In Absence

You left your ratty slippers
on the shoe stand.
I find your toothbrush
still in its place, bristles
touching mine.
There are dustballs here
made of your skin cells,
and cobwebs that
carry the weight of your gaze.
You left fingerprints
on the light switches.
Your goodbye a breath, still
on the doorstep.
Still hanging on the coat rack.
Still dripping from the tap.

vacancies

you are

now: beside.
entwined,
lace,
like snakes.
you are
snakes, now
entwined –
me,
you
beside me.

now: away.
reaching,
space,
like planes.
you are
planes, now
reaching –
me,
you
away me.

now: here.

then:
                        aside.

gameface

today

i saw you for ten minutes,
the first ten minutes
in two weeks.
i smiled
because i missed you –
i haven't seen you in so long

but

i have a couple questions:
when did you grow that mole on your face?
when did your cheeks decide to stick
to the hollows of your skull?
when did your hair grow that long?
the last i checked you had a haircut
pretty recent

and

when did you rewrite your fingerprints?
when did that octopus build a home
on your head?
when did your mouth carry a deeper voice,
did the piano in your throat
tune itself a couple octaves down?
who switched off the lights in your eyes?
who painted you another shade of tan?
who stole your smile from its home on your lips?
when did the grooves in your ears become canyons?
why did your chin come out of hiding?
in two weeks did you grow another face?

sorry

if i was the one who planted it there

(distance kind of does that)

i thought i saw you

I thought I saw you, but it wasn’t you.
It was a rifle.
I forget that you are
more like a sunflower
than anything
else.

I thought I saw you, but it wasn’t you.
It was a rainbow.
I remember that
everything
was
black and white
for you.

I thought I saw you, but it wasn’t you.
It was a glass of wine.
On the tip of my tongue
you were
ice cold mercury
instead.

I thought I saw you, but it wasn’t you.
It was a sunbeam.
And you have
always been
more like
the sun
itself.

Pinwheel

I found the strangest thing in my pocket. It was the universe. I took it out and laid it on my palm, even held it close to my face like a gumball, and I licked it. The universe tasted like ice.

*

I walked home holding the thing, the universe, you know – you, basically. Holding you, your family, their families, and your pets, and their families, and all the animal rights activists who think you're a bad owner for sometimes keeping your dog in a crate, and holding the Earth, and Mercury, and the sun, and nebula, and your solar system, and Pegasi, and Virginis, and all these other planetary systems, and all the other galaxies in the universe. I was walking home and I kept the universe in my balled fist.

I finally got to my house. It's a humble little thing – Freja and I built it together, and she is a really talented painter so the walls of our home are all sorts of colors and images, and that's no problem with me because I have absolutely no qualms with living in her art. Anyway, I didn't have my keys on me, so I knocked and waited for Freja to come to the door.

It was a little under a minute before she came. She opened the door with a "Hi, honey," and a quick kiss on the cheek, and I saw that she had a smear of blue paint just above her right eyebrow.

"Landscape, portrait, abstract...?" I asked, closing the door behind me and following her down the hallway and into the study. The study is an amazingly bland room – off-white walls, dark blue carpet, one French window, all boring, but Freja insists the plainness is vital because wallpaper or other art can't play a role in her own paintings. Freja's easel is next to the window. There is a floor lamp on one corner of the room and a couch next to it, so whoever is sitting there can see what Freja's painting. There is also a desk and a bookshelf along the opposite wall, with a cuckoo clock that doesn’t work hanging on it. It's a boring, little, cozy place but it's the room we spend the most time in.

"Portrait, I think," she said, taking her seat on a stool, back straight, lovely as ever. She looked back at me, smiled a little. "Though that can quickly change." She faced her painting again, picked up her paintbrush, and dipped it in some red.

I nodded, grinning as well and leaned on the doorframe. "Hey, listen – I found something in my pocket."

She continued with her painting and I watched her, waiting for her to react. Or something.

“Well?”

“Is there more to this story or is that your rising action, climax, resolution?” she asked impatiently, with an angry red stroke at her canvas, slicing her painting’s face into halves.

I smiled at her bluntness and sarcasm and temper – fire is what I look for in a person, and Freja is made out of it, she spits it, she breathes it, it dances on her tongue – and made my way to the couch. I plopped down on it and finally opened my fist, which had been closed the whole time. “Look.”

