“As the years pass, I am coming more and more to understand that it is the common, everyday blessings of our common everyday lives for which we should be particularly grateful. They are the things that fill our lives with comfort and our hearts with gladness — just the pure air to breathe and the strength to breath it; just warmth and shelter and home folks; just plain food that gives us strength; the bright sunshine on a cold day; and a cool breeze when the day is warm.”
— Laura Ingalls Wilder
You and me and maybe one other kid, we should just go. Put some things in a backpack and go. On our Mongooses (on our Mongeese) we should ride into the afternoon sunshine while we can, you know?
I don’t see this as one thing or another. We come back around dinner time, I guess, but whatever. Maybe we don’t. Maybe we don’t, huh?
Maybe I tell you my vision on the bus home and you don’t say much. Know what though? It hardly matters. I know you and I know you are up for it. I know deep inside: you are smiling even as you’re just staring out the bus window at old houses along the wooded street. The flashes of sunshine that strike you are violent. The bus is in and out of so many shadows and then openings of sky, one after the other, at blistering speed, so that the whole effect is you/ your head turned away from me/ the back left side of your face barely visible/ your pink ear/ your red hair drifting down from under your ski hat.
You should see you right now. I mean it. Darkness and light trading places so impulsively/ with such silent force all over you/ and you just sitting there taking it/ unimpressed with anything/ uninspired by me and my bullshit rambling again/ and this magnificence that surrounds you/ these shadows and beams/ these penumbras eclipsing you/ swallowing you whole/ spitting you out so swiftly with troutish rejection. It all unfolds before my eyes, my schoolbag down on the bus floor, clenched between my sneakers, and the feeling I get as I try to keep up with this puff of mad sparrows flitting all over you/ revealing you/ hiding you/ like you’re some kind of 16-year-old witch.
I suspect you are, you know? I figure that you aren’t quite like the rest of us but I can’t put my finger on it. It isn’t one thing, or even a few things/ it’s more like everything. All the things I know about you, the things I see and even the things I don’t fully witness but, like… I don’t know, I sense them, I guess/ these all add up to something mysterious about you for me.
What is it that you’ve got going on?
Huh?
You’re not gonna tell me, are you?
The sun pops through the canopy racing by above us and for an instant you are ravished by illumination. You are burning with the light of the master star and inside of all of that/ all that it entails and all that it could possibly mean for you or me or even maybe both of us/ inside of all that radiant shining falling down on you/ sloshing you with dazzle even though you don’t move or react/ except I can feel you squinting over there/ even if I can’t see it/ your eyes are going thin and your face is falling back within itself so it can protect you from going blind or even burning up in this herd of rays that have traveled millions of miles through frozen space just to slam into you right here, right now, while I’m trying to see if you’re into my idea or not.
The bus driver shifts gears at times and we can all feel that in our butts and our thighs. I feel it in my pants too. I feel the bus rubbing its fingers up and down my jeans and I react the way I always react when that happens. I just tense up and try to think about my dog taking a crap. I don’t know. It’s mostly so I can concentrate or whatever, I guess.
I wonder that about you. Like, do you get that ever? Not maybe from the bus buzzing underneath us but maybe from other stuff? You would probably blush if I ever asked you that. I might ask, too. I feel daring with you. I feel dared by you all the time. In your eyes, the way you smile just enough to show a feeling but then move it back behind your face so I know that it’s still there (because I just saw it), but I can also tell that you regret letting it slip. Or even if you don’t regret it, you maybe did it on purpose just to mess with me.
Kind of like you’re messing with me now.
I am being quiet against every desire in my body so I don’t press you too hard or rattle you with my excitement or any of that stuff. You sometimes make me feel that I’m over the top with you, and that maybe that’s not something you really like. You frown at breezes and it looks like you are frowning at me. You make this face that appears to be you getting frustrated with your blood hair being rapped across your pale face by some rude 5pm gust out along the woods behind the strip mall. Then it seems to be something else. The things shuffle in my mind and I get nervous landing on newer possibilities. Maybe your face isn’t about the wind at all. Maybe it’s because you just had this thought occur to you about wasting your time running around with me after school all the time.
