Part I
It was insane, utterly insane, to think we were expected to all go home this year. It wasn’t necessary – in fact, it was more dangerous this way. But the expectation held. We debated it, saying things like Should I cancel the flight? Then we flew.
We thought it; we did it; we were each lonelier for it.
I remembered T’s old menorah, caked with wax, and the Hanukkah candles that burnt down
so quickly. They were manufactured that way, a safety intervention. You don’t actually want them burning all night.
The wax – creamsicle, Easter green – pooled onto the tablecloth, where it hardened.
We left it there for days, until T left for their mother’s.
I knew little about their childhood; I knew it was a shoes-off household.
And that they spent a year in Israel, which is how T knew all the blessings. Except for some reason
we still got the tunes wrong. We were always singing the Hanukkah tune on Shabbat.
This made Hanukkah easy.
Over the menorah: We would each be lonely, I said to Jules. It was a matter of with whom.
She was staying behind. For her, alone in Providence in the snow that did not melt,
alone in the three-bedroom apartment with the squirrels throwing a party in the walls
(it was fine for the squirrels to live there, as long as they did not die there).
All last spring, I said, we had lived together with no one else, and I thought it should go differently.
I felt angry that it didn’t. I thought we should play games together, for instance. Or laugh,
or have joy.
Jules’ boyfriend would stay over, and he might even wear jeans.
I would find him more beautiful for that. You’ll be lonely here, I told her,
Thinking you should be with other people,
and I’ll be lonely surrounded by the people I’m meant to not be lonely with. Either way.
And I remembered the night T came to my bed with wet hair.
I made them listen to Louise Glück. I read the poem about nail polish. I sat back, satisfied.
They said, Okay, now I read. So you can have the experience of listening.
I did not tell T that saying that to another person is basically what it is like to be in love.
They read me the poem about nail polish. It was about life not looking the way you thought it ought to look.
When Jules came in, it was my turn again. I read the poem about Earth.
Then she read “Radium” aloud
crouched over the book, by my feet.
A quiet took hold in the three-bedroom apartment.
We all said goodnight.
A quiet took hold in my heart.
The door closed while I wondered what any of us were to one another.
Part II
In the kitchen, we lit the candles, a gift from T’s father in Boston.
They were elegant and tapered: purple on the bottom, then white, then the wick.
This time last year, we waited for T to go to California,
ahead of a snowstorm.
I was the one to dig us out. J had appendicitis. No, she had gas.
No, nerves.
Enraptured by the storm:
It was the only time our neighbors were involved in something collective
that whole winter. Marveling, and shoveling, and plowing, and staying warm.
That winter was very cold; it was, in fact, acute,
and poignant in its difficulty.
The rest of the year was long.
We were the three of us.
We needed sun that we never got.
I dug out the driveway while J slept off a depression.
I’ve written of this before; there are very few discrete memories.
The light coming into E’s room one morning
sunrise before snow,
when my body hurt.
I began taking miniature, oval, light green pills.
I was afraid of them, so I only took the tiniest bit.
This is not entirely chronological. But things lost their chronologies that winter,
and for the whole year after, too.
In New York, I pulled out photographs. What did we want to be reminded of?
In some of the photographs my friends smiled.
There was a sweetness and a sadness to everything we saw:
the white linen, its caked-in meals.
Then the house, on the third floor, its umbrella and its hammock,
in a coastal New England city so small it was,
even after all the years, like a toy.
We never realized how small,
since it was also everything.
I never knew whether we got smaller there too.
We became well-acquainted, certainly.
With the streets,
Each other. With the neighbor’s May lilacs, peonies
Then her tomatoes.
All the way through September.
And we had the Northern red oak above the house which never fell and never lost its leaves.
Eventually it would be summer, I would fall in love,
we would leave.
We had debated leaving for so long. It was nearly all we spoke about.
Leaving the place was difficult
because it was where we had cared for one another.
Now the beautiful purple candles from T’s father were lit.
The candles would burn for at least another hour, and I was tired.
About the passing time, was I asking a where, why, or how question?
One day might there be answers about it all
Or, perhaps, a story?