Snow

Still, nobody knows if it’s better to write about snow on a country road from an apartment in the middle of an urban sprawl, in a small cabin several miles away from the country road, or on the country road itself. Still, nobody knows if love can exist only in time, like most concepts and biological processes, or if love is independent of time, because it is a more mysterious form of experience that existed before metaphysics and Euclidean geometry, as we understand them in the human sense. Nobody knows. Sometimes I like to listen to the birds and children through the open window (European), but sometimes I resist the Stoßlüften because I want to feel sealed inside of my atomized identity (American). Nobody knows which of these actions inadvertently represents a nonpartisan conservative ideology. Still!

***

Reproductive futurism is unsexy, but so is the revelation that you might never make a choice about having a child. The day might come when you are too old. I try to remember certain things about my relatives, my friends from high school, or girls I knew who went to the school one town over from mine. People tiptoe in and out of view. You have no choice; you chop more vegetables. Even as I try to remember that girl, the girl I liked with the light brown hair, the non-obviousness of memory reminds me that I will only ever remember her fully in dreams. She wore under-eye eyeliner. She resisted the mandatory, tri-county beauty pageant by cutting a hole in her dress, at the crotch.

***

Santal. I’m alive to breathe in the candle. I’m alive to warm up the chicken, eat it in a bedroom, then open the windows and spray the room with scented linen spray. On the windowsill, a plant from my boyfriend brightens inside a beam of sunlight. Sometimes, I imagine the plant is my boyfriend. It helps me sleep. But sometimes I wake in the night shivering from the desire for solace of a different kind, the kind that comes from novels, old quilts, and ideas about the future that involve women, solitude, oceans. My boyfriend still exists in that fantasy, but he is far away on a different continent, taking care of our children, or building wooden sailboats by hand, or having a quiet but passionate affair with the son of the woman who owns the seaside tavern. We write each other letters. We live our lives apart. The attention of the other in memory is comfort enough.

***

I want what two other women I know want. Expensive sheets. A black iPhone without a case, spinning on a larger piece of translucent circular glass. Flowers and jewelry, given to you by lesbian lovers. Affairs. First-person narratives and confessional poetry, written for, about, and with us. Dreaming without analysis. I want to escape the dirty house I live in, where my roommates are two boys. But I want the boys to visit me in my new house, which, in the fantasy, is sparklingly clean. I will wash them in the bath. I will soap them up like children, then let them watch the largest bubble. It will float towards the ceiling. It will not pop.