I saw her stop painting for a while, but she didn’t look right away. She put her paintbrush down and turned to me hesitantly. She half-laughed, half-sighed in relief when she saw the universe in my palm. “Oh. You made it sound so–I thought it might have been…” She shook her head, laughing and collecting herself. “Something bad. I don’t know.” She stood up from her stool, and sat next to me. She brought her face close to the universe. She whistled. “That’s something, isn’t it?”

“Yep,” I said. “The entire universe. In my palm.”

“Is it… is it living?”

I paused. “Well…” Paused again. “I suppose. I’m not sure. Maybe not. Doesn’t really look like anything is moving.”

We sat in silence for a while. “Oh!” Freja’s eyes suddenly lit up. “I have a friend in art class who is into this sort of thing. He studies the universe, and all. He’d love to see this. Ben – remember Ben?”

“Yeah. Coffee on us, Friday?”

“I’ll tell him tomorrow.”

“Great,” I said, rolling the universe between my two hands.

“Don’t do that,” she warned. “Climate change.”

*

The next day, while heating my bagel in the kitchen, I called in to have the next couple days off at work because I had to look after the universe. I had the phone pressed to my ear in my right hand and the universe in my left. I didn’t have to explain myself because right after I’d said, “I’m looking after the universe,” the universe made a really loud cracking sound.

“Is it… is it okay?” Margaret, the receptionist, asked on the other end of the phone.

I brought the universe closer to my eyes so I could make sure. “Yeah,” I said, “the two Magellanic Clouds had a little fight, that’s all, maybe the gravity of the Large one pulled in the Small one, I dunno, I’ll have it checked.”

“All right… Anyway, I’ll let Mark know you can’t come in today. We’ll send someone else to the Bodes’ – maybe he can close better than you.”

“Or she.” I laughed. “Cheers.” I hung up and put the phone down, and set the universe down on the wooden dining table. I took a seat, rested my chin on my palms, and stared at the universe.

Freja came rushing into the kitchen. “Did that sound come from” – she pointed at the universe, wide-eyed – “that?”

“The cracking?’

“No, the whistling kettles and the singing dandelions, idiot.”

I fought back a smile. Always a fan of her biting sarcasm. “Yes, it did.”

She exhaled deeply, and paused. “Sign of life, isn’t it?”

*

(Brief intermission: So, yes, that was when I realized I was not just holding the universe. I mean, I knew I wasn’t just holding the universe – I was aware that I was holding everything in the universe, too: all the stars, all the dark matter, all the ideas, every thought any being had ever had, and I had, in my palm, every breath ever breathed in history, and so on – but I thought I just had one second of that. I thought I had a picture of the universe in my palm, a freeze-frame of Everything That Has Ever Happened In Time. I thought I had one second of you in my palm – maybe a picture of you mid-walk, or you mid-bend, or you with your spoon and soup halfway into your mouth. I didn’t think that everything in my palm was breathing. Freja catches everything I miss.)

*

It was finally Friday. I was really hoping Ben could shed some light on what was happening, because I had run out of ideas. And I wanted to know if this was supposed to last forever – me being the universe’s caretaker – and if so, then what is the proper way of taking care of the universe, is there a how-to book for this, and other things of that sort.

Freja squeezed my hand. “Don’t be anxious.”

I forced a smile.

“Where is it?” she asked.

I patted the pocket of my jeans.

“Freja?” The voice came from behind us.

We both turned around.

“Ben!” Freja said, standing up and kissing his cheek. “Thanks for coming!”

“Hey, thank you for inviting me,” he said, making his way around the round table. “Great café.”

“And an even greater occasion,” I added, digging into my pocket, taking out the universe, and putting it on the center of the table.

He breathed out, not even leaning closer to inspect it or anything. “Haven’t seen one in years.”

“How long?”

“Almost fourteen billion now – hang on.” Ben’s eyebrows drew together and he picked up the universe, and put it really close to his face. Uncomfortably close. Close enough for everyone in the universe to see a pair of eyes among the stars.

Freja and I looked at each other.

“Is-is there something wrong?” she finally asked.

“It’s all dark,” Ben said, his voice quiet.

“Does that mean anything?” I began to feel nauseous. I didn’t want to hear the answer to this question at all.

