Cable World

I bring them everywhere, leave them everywhere, my grandmother was in the next room and came in to see what the noise was, it was a small pink house in an old neighborhood, and piled near the door in a plastic bag were my cables, in the dark corner of the white painted walls, which smelled like lilies in summer, and my grandmother bent at the hip and looked down at the crumpled bag in the corner, her nails were always long and acrylic, they pinched the bag and looked inside,

I start with the highway. I was attached to someone else my whole life, I was always afraid, not to be alone but to want to be.

I would drive home and watch the black branches wave and know I had another three hours of being alone, only my hands on the wheel and the darkness in front of me, I would pretend like things were like they are now, like I was free to feel completely.

Something begins to rain down on us, it is sticky and my grandmother smiles in the tar, she loves to listen to me, the pink house is becoming dark with the movement of the cables, soon we will be suspended on wires, strung high above the ground, my grandmother clasps her hands and waits,

I'm getting agitated, I'm shouting through black plumes of smoke,

We should have ended three years ago, the day we drove to Clackamas Town Center and we walked through the parking lot together, I took your hand and I said that I was feeling something, that it was suddenly so beautiful, something was funny and you said, I hate when you get like this, that was funny but I think you missed that the real me had come out for a moment, I think you missed that something true had happened and that I was really more there than here.

My grandmother begins to paint, the cables are everywhere between us but she lets them take her body and move her arms for her, she does not paint the blackness but instead the color I'm describing to her, she sees the feeling I tell her clearly,

I knew the man at the cable store, he was self-actualized, with jokes he liked from facebook printed out and taped all up and down the wall, there in that meaningless strip mall, the PVC he used to hold the price tags had stood exactly as he left them for twenty years, I was enraptured, he swims through my dreams, of course, I wish to be him, standing and nodding behind the counter, as though he already knew everything, in the backroom he sits and considers his life, over a strange cup of black coffee.

I reiterate, the strip mall was always changing, it was only that you couldn't see it. The travel agency and the martial arts studio would always have new owners but the same signs, you could never speak when you were sad or angry, your voice became lost in your throat. Perhaps that was really why he had all those signs hung up, was it true that you were afraid to make a mistake?

I drove over the empty swaths of I5 and in the darkness reflected on the window I imagined everyone, I imagined myself saying everything, the words coming once I was alone,

I walked down the hall in my old school and in the center stood a model of Challenger before flight of course, forever held to the ground, forever tied in safety, was it true you were afraid to lose me? As I drove home over the miles of empty fields, it was true I was always wishing for something else, I lay on my bed when I was 12 and imagined another life, somewhere with a thousand blue lights that shone on me all through the night, I climbed the cliffs of my town and drove far up the mountain roads, I'd feel the change growing on the other side, growing from the campfire, from the crooked teeth of the neighbors, I'd feel it in your hand on my shoulder as we stood in the gravel lot and listened to the trucks starting.

I write about patterns all day but it's not about you, the women speaking begin to read the words on my page, the words begin to be about me, the letters start with my name,

She looks back, does she understand? Do you understand?

The women speak of everything I already know, they are in psychosomatic therapy, they have past lives, I just got the pattern, it really doesn't prove much, metaphors, it's easy to imagine DNA making a body but what can my words make?

The road curves and I drive on, the wheels turned before I even asked them to, as though I had already moved but in a dream,

I came to a new country and was very afraid, I could not taste, I could not smell, my first week I was blind. The sound of the gunshot rang in my head, do you know what a gun looks like when it is used against you?

The cables stretch the pink house and it is unrecognizable, my grandmother is warped into something new,

You never lose the shape of the gun, I took the gun to this new country, I cradled it between my stomach and my legs as I slept, I still could not see the dirt on my bed and I noticed only that I could not hear my own voice for I was always drowned out by the crowds, I was the most animal that I have ever been,

Then I was taken somewhere new and important, I began to ride the ring train many times, I never thought of I5 , I never thought of who I was then, I was separated, I was the steel barrel, I carried only this through the streets, I was only fog and imaginary to everyone but you,

Within the house that is now only built of strands of something else I am again in my skin.

I remember the drive, the way home, I remember the outside of my old school, I remember my hair in my face, I remember the strip mall and what lay below, I look now, I look into the hole and see again,

What will happen, the owner smiles at me, I come in, he is pleased to see me, I sleep in the building across the street, it is purple inside and smells like lilac, I will never be home again I fear,

The owner motions, it is the slipping of the fingers that I remember, so close to the trigger, your voice, I've forgotten.

It is true, my grandmother has moved, she is no longer home, no longer living here,

The owner sees me, he understands immidiately what I am and where I sleep. He sees that I looked through the diamond of the chain link fence and saw the houses which stretched up and down the hillside, as I looked out the front window at night and watched the streetlight burn, he saw my brown hair cover my eyes, and so he motions, and I come forward.