Nerves,

There's a peculiar sort of feeling I get in my stomach when I'm nervous about something and I drink too much coffee. Usually, when I'm nervous or bothered my instinct is to drink coffee because caffeine will surely calm my nerves, right?

But, it happens. I'll wake up and my feet don't feel attached to the ground, and then I drink cup after cup until I feel like acid is swirling around in my stomach and the idea of swallowing food makes me want to retch.

Because of the way I handle stress, this feeling will actually trigger to me that something is wrong, and I'll try to figure out what it is that's bothering me. Sometimes I figure it out. Sometimes I don't.

This time, I can't figure out whats bothering me, but I'm five cups deep and something certainly is.

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep;
"God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;
The wrong shall fail, the right prevail,

With Peace on earth, good will to men."

There's a pretty big part of me

that wants to clean out this whole thing are start over. Someone commented to me the other day that I only write about sad things. All of my stories have a dreary edge to them. Not a dark, gothic side to them. Just the themes they deal with: loneliness, abandonment, and fear tend to be inescapable.

I guess I didn't quite realize this. I think of myself in positive upbeat terms, and in fact project that kind of personality, in order to avoid the things that are bothering me. Which is probably why they come out in my creative outlets. My characters don't always make these things clear to me.

I'm not going to turn my back on any of it, but I am going to grab hold of a new happiness that I've achieved and try to wrestle with it a little bit. Let's see what happens.

The First Snow

My twenty first year
was the first time the snow felt stale.
It seemed too soon,
though it was late in the season
on the seventh of December.
It fell on my shoulder and
dusted my hair.
I felt the still burning flame of summer
flicker and die in my chest.
The external light of Christmas
is a comfort, but dull
in comparison.

Friends Are Essential During Finals Week

"It smells like Christmas and homework in here."
-Joel VanderWeele

"We don't KNOCK before we walk into their flat."
-Amy Buckingham

Whiskey Between Men

He stood just outside the door in a jacket that smelled like 1974 and September. The house was an imposing shape, pale blue and stark against the sky. It was not his home, but now he needed to make it seem that way. He resented this fact.

He walked inside and the smile he tried to give his nephew was stiff from the salt dried on his cheeks. It matched the smiles of the Dresden dolls lined up along the fire place: cold, hard and empty. His old mind had been poetic once upon a time, but now he thought mostly in disheartening clichés.

There were no lights on in the living room and it was cold. The windows were open, and he shivered inside the old jacket. He saw Stephen’s huddled shape in black and white, surrounded by a kingdom of dirty dishes and half empty glasses. The sound of a muted laugh track made his stomach churn.

He knew that this pile of dishes mirrored the one in the guest room which he had currently taken over. He hoped the boy had neglected to notice them. They were scattered with bits of leftover toast and cold stained tea cups. He’d noticed that no matter how much he ate these days, he never became full.

He down and removed his shoes. The laces were worn and bent from being tied in the same way year after year. The leather was cracking in certain spots, and he felt out of place in this house and this room with a boy who would not speak.

“Are you hungry?” he asked, breaking the silence. But the people on the television laughed at him again. His nephew shuffled his feet underneath a crocheted blanket and said nothing while he removed the hat from his head, turning it over and over in his hands. He didn’t understand how this wall had sprung up between them.

It wasn’t that he didn’t know what to say. He could think of a thousand sentences that he could utter, ranging from compassionate to furious. But for all he talked, he might as well speak to his reflection in the mirror.

Maggie would have known what to do.

He continued to stare at the circles that blossomed out from the center of the blanket on the boy’s lap. Even in the darkened room he could see the vibrant colors his sister had woven into the pattern one day when they were both younger. It was just one of the many inescapable things that Maggie had left behind.

Somewhere underneath the grief and loneliness that lay heavy in his ribcage was a guilt he was not ready to face. He wanted to go somewhere with cacophonous noises and bright colors. Somewhere he could beat down this guilt. But in this dm room his guilt was making louder and louder noises. He didn’t want to be here with this silent boy for company.

There was a desire under this grief but it was one he felt slightly ashamed of. Now, it inspired an idea. An idea that wasn’t the most honorable but he supposed that Maggie wouldn’t mind.

He turned and rushed out of the room and Stephen glanced up from the TV in the sudden flurry of action. All around, the house seemed to hold its breath. His feet pushed down onto the carpet with more purpose than any of his limbs had felt in the past two days. When he reached the kitchen he pulled two small glasses out of a side drawer and out of the cabinet over the sink came a cool bottle of whiskey.

He headed back toward the living room, trying to keep his feet from hastening ahead of him. He knew it would be important to approach his nephew carefully, like trying to sneak up on a wild animal. He stopped by the front door again, slipping his jacket from his shoulders and hanging it on a peg. He unwound a scarf from his neck and folded it carefully before placing it in the closet. He felt out of his own skin, in a shirt that was stiffly ironed. He unbuttoned one button to allow him to breath and rolled up his sleeves to his elbows.

When he entered the living room again he noticed that Stephen was sitting more upright underneath the blanket. Their eyes met he saw all of the emotions his nephew had been trying to hide, but the strongest of all was anger.