“You just found this in your pocket?” he asked.

“Yeah, completely out of nowhere.”

“Has it–”

“Made a sound?” Freja said. “Loud. Sounded like cracking.”

Ben motioned for me to extend my hand, so I did, and he carefully put the universe on my palm. It was the most delicate movement I’d ever seen. He used both of his hands to press my fingers close so that the universe was now back in my balled fist, like the first time I held it. “It’s dead.” It spilled from his mouth like the most carefully crafted accident.

“The universe is dead?”

“Afraid so.”

“It can’t be dead. It’s the universe.”

“Look, usually, the first thing that goes in the universe is light. All the light is gone. The absolute signifier of the universe’s death is that cracking sound. That’s the collapse of Everything and Everywhere. Collapse. The galaxies drift far, far away from each other – so far that it’ll hit the Edge of the Universe in in the span of a minute. A human minute. That means everything that makes up a galaxy – all those stars and systems – gets stretched, and gravity and matter and bonds won’t even dare to hold anything together. Because they can’t. Because everything is falling apart. Everything and Everywhere falls apart.”

There was a lengthy silence.

“What causes it?” I asked, feeling like my voicebox fell to my stomach.

“Time,” Ben said simply, shrugging his shoulders. “Time decides everything. I suppose Time thought it was the universe’s time to go. It’s the sovereign dimension. We won’t have any luck trying to tell it to fix things.”

“So there’s a way to fix this?” Freja asked.

*

Freja was quiet the entire walk home. When we got to our doorstep, she stabbed the key into the keyhole.

“Hey, whoa, Freja–”

“There’s a way to fix this.” She pushed the door open, stepped inside, dropped her keys on the floor, and made her way to the study.

I followed her, telling her to “stop, Freja, stop, Ben said we couldn’t do anything about it, please, let’s just forget about this for a while.” I didn’t want her wasting her time. I finally got to the study and I saw that Freja had taken out all her tins and tubes of paint – oil, acrylic, watercolor, everything. All the paint she owned, laid out on the floor. I ran my hand through my hair, exasperated. “What are you planning, Freja?”

She turned to look at me and she gave me the most vicious look I had ever seen on any face and I asked myself if I really loved her for her temper. “I plan to revive the universe,” she said. Low, dark, venomous.

“Ben said–”

“I plan to try to revive the universe.” And we both fell quiet.

And she slowly made her way to me, and looked me in the eye – really looked me in the eye, and maybe picked apart all the parts of my eye, looked past that, looked close enough to count the neurons, and found my soul, or spirit, or something. Maybe she was trying to memorize the color of my eyes so she could replicate it in paint – and then she quietly shut the door, keeping me away from her.

*

I sat outside the door to the study all night.

And then, all day.

And then, all of that night.

And I sat outside the door for the next five days, and I never left.

I sat outside the door to the study for a whole week.

*

On the seventh day, I heard the cuckoo clock ring, and immediately realized what that meant.

I put my head in my hands and wept for a long, long time.

*

Two nights later, it’s Tuesday night and I finally gathered the strength to enter the study.

I got up from the floor, put my hand on the doorknob. Exhaled deeply, and twisted the knob. The door seemed to swing all the way open by itself.

Freja had painted the universe. Every atom that made up a galaxy, on the off-white walls. The Milky Way, Andromeda, Pinwheel, every galaxy and all the planetary systems in them, and the one solar system where you live, and even you, and all the atoms of you. On the off-white walls.

I stepped into the study in the dark, letting the light from the hallway make the room a little less dim. I inched toward Freja’s easel and exhaled. There it is, on her palette. The color of my eyes.

And then I walked to the cuckoo clock, digging the universe out of my pocket. I kept it in my closed fist. I looked at the clock. There was a birdhouse under the clock, which is where the cuckoo bird burst out of when it rang. With my free hand I pulled the cuckoo bird out of its house, and put the universe behind it, making sure it wouldn’t roll away or move or anything. I pushed the bird back into its house, and pressed my forehead against the arms of the clock. I exhaled deeply and I noticed it was shaky and I told myself Freja wanted this and she worked for it and she’d done her part and more than that. I felt oceans forming in my eyes. I opened my mouth. “Let there be light.”

And I stepped away from the clock, watching it burst into flames. Fire.