Pantheon

January 17, 2019

The tiniest snowfall began as I was walking back to the place I’m staying on Marcy Avenue, and Mary Oliver died tonight. My first thought was, “I’ll try and find her best poem to pretend-share with him,” which really meant I was sharing it with myself. But why try to fit someone else’s thoughts to my own feelings? It’s like wearing someone’s used shoes.

So the snow goaded me to write. It was too lovely to say no. It’s all been lovely—the snow, the skyscrapers, Asilia, the cafes, the wine, the conversations. Even the subway, which smells like cotton candy and urine all the time. It’s all, very, lovely. 

But this nagging. This shadow. This human-sized, invisible space that has sat in my brain the whole time, too big, like when I was eleven and didn’t fit into my cardboard-box forts anymore, and I realized that the fantasy world I’d played in was gone, just like that. Time for reality.

You should have been here with me, but I wonder: would you have fit? Would we? You’ve been taking up so much space inside me, constant, not on my lips but right behind my eyes. Lodged down my throat, maybe.

And just like the shoes and the forts and New York, nothing ever fits. I tried to put you on too soon. I tried to force you on, the needling and the bargaining. I flew into a rage and ripped you.

I still can’t tell if I was too much, or not enough. Or maybe I was just right. Either way, I never let you slide around comfortably into me, and now you’re gone and everything is too big, feels so heavy.

You once asked me whom I had loved most in my past; I told you, and the story made you sad. Well, time and my heart-clobbering have shifted you into that position. You are it. You are it it it it it. You finally fit somewhere. You are the centerpiece—a vibrant, gilded portrait in my pantheon of regrets.