Morning Wood

I lay back on the soiled sheets and rearranged the pillows. The pillowcases needed to be washed. The room was grey with careless use, our sweat still fresh and the sheets damp beneath me.

“Hey, man,” she said again, leaning back to stare at me with her dark brown eyes, eyes dark like her hair, wet and wild, eyes deep, masked, like the shaded trout pools on the North Bank.

“Yes,” I said into her silence, the silence of the not-still-young, a silence which ran like a river beneath the fast chat and the joke lines, the riffs of a private vernacular, a silence of frustration and anxious grief for nameless losses.

“Hey, man don’t be sad, okay? Older guys, afterwards, you know, they get down. I don’t like to see guys sad after we fuck. It makes me blue,” she said. She sounded lonesome, like November morning rain among the sycamores along the river.

“You don’t make me sad,” I said, not telling her that where she was is sometimes sadder than any middle age, that she made me feel old, older than the mountains, more ruined than the clear-cut sitting jagged on the sunburned slopes outside the windows; not saying that her life was full, and still in front of her, that the heartbreak and loss that was coming was like nothing she had ever seen, that her laughter and her stories of people I would never meet, never play cards with, released me from the dark tunnel of my own journey here but they also brought a boxcar of regret, a wind rent with lost voices and restless souls, all of it real for me in the hollow light of countless broken mornings.

“It’s been too nice a day to be blue,” I said.

“Great,” she said, sadly.

And if I could have done it I would have lifted her in my arms, she as light as a bundle of dried blackberries. I wanted to break the spell, to heave her into a creek somewhere, to shout and splash water happily, to find some quick irony with which to resist, to overcome.

She looked over at the clock, almost apologetically. It was almost always apologetically. When she turned back it took a second or two for her to be back in the room.

“You’re crying, you old goat,” she whispered sweetly, almost happy.

“Maybe I’m still high.”

“You’re not still high; you’re crying.”

“Maybe so, but I ain’t fuckin’ blue.”

Photo Credits

“Women and Sand” by Michael Lebowitz