"Where the fuck have you been?" She said as I pulled up. "I've been waiting here for a fucking month it seems."
Or so it seems.
"I've been busy. Film. LA. Hollywood. Important things like that."
She slammed the door after she slipped into the back seat. There were boxes piled in the front seat. They had been there for months and I had no time to move them. I didn't even know what was in them anymore. Maybe John's old clothes. Maybe my mother's dishes.
"Really, what's your excuse for not coming back here sooner? I mean, it's not that far away and it takes, what 15 minutes to get here. You too busy? Too self important?" She lit up a joint, took a long drag and then out of habit tried to pass it to me.
"What?! You crazy?! You know how I get on that shit. Stop it. And back the fuck off!"
I didn't dare tell her why I really hadn't been here for a while. First, I was lazy. Sure, it was true, work was driving me into the ground, and there was the LA trip, but truthfully, I couldn't stand facing the silence followed by all the criticism. Just couldn't do it, not every day. Besides every time I did show up, I felt like it was my first day on a job--didn't seem to know a thing, I didn't get the lingo, I was so insecure I could barely form a sentence.
"So what's happening, anything new with your business idea, that one about the internet thingymabob?" She sat in the middle of the back seat so we could keep eye contact through the rear view mirror. I saw the searching in her eyes, that look for failure, for false promises.
"Haven't had time." I mumbled. "Besides, now's not really the time." I caught a grin on her mouth and before she could say anything I cut her off.
"You don't know shit, so stop your grinning. When's the last time you even held a job you dumbshit. So stop your taunting."
I felt bad after I said it. And we drove down the street in a cloud of smoky cool silence, past the billboards for the next new thing. I wanted that next new thing. Wanted it bad, but couldn't see it. Couldn't taste it. Maybe that's why I hadn't been back here. This isn't the next new thing. It's now. It's here. It's raw. It's history and memories and most of all it's unknown. I wanted certainty, but I wasn't going to get it, not here.
Funny. She had been called a bimbo before, but for some reason, on this corner, on this day, it made her laugh so hard she doubled over. She doubled over so hard her head nearly touched the ground and a car full of Koreans on their way to church stopped, rolled down their window and when they heard her cackle, they rolled their window back up, and sped away. When she caught her breath and raised her head he was still standing next to her. She was tempted to double over again, falsely this time, with the hope that when she lifted her head the second time he would be gone.
“What? You’re still here? I thought you said you didn’t want to be with a bimbo. So why you still standin’ here if you’re smarter than a bimbo?”
“This is what I mean. This is exactly why I call you a bimbo. Look at you. Your eyes are all smeared and black, you’re missing an earring, and your hair's not even blond no matter how much you put that shit on it." He flicked his cigarette into the street and then finished his last comment shrouded in smoke. “And honestly, you’re just not that smart.”
This is when her laughter started, deep down in her belly. Not because it was funny, but because it was ludicrous. She looked up at the yellow sign and reminded herself: there’s no outlet being a woman.
Smart. She just wasn’t that smart. She was smart back in the 4th grade when Tommy O’Brien asked her over every day so she could do his math homework and in return he would kiss her for each correct answer. And she was smart when her mother’s boyfriend would stay over and she would lock her door. And she was smart when she worked at Wall-Mart and did an extra five hours a week to make sure she got overtime and benefits. And she was smart when she left her last boyfriend because he had a problem with gambling with her money and her heart.
And she was smart when she turned down Sanchez Street, knowing what he would say.
“See, you’re such a bimbo! It says no outlet. Jeez, how do you think you’re gonna get outta here?” He yelled and pointed at the sign as she kept walking.
She walked with purpose, head in the air. Being a smart bimbo she knew that no outlet was the story of her life and that today, like any other day, she’d find her way out.
Dear JoJo,
Burn me. Burn these words that you’ve written to me. Burn the salt of tears. You can’t come close to this heat. You can’t know the fire that rages in me right now. Is it humanly possible to burn this hot without your insides melting, molten?
When your letter was left at my door, pages and pages of your mind spread out as wide as a canyon, I spent two days rambling over and under your sentences while tears stained the landscape. How did you know I was still here? How did you deliver this from so far away? I haven’t been able to forget that day you stopped me to ask directions to the church, thinking I was a local. And I thought you were Italian, but come to find you were from the same city outside of Prague as my great grandmother.
And now you have left me the weight of the past and I have to burn the remnants. I wish I had told you sooner that your love had been replaced, or at least smothered by something different. You thought I had children and married, but I actually had a child with no marriage. She works in that little café we once met in for tea after I met your mother for the first time. Sometimes I miss your mother, her wisdom and her tea cakes. I still have her recipe and made the tea cakes for Anna’s 18th birthday. I have decided to leave Prague now. It is time to return home to New York. You would have enjoyed New York, but those boots of yours wouldn’t leave the continent, would they? I wonder what would have happened if we had moved to New York, if we would have survived in America. Maybe the freedom frightened you. I wonder now what your new found freedom has in store for you.
Travel lightly my love,
Sara
Dear JoJo,
I received your letter, late. Had I made that half-mile trip to the post box just a few days earlier I would have known. I must tell you that I am surprised. Surprised that you remembered me. Surprised that you bothered to write. How can it be after 30 some years you can conjure the feel of my braids and your fingers releasing the twists of hair? All I know is the wiry grey and the knots that pull on my head. What I do remember are your boots. They were so old and tired and when you pulled them off your feet I remember thinking to myself—this is what life is, simply a covering that slips off. Now I am left with your boots in my mind and your life slipping off and falling to the ground. I wonder now if you will forgive me for stepping off that platform and on to that train, for ignoring the stomp of your boots as I ran from you and into the mountains. You know, you could have come for me. You could have put those boots onto a trail and come for me. And now, now I can’t come to you. This letter will land no where now, just the ink to page and page to envelope and envelope to no where. No where but here. I am surprised, surprised that you remembered me and surprised at how well I remembered you. I will mail this note to you and hope in my heart that it finds you. Finds you peacefully sitting by the fire, boots near the door, and me by your side.
With all my heart,
Sara
For my rusty words, my illegible sentences, my stories that make no sense. Tis the life of a writer. Do you understand? Are you not a writer in your own right? Tap tap we all go on these keyboards, clever or smpl. I want to be prolific and cathartic at the same time. I think it is not possible. So every day for the next 30 days I will sit here, wondering if you care, not caring if you care, and tap tap tapping on this keyboard, stained and worn. Words want to meet you, to caress you, to tickle your ears, but I get in the way. I want them to walk rather than stalk, swim rather than run or brush rather than poke. Space and silence. The desert for me is the epitome of writing--prickly, sometimes barren, most certainly powerful, and forever transformative. The desert makes me wish for a little oasis, one that is full of umbrella drinks and the call of a waterfall rather than the unforgiving terrain of rock and cactus.
So forgive me. As we move through this month I will certainly stumble and beg for water (or gin), and cry for the ocean. But I will also challenge myself to scale the rocks and grab deep into the earth for gems, gems that remind us of beauty and grief and love and peace.
"Where the fuck have you been?" She said as I pulled up. "I've been waiting here for a fucking month it seems."
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