A Stream of Her Consciousness

She would read a book and be in the mood of it for days, the mood of whatever was happening in the story. Lovers’ quarrels were the worst, especially when the man was to blame, but she liked it when they made up again, tender and sweet. Only this does not always happen in books, especially the ones she reads. Most of them make her sad, and she knows that but reads them anyway, because she will settle for nothing less than the nit and grit and bittersweet and ugly, and shocking maybe, or illustrations of the dull, gray monotony of the everyday; the rock in every stomach and the dryness of every tongue and the enigmatic question undefined in every mind.

So she takes on the mood of what she read and often it is a sort of melancholy introspection. Sometimes she’ll read something more optimistic—about what she considers to be happiness of substance; the “comes-after-something-hard” appreciation for continued life in which the sun rises and sleep feels nice. The sun is pretty, and sleep is something you have to do anyway. So continued life with still some beauty in it, and guiltless rest when you are tired.

Her fuse is shorter in the summertime—or at least she’d like to believe so, quietly hoping she isn’t this way all year long; that it really is just this heat. This swelter, these temperatures so high she can hear the buzz and drone, sun so bright it beats her eyes blind. White noise always in her ears and white light always in her eyes and sweat trickling down, tickling her back and making her clothes stick to her and her hair flat.

It didn’t used to bother her so much, being out in the heat. She remembers the high temperatures picking apples in Weston as a child: small apples, apples of red and yellow, of dusty worm holes and red and tart and juicy still and so red next to the yellow, and it was fine because she never found a single worm in any of the apples. She consumed them under those old-lady cedars across the street from the orchard. Their trunks and branches that bent toward the ground in an arch above her, and when she sat in the tangle of its roots she would be pulled into a sweet nostalgia, reminding her of the lap of her grandmother. Grandmother used to curl around her like that, like the tree did, when she sat in her lap as a baby. She doesn’t actually remember that, but she has seen so many pictures and knows her grandmother’s scent so well that it is almost like remembering.

It is summer now, but damp these last few days and hummingbirds swarm like locusts around the feeders, stabbing manically at the sugar water inside. They never come to her favorite feeder—the expensive one, the pretty glass one with copper accents—instead flocking to the cheap red plastic flowers glued to a transparent cylinder that hangs from the roof of the porch by a rusty hook. She leaves the glass one out though, just in case. They are such delicate little creatures; certainly sooner or later they will realize they belong among the finer things.

She thinks quite frequently. She thinks of things more often than she does them, and when she does do things she thinks so much about the doing of them that she forgets to experience the things she does.

She has thoughts and she thinks them late at night, late at night when she can’t sleep. Round and round, the horses gallop, pounding, pulling carriages that bump roughly over every wrinkle in her brain. She’s rearranging her furniture hoping that it will make other changes easier; hoping it will fool her heart into thinking that the strange horizon is a fresh start rather than the ruins of what she painstakingly pieced together with her own two hands and blood, sweat, and tears. A model-future, the scaled-down structure of what she thought things might be. Hopeful ideas glued together with circumstantial facts, forming a skeleton that was the practical plan beneath the lovely Dream.
The Dream had been lovingly sculpted with tender—if shaky—hands, every bit of it. The airy hypostyle supported by a forest of twisting Solomonic columns with capitals carved to the very last ornate detail, the symbolic finials perfectly placed atop onion domes, the tracery artfully dispersed inside the arched and vaulted rooms, a custom-make of everything her own. She had even furnished it with the people and things she hoped would be included there if the model-future was ever realized.
It was perfect. Elaborate—even gaudy, perhaps—but hers. Specific enough for security and joyful anticipation, but left with enough unfinished parts to be exciting and mysterious.
But she knows the glue of facts pertains to the present and thus is subject to change. Years of planning and building and loving and laughing and crying and heartache and happiness and meticulous craftsmanship. She has almost forgotten that it is only a prototype, a rough draft; not necessarily a promise of how things may turn out to be. She dwelt there as if it were home and it has held up—-for the most part—-until now, when she begins to hear the creaking. It’s only settling, she is sure at first. But it is getting louder now, and she trips over cracks in the foundation. She knows the glue is beginning to break its hold, because circumstances are changing and if they continue she knows the glue will finally dissolve and it will fall apart—-all of it. She lingers by the doorway, reluctant to leave, but soon begins forcing herself a safe distance away.

She never played with dollhouses as a little girl, but as that Dream House crumbles and the little pretend-people jump from the windows, she realizes she’s been playing all this time.

It is a slow crumble and she watches it, scrutinizing as if that would make it easier; as if observing every gory detail would prepare her for the Dream’s complete destruction. As if that would make it easier to live without; would make easier the vast moor of nothing it will leave behind.

I will not be overwhelmed. Underwhelmed. Overwhelmed. Under, over; under, over… like the long shards of reflected light braiding themselves together on the floor beneath the window…

She keeps pretty glass bottles on the shelf by the window, where the sun glints off the many facets of so much ornate glass, and in so many colors. They are such elegant bottles, with many fine engravings weaving up their necks, one glass textured around a cut pattern of flowering vines spreading up from the bottom. The cut flowers and their stems curve through the frosted glass with such fluid grace they almost seem to be growing—ever so slowly—toward the sun. When the sun shines through the window, the rows of bottles—the light catching everything, their curves and facets and cut designs, the round rims and a chipped spot or two—light shatters on the floor.

So beautiful.

The bottles in the window…how often she had thought to break them.

These days it seems like every song she hears breaks her heart (You’ve got a fast car; is it fast enough that we can fly away?).
Especially if she knows them well enough to sing along, to release from her own mouth the words that bring back memories, (Some had crumbled you straight to your knees; did it cruel, did it tenderly) and the harmonies where the notes skate simultaneously over and under one another, making twists and figure-eights in her ears(I know that it is freezing, but I think we have to walk).

The ones that remind her of someone else (Now fighting’s a part of baby’s romance, I’m never gonna tell on you), the ones that remind her of herself (Tuesday night at the Bible study, we lift our hands and pray over your body, but nothing ever happens), of God (When you wear your clothes, I wear them too), of old friendships (Like stubborn boys with big green eyes, we’ll see everything); the ones she doesn’t want to hear (When your want from the day makes you to curse in your sleep at night), and the ones she wish would come true (Whatever differences our lives have been, we together make a limb). They squeezed her insides like a bad nurse with a blood pressure cuff—-not tight enough to bruise really, but enough for discomfort and a sore throbbing, throbbing; building and building with no place to go but you can’t complain because it is routine and it will be over soon anyway (Be brave, dear one; be changed or be undone). And indeed when the music fades out the cuff loosens, allowing the quiet rush of tired relief (Like grace from the earth when you’re all tuckered out and tame).

Another song plays, though, and another. She can’t stop listening no matter how they make her heart feel, fit to burst, in the same way you pick at a scab: as if you could just peel off the part that hurts (Shedding skin faster than skin could grow). Over and over, (We were sixteen, maybe less, maybe a little more), throbbing, throbbing, building pressure. They force her brow to draw together (Me I’m not a gamble, you can count on me to split), her eyes to close (It was something of an end to a lovely and a wild thing).

Because of this her heart breaks roughly eight times a day. In this inexplicable sadness she tells herself, “Don’t forget, this day is good.” And it is. They are only songs; they are only thoughts, or memories. Sticks and stones…
She turns the volume down, the songs murmuring hushed in her ears, and the sepia-toned whispers sing to sleep her wandering thoughts.