Mothlight

A journey, a confession

When I see her broken down blue pickup truck pull into grocery outlet, I unexpectedly find myself shaking. That halfway shiver whose relationship with the cold is always uncertain.

She, as usual, is grinning.

We put my backpack in the back and I climb into the car. “Do you need anything to eat before we go?” She asks. I'm starving but don't want to spend money or slow her down. I can wait the two hours to get home. I tell her I'm fine.

I ask how she's doing as we pull out of the parking lot.

“I don't even want to go into it. I got to bed around four because I was writing and worried about the protests, and then my body woke me up at seven with all the things I'd forgotten to write before.”

Quick mental calculations give me three hours of sleep.

“I took a good nap for about an hour though.”

Four hours of sleep.

I ask if she's okay driving

“I'll be fine.” and then as we make a questionable merge “Maybe I should get coffee. . . Nah, I'll be fine.”

She asks about my day and I go briefly into the tournament and how I'd lost matches I shouldn’t have lost.

I'd come to the clarity of why I won't be starting an amtgard park - I don't want to be bound to an archaic set of rules that make no sense, and stand against the way I was trained. I try and communicated this - sword as a paintbrush - but I don't think I get it across well.

Conversation wanders. I make a crack about needing my license so that I can drive her home. She starts explaining how a stick works, listening for the subtle changes in tone. Lapsing into silence.

Our shared silences are oddly comfortable creatures. Not the awkward beast that bites at your breast with so many teeth, but a silence that curls up in your lap urging you to contemplate its softness.

She pets the silence “I'm not in a talkative mood but you can ramble if you like.”

I can't ramble on command, but I can ask questions. I ask about her worse fear.

She's faced her fears every one, and considers herself stronger for it. She laughs that this newfound strength will attract new troubles - for does not the universe send pain exactly equal to one's strength every time?

I ask about her rings.

She has one on her left pointer that came as a reverse birthday present from her mother, and a gold ring on her right ring finger, where one would put a ring if engaged.

“it signifies my engagement to myself.” I love this idea. She talks about maybe someday doing a marriage ceremony and I offer to be a bridesmaid. She asks me if I am engaged to myself and I tell her about my pattern of choosing women for who I am with them rather than who they are, and how I'd like to like myself just as much when I’m alone.

This segues into how relationships are so often split into roles. I begin telling a story. That day when I bemoaned to Manta how much emotional baggage I put into our relationship when she had none and later that night Shine breaking down and saying the same thing to me after. The realization that I held different things in different relationships.

It's just as I'm getting to Shine’s breakdown that we pull into a gas station. She's worried we're on the wrong highway and the more I peer at the dark rainlit road the less I've recognized it.

She gets out for gas and I bookmark my story so I can find it again. Then wonder why I'm telling it, then realize why I'm telling it. She's hit a lot of men who can't stop everything and hold emotions at need and I want her to know I can. I'm surprised sometimes by how sneaky I accidentally am.

She gets back in and calls her friend in Olympia. We're on highway one-o-eight next to Solky road. I hear one edge of the conversation.

“yeah S-O-L-K-Y.”

“You got it? -” then lighter, laughing “Can you see me?”

Deeper, serous. “F**k"

“An hour drive back to the turn off?”

“Okay, got it, turn left.”

Then we're heading back the way we came. We've doubled our trip time it seems.

“I didn't plan this as a road trip but it seems like it's turned into one.” A couple apologies follow, to which I assure her it's fine, and it is. I love seeing people with everything hanging out, love seeing humanity. She's never hidden that piece of herself, never pretended she has it all together, but the honesty is becoming. The ability to solve problems even more so.

I finish my story, and move on into asking her if she minds being written about.

“it's not like I have much of a choice.” she says. “I write about other people all the time.”

But that wasn't the question and I tell her that. How does she -feel- about being recorded, edited, shared?

“I don't have enough brain cells to answer that question right now.” and then she lets me know she needs music - loud and sing alongable.