“I thought people liked to be left alone after a tragedy,” Stephen asked with a grimace pulling his face into an ugly expression, “you’re going to get me drunk instead?”

It would be so easy, he thought, to give in. To remind this boy that he was grieving too. Anger would be easy. He could feel it in the shiver that ran through the room. It was charged, like the shakes in a volcano before it exploded. He could drop the glasses and the bottle, leap over the coffee table and punch him in the eye. But he can’t, because he remembers Maggie, and instead sits in the loveseat that has the uncomfortable springs that squeak when you move.

Stephen’s eyes roamed everywhere but at him while he sat the glasses on the table between them. It would be easier if this could be reduced to a battle of words and fists. He tipped the whiskey into the shot glasses. He doubted this boy Irish temper would even recognize the gesture. He carefully aligned the top of the bottle and the rim of the shot glass, not trusting his shaking hands.

He raised them both, and held out one to his nephew. Stephen stared at them but said nothing. He made no move to take them. His hands, young and clenched, stayed on his lap.

“I think this will help,” he said, but he knew his tone was harsh and made his nephew flinch. It occurred to him that there was so much of his sister in these defiant actions. Stephen had always been so like Maggie, with his temper and the way he pretended the world did not exist, or at least that the world could not make him explain his actions.

“This is what adults do, boy,” he barked. “They honor the dead. They don’t hide from the world in front of their TV’s.”

There must have been something in his tone of voice, and he knew his sister would have shushed him and made him apologize if she had been here. But that was the point of all of this, that Maggie was not here, except in the whiskey that Stephen refused.

Another explosion happened somewhere behind his nephew’s eyes, and his hand shot out to take the glass from his uncle. A tiny amount splashed over the side and dropped to the carpet between them, leaving a stain that wouldn’t come out anytime in the remembered future.

“Now,” he instructed, “I want you to make a toast. A real toast, something your mother would be proud of.”

The way his shoulder’s dropped to told him the boy did not want to do this. There was fear under all his big words and angry eyes. But he waited. He studied his nephew’s hands and the way they gripped the glass. All of his fingers were bunched around the edges, and the skin of his knuckles was brown and unbroken. His own hands were pale and spotted by age, grasping his shot glass between fore finger and thumb. So many years divided them.

“To my mom, because she taught me that the world revolves,” Stephen paused as his voice was on the edge of breaking, “around love stories,”

He downed the brown liquid, and he lifted his shaking hand to do the same. His nephew tried to hide the grimace as he swallowed, but it was comical the way his eyes watered. He pretended to be preoccupied with filling the glasses for another round.

He lifted his glass high in the air and waited for Stephen to do the same.

“To Maggie,” he said, “for always leaving me with messes to clean up.”

Stephen laughed, and something between them splintered and shattered. The sound had been so unfamiliar in the past few days that it he almost felt embarrassed for his nephew. The rest of the toasts came more easily.

“To mom, for always leaving the stove on when she left the house.”

“To Maggie, for never learning how to decorate a living room.”

The looks between them became heavy with the whiskey as the shots past and the blanket slipped down to the floor from the couch. The drops of whiskey on the table became more and more numerous as his pours became less and less careful. Stephen had left the couch, and now sat on the floor with his limbs flung in every direction.

Eventually, he thought his nephew had consumed enough. His gaze was no longer present but he stared through the window to the changing leaves on the trees.

“This doesn’t hurt as much as it did before,” he whispered. He wondered what his nephew meant by ‘this’ but something in him filled in the blanks with words he did not know. His nephew’s voice was barely louder than the hum of the refrigerator in the next room and looked down at the boy beside him and thought about how much hope there was in that statement.

He didn’t know yet that the grief would wake him up in the middle of the night unexpectedly. He didn’t know that in ten years he would realize he could no longer remember the color of her eyes. He didn’t know that in some ways it would always hurt just as much as it did before.

But maybe he was talking about the whiskey. The burn did fade.

There was chasm between them that had never been crossed, and he doubted now was the best time to try. He wished that he could place a hand on his shoulder and offer a gesture of comfort.

“You’ll be okay,” he said, with his hand hovering somewhere between them and finally landing on his knee. It fell short of where it should be, just as he had.

Stephen didn’t answer, he just closed his eyes. There was understanding of what his nephew felt hidden somewhere in his chest, though he could never explain what it was.

“I know you didn’t go to the church either,” Stephen said.

No more words really needed to pass between them. He counted the seconds of silence, and thought about how each second carried them farther away from Maggie. He watched dust particles float in the light of the setting sun and each of the seemed to settle on Maggie.

“She deserved better than us,” one of them whispered. He couldn’t remember who it had been, but both of them knew it was true.

I wish I could forget all the details.

Close to the surface of my memories of Christmas
is the memory of running to a doorway in thin stockings
while you came in from the cold
and I felt the moisture on your cheek from when you had shaved.

I wish I could forget the way your jacket settled around me,
as we bowed our head and ran for the car.
The smell of your soap and shampoo sticking to the collar,
and pulling me closer to you because it smells like home.

I wish I couldn't remember this as I walk now,
from a different house. To a different car,
with only my own arms hugging my torso.
Those memories make this moment not enough.

Followed by purposeful thoughts that declare - I miss you,
and I know you don't miss me.