Reckless
She was the type of woman
who collected other people’s impressions
the way hungry men collected food stamps.
She said she was fashioning a blueprint,
she needed an outline of things.
She didn’t make sense to him.
He said, ‘Every time the world turns into a Chet Baker song
you’re sifting through sounds and words and meanings trying to find the
exact fit for the absence of before
as if the world were a giant jigsaw
you were trying to breathe
through your memories and skin.’
He said, ‘You’re going to get lost in this.’
He said, ‘You’re going to drown in innocuous and dapple
and moonlight and languid and within.’
She understood why it didn’t make sense to him;
he was a thesaurus, he had an answer for everything,
he had options running through him like creeks.
But she was a dictionary, and she could see things.
She knew about categories and families and groups,
knew that you couldn’t always live a nice ending,
but you could dismantle a bad one, find the roots and trace backwards with your fingertips.
But this was not the sort of answer he was looking for, it was not neat or tidy or replaceable
with similarly detached nouns or adjectives.
It was drunk on the breath of her,
it was carved from that place at the back of her neck
that he knew about, the exact shape of her baby finger curled under his chin.
She wanted to say, ‘I have gathered
these moments like a bushel of roses, I have lain them in all the places you had not thought
to guard your skin.’ But he was counting things off
on his fingers so she did not say anything,
dipped her hands back in the river, for a bit.
It reminded her of the time he took her for a ride
on his friend’s motorcycle, how she leaned too far into the turns,
nearly toppled them. How she wrote a poem about it,
how the wind chill snap licked at your neckline, the crevices filled with adrenaline,
but he wouldn’t read it because he was mad at her,
he didn’t understand why she did things.
And when he gave her back the poem and a part of her was happy,
she wondered if she wasn’t more in love with the words than the people who were attached to them,
and why she always leaned into the curve of a bad decision.
When he finished speaking
it was like the sound of wings folding, it was her breath in grade three when
that boy used to chase her at recess,
when she ran and ran for what it felt like to be just ahead of the hands
that were reaching for her, when she knew the point of the game
was to let yourself get caught but she ran anyway
because why would you ever give up on that feeling?
When he asked her if she felt responsible for any of this, she wanted to say ‘I
will climb back down the bank.
I will wade in past what is acceptable for lifeguards and young mothers,
I will bathe our memories in words like supple and lavender and lit.
I will lay them out on the shoreline, end to end, until they are soft like lily petals
and warm like the sun on your skin.’
But she did not say these things because although they were beautiful
she was not entirely sure if they were true.
What she really wanted to say was, ‘Don’t you ever
want to run around at recess?’
