The Space Between
by Andrew Rayle
Do you remember day-tripping from Baltimore to Tampa Bay with nothing but beleaguered hope and a half gram of coke between us? We drove for hours hypnotized by the air, moving like hula dancers above thick black pavement drunk on all the heat, and taken by a comfortable surprise as we allowed the Southern sun to work on us with its sedatives. I fell in love with you in Georgia before the Savannah City Hall, when you cupped my chin in your hand, you said you admired the geometry of my beauty.
I’m laying out the skirt you bought me four years ago. The one you used to say made my legs look like ivory telephone poles. It is flat and dusty now but I need to know that you can still see me from where you are. I need to remember why you left, as memories find me in every part of our house like spider webs I cannot break.
The thermostat is dialed high and the outside world is framed by a thin film of fog on the sliding glass door. The arctic night sky reflects perfectly the glistening of the frost on the ground. My memories of you appear cryptically, like messages you write in the mirror with the oil of your finger in a dream that appear surreptitiously via the steam of your shower.
I remember how I even came to admire the way you stirred your coffee, saying, “The last thing in the world we need now is another early afternoon game show.” I remember how easy it was for you to write your songs. How your lyrics made us second guess the world around us, and revisit with unprecedented accuracy the blinding beauty of the dirty pile of laundry on our bathroom floor, effortlessly. And the beauty exploding from your voice like a champagne bottle stirring the cauldron of echoes in our ears.
I remember how feral strands of your hair were highlighted by the sun as you starred despondently out the window after you found out your father died. And I remember begging you to write just one more song. You said, “The world doesn’t need what I have to offer,” pushing your notebook away for good.
In the winter time when the morning dew froze and suspended the lawn I remember how the grass would crunch like bits of cereal underneath our feet while the bundled children waited for the bus making their breath like they were smoking cigarettes. You said, “These things I use to experience this thing are false and inadequate,” when I brought you hot tea and said you needed to sleep before the funeral.
I remember spending hours with your little brother so downtrodden by Asperger’s that his pushing you away began to take shape as a new form of endearment. I remember the same little brother pushing you off your father’s coffin as you screamed, “You aren’t so tough. You aren’t so tough!” And how later that day you cried in my arms begging for an answer I couldn’t give asking, “Can that really be all there is?”
Everybody knows what everyone else needs, but nobody knows what anyone else thinks. Your father said we didn’t want it enough when all we needed was a chance, to be the player not the ball, or maybe just a bit of time in a world where the sailor’s grapes go rotten on the vine. I remember drinking wine in the shade on summer days and you saying, “There are no immediate answers for the hard times we go through,” waiting for our clothes to dry on the line.
Walking now through the house, past empty closets and mildew bathroom, to the living room where you kept your coffin, where tired light rests having traveled the distance from the moon.
I remember how you would say, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar,” before harvesting its paper shell. I remember how drunk and high we used to get embarrassing ourselves dancing to music on the radio we didn’t even know. You said, “We are golden leaves waiting for the wind to blow us down.”
I remember when you told me to be quiet or else as I found you pressing your ear to the static between radio stations whispering, “If it’s him I need to know for sure.”
I remember discovering great new bands the day after they left for Europe. I remember basking in the relative safety of our parents’ bedrooms, or the bedrooms of our friends. And the slow, steady pelting we received sleeping in the back of your pick-up truck in the rain when we had no where else to go. And how you used to say, “I live the life of your love,” sweetly into the space between your lips and mine.
