At the age of thirty, you decide to go home because the circumstances of your life allow you to do so, and like everyone else, you are looking for a place that feels safe. This is not a frontier, but a returning—the sun setting ahead of you, the sky gone pink as if hung over a fire.
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You receive a text message you are not expecting––an apology––and feel gratitude toward a person who hurt you. This feeling is terrifying.
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You drive through Appalachia at night, through mountains folded into sleep, purple and growing with breath. You are a landscape turning under the clouds. You are forever inching toward the edge of a sheet that never quite falls from your hip.
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When the city reopens, you and your mother go to see the paintings of J. M. W. Turner. Paper and canvas stained with the sublime, water and oil slicked into landscape, soft and sharp. The curb of an elbow, the inside of a thigh.
In the center gallery, The Deluge—bodies flailing in the rush of divine. At the edge of the earth, a man lifts a woman into the air, into breath, their backs turned to you, looking ahead to a blaze just beyond the horizon, breaking through a sky closing like a scar.
You admire God’s wrath on his own first drafts.
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Dream Sequence: Your mother is young and tanning on the deck of a boat anchored at Lake Decatur. You exist within her; you see what she sees but as a separate consciousness. Together, you revel in the openness of the body you inhabit, freckles dilating in the warmth of the sun. This sensation swells in your stomach as a man untethers the boat to take you onto the lake. A snake slithers out from between your legs.
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At another canvas, forsaking narrative and form, Sun Setting over Lake, your mother leans in closely and points to a single stroke of paint.
Is that a blemish or was that on purpose?
You both laugh at the question, and you tell her that, steady in the spill of so much color, she is pointing at the sun.
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Was it really hard for you?
An old classmate invites you to dinner and asks you questions like this while her husband puts their children to bed. Time has rendered you unrecognizable to each other, though some of the original surface still holds. Fragments shine through the way you carry your bodies and divert your eyes—
[Read: Was it hard for you when the preacher called you a queer from the pulpit?]
—from those glints of familiarity, a language shared by those who come from the same world, an I remember you passed with the panna cotta and a spoon dripping with raspberry.
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You drive by a fallow field where once, when it stood heavy with alfalfa, you wrote a poem about making love. You are just as virginal at thirty, and even though you know better, you still can’t help but wonder, Could it still come, even this late, as a field in yellow?
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Dream Sequence: The backlit figure of a man, at once the boy who wrote fag on your locker and a man in uniform. Your faces shift in the ripple of shadow and light. You are fifteen; you are thirty. Though he is married now and a father, you don’t stop him when he takes your face in his hands or when the weight of his belt comes off or when the weight of him on top of you, everything coming off.
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On the phone, you tell a friend how you are losing words to sense: a person, a memory, a feeling. Each time you round a street corner—though things no longer appear as large, the bends in the road less scary, less silver, the patch of daffodils less yellow, even the whitewashed wood of the church less blazing—it all comes back, and you refract with each step.
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In the aisle of a grocery, you recognize a voice. His daughter points at you in passing, but you are both wearing masks, and he nods without recognition.
If I were a little more drunk . . . . You know what he means, and you know what you want, and you are afraid of both.
You don’t say anything until he’s gone. Until long after he’s gone.
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You and your mother drive by the house where you grew up. Look how tall the trees have grown, you say.
Your father told me each time I’d plant a new one that he’d never feel the shade of those trees. The heart beats twice, two blinks. And he was right.
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You are on a date with a man you met online, and for a moment you watch him as you stand apart. You no longer believe things are divined, but you think, He is here with me, which is new and feels bigger than anything you’ve believed before.
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Washing the dishes, your mother says, Sometimes I wonder how different my life would be if I had a different father.
Memory, you want to tell her, is a wound that doesn’t go away.
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She says you only remember the bad things. You remember the good things, too, but they were born out of a contingency which your very existence breaks.
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Dream Sequence: You sneak into the church at night wearing a custodial uniform and bowling shoes. Into the fuchsia carpet, you pour two dark rivers of gasoline, intersecting, and watch the building light up from inside out, the way you were told our bodies are supposed to when the Holy Spirit descends. The steeple disappears into the church’s stomach.
When you were a child, you would try to push your penis back inside of you like a shitty first draft.
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The voice of a friend: What makes you want to go back?
Your answer: Love.
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You tap the wells of your memory for something good. Something to hold onto, to hold out, Here, as proof that you haven’t let everything sour. You turn memories over in your hands like photographs, some inspiring closer inspection than others. But at dinner, you think you’d rather hold on to this: the sun still coming through the windows, and on the radio, O-o-h Child, and with your mother and her husband, food in your mouths, a chorus:
Things are gonna get easier.
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You are startled awake by the sound of your own voice. In the dark of the kitchen, a light from the fridge door illuminates your hand pressed to the spout for water. Your cup overflows.
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You and your mother have said things that hurt each other. Your faces are heavy and red. Outside, your gazes are lost in the drama of the trees straining to net the day’s last light, their crowns flickering like bright fish. There is still so much you don’t know about each other. You do not speak because there is nothing new to say about it: the sky. It is big. It is blue. It remains.