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Nutshell Kingdom: Lake Effect from somewhere near Buffalo
2005
We grew up together basically and if it fell apart, it is because such things almost have to fall apart. I guess.
But before that, before the marriages and divorces and far-flung journeys and cross-country relocations and years of not speaking one out-loud word to one another and the collapsing and rising, always separate, I hate the separateness, we were twinned and the separateness still hurts a little, like a knee injury that can predict the weather, whatever (the last time i saw you was at a restaurant in chapel hill, nov. 17, 1995, we sat at different tables, were polite)...
before all that, before adults and right after childhood, we carried a blanket everywhere we went because we would sneak off into the woods ALWAYS, everywhere, just grab a blanket, sneak off and do horribly wonderful fithypure things to one another. Remember?
Remember the ABF trucks? That was your weird girlish thought. And the notes passed back and forth, you gave me weeks I still recall day-by-day, I can tell you Wednesday thru Sunday even still, 17 years ago this all happened.
We were mosquito bites and hormones, the still air, the buzzing cicada. It was always summer, wasn't it? I could tell what you had on under your clothes (if anything) from a simple raised eyebrow.
O and there were fights as only two people who had no idea how to behave could have fights. Screaming and clawing. Sweating and speeding. Loving you was like being birthed for three straight years. It shaped my head, altered my genetic code.
But it was us, still is, I suppose, to some extent. There's a pang, a lake effect if you will, that enlarges your mind, makes it colder, sharper and harder than it really is. The snow of your disdain rises much higher than the others. I still have to call out the snowplows at every infrequent contact.
These things that happen when hormones collide with love, when two people learn to talk like one another, they don't come often. It happened to me, when I was just barely alive; I was being taught to feel more than simple nostalgia. It happened to me and I'm not taking any of it back.