We drive for a few hours this way. She singing, and I joining when I can catch a chorus. We pull over a few more times to call to our home base and get an overview. Once she exclaims “it all makes sense now!” and I'm confused until I see the casino and all the roads we've been on align in my head and it really does all make sense.

Mostly I sit and watch her face, expressions echoing across it in the dim light of the dashboard. At some point I figure out there's a reflection in the window so I can watch myself watching her, but the reflection isn't as clear as real life.

I'll never see my face in real life I think, and it makes me sad. If she's more beautiful in the real than so must I. How am I ever to marry myself if I can't see myself?

Thoughts flutter through.

If condensation occurs because of the difference in temperature on the inside and outside of the glass, why did blowing warm air on it make it go away? This baffles me. What is her middle name? Will she be going to dance this week? I should tell her about my lie.

These things get bookmarked and set aside. I will tell her, I will ask, but maybe not this trip. Surely I can hold tension can't I? That's why I lied in the first place. And who wants to hear a confession of love on four hours of sleep anyway?

Her singing is a boundary, a clearly stated need. When I asked her about boundaries, wandering through the silky state park night, she heard me, staged a no on the dance floor, and feels comfortable informing me she's going to sing now. I only wish I didn't have so much to say.

We're on the steep winding bit of the road when she asks me to peel her orange. I do, stash the peels in my coat pocket for future tea, and hand them to her. Taking one slice, even though she's offered as much as I like.

“You should eat more orange. You're probably hungry too.”

I ask her why she's always so nice to me.

“I'll answer that question after this song” she says.

Song ends, music goes off. She recites.

“Before you know what kindness really is you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment like salt in a weakened broth. What you held in your hand, what you counted and carefully saved, all this must go so you know how desolate the landscape can be between the regions of kindness. How you ride and ride thinking the bus will never stop, the passengers eating maize and chicken will stare out the window forever. Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho lies dead by the side of the road. You must see how this could be you, how he too was someone who journeyed through the night with plans and the simple breath that kept him alive. Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing. You must wake up with sorrow. You must speak to it till your voice catches the thread of all sorrows and you see the size of the cloth. Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore, only kindness that ties your shoes and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread, only kindness that raises its head from the crowd of the world to say It is I you have been looking for, and then goes with you everywhere like a shadow or a friend.” - Naomi Shihab Nye, 1952

I like asking her questions. She has good answers.

It feels right so I launch in. I tell her that I told her a Scorpio lie.

“I bet I know exactly what it is.”

Oh?

“No - telling you would be giving it away if I were wrong.”

I tell her.

“Yes, that's what I thought.”

I love how transparent we are to each other. I've yet to be wrong in reading her. She's yet to be wrong in reading me, and yet she still surprises me.

“What did I tell you on the way up?” She asks me. An admission of desire calls for a return offering.

On the way up she started in on her love life, and it's even more complicated than I'd seen. She knows about all the men I wondered if she knew about.

And then in that list she just casually put me. Breaking every rule of seduction, and laying out pros and cons like I do in my head. It's beautiful, and a little awe striking, and I can only strive for that level of honesty.

I give her those pieces I remember. Still deciding. Still figuring out. She elaborates going into more depth this time.

We keep talking about our relationship all the way home. About the ease of it, and the ability to say what we mean and see when it's not being said. The simplicity of it, and the dangers of pushing it where it doesn't serve us. That we don't need to define it.

“I'm obviously attracting something, but who even knows what it's about. I think all these men are just a pathway to Berry hill. Kimble. This was all so I could meet f*****g Kimble.” I have to agree, laughing. Papa is at the center of all this. Who can speak to the mystery of things?

She drops me off at Berry hill. I tell her to get some sleep and not stay up late writing. We hug and part. I go inside and sit in my chair in my room in the dark for a moment as her headlights rumble down the driveway.

And then I begin to laugh. Deep full belly shaking laughter because we talked about everything, and the tension is still there, and that is the most beautiful thing of all.

Then I stay up late and write.