the air itself damp and crawling. The whole place alive with something just below the skin, infested.
The last time I saw him we stood here in this yard under these steadfast oak trees and their shrouds of Spanish moss. I didn’t know, yet, that this place was enchanted—in the true way of fairy tales, in the way that ends in disaster. I didn’t know then it would take thousands of miles of distance to see how dark it was.
That day, he gave me a kiss on the forehead and drove off. The sun threw spangles off the bay and his candy-apple Mustang. Everything was bright enough to hurt.
Later, in the desert, a different man—one I won’t let close enough for bruises—will tell me to imagine a color, any color. That I can find it in a handful of sparkling, arid dirt.