Look at me?
No?
I talk to you inside of myself all the time, do you know that?
I ask you to look at me and every now and then you do. You look at me right when I say that to you inside myself and it’s magical. But do you think you have ever noticed me being like that? Like, me being all like: flushed and breathless and going dead quiet right when you look at me and I realize that it has happened. Do you ever just know that kind of thing is occurring or no?
It has to be no. I know that. I know enough to know that much.
The leaves are all deeply golden mostly, with a few red and some browns scattered among them. This antique painting of an autumn forest is observed by us, but it is real out there. And we are blazing by it. Other kids are mostly quiet. It used to be loud on the buses when we were younger, huh? Remember the high-pitched squealing and the chaotic voices all colliding with each other when we were in elementary? Everyone was loud then. It was as if we utilized volume to soothe ourselves once. It was as if we understood how to assure one another that the fear of monsters appearing- or whatever we feared back then- was ridiculous. We were, we unconsciously assured one another, too wild for danger. Our very existence was preserved, we sort of understood, by the simple song of our lives being sung out of tune and louder than bombs, collectively, like a chorus in a play.
Now things have changed. We have changed. We aren’t loud anymore/ not on the bus anyways. We are sullen, it might seem to a stranger, or perhaps deep in thought. And I suppose both are true; nothing to apologize for there. But beyond the teenage angsty pout thing, there is more and we both know that.
You know it because you seem to know so much. And I know it because I want to watch you being gilded and charcoaled/ pushed through this sunshine that believes it is shade/ dragged down through these suburban hollows on a platform in a tube/ insulated by the glass and the metal and the movement/ me and you allowed this rarified perch looking out over the world/ this romp through the countryside/ on our way back home.
I want to watch you when that happens.
I want to watch you when the bus slow rolls up to your stop, two stops before mine. I want to watch your face as it moves away from the window and shifts to the floor, innocently, naively, either acting as if you don’t feel the need to meet my eyes or trying to figure out how to let me know that each moment you don’t peer into me is a moment of torture that you feel ashamed to have.
Grrr.
You gather up your backpack from the floor and you feign standing up as the motion that has gotten us this far slows and the trees outside begin to emerge from the rush/ to stand singles and doubles again/ to creep out of the impressionistic blur we had been caught up in/ the street climbing out of its artful costume to reveal this strange naked skin tattoo of people’s garages and their pick-up trucks and their Halloween decorations flapping in the harsh afternoon winds/ trying to escape the brutality of their porches.
These simple untouched photographs that I get fooled by all the time.
Our lives, I sense, as you move past me towards the aisle, your backpack deliberately bopping me hard in the side of my face as you go, your ass in your jeans, your hair from your hat, tumbling down onto your army jacket shoulders with the force of mountains coming unplugged/ ancient underwater veins bursting/ the hidden streams where blind trout dance beneath the steep rocky drifts/ all these fucking hills looking down on us/ the detonation of nature/ the massive boom/ the charge raining down on everything and everyone/ but mostly on me/ maybe only on me/ as I watch you slip into the aisle behind the Moyer boy who lives three doors down from you and plays football and fights other boys and sometimes men on the weekends/ and I feel so overwhelmed by hatred and glory and these feelings of your dancing light and shadow slapping me and caressing my cheek at a thousand miles per hour/ all the poets spitting down on me at once/ from the flood roaring down the mountainside/ each of them holding fast to a homemade raft that will shatter in the end like everything always does, you know?
I’ll call you in ten minutes, I say out loud, breaking the silence, as you move away, leave me hanging.
You turn then, the pinks and whites of your face framed by your red hair, your Scottishness breaking through the fourth wall, a stone wall, a farm wall, you rising up from behind it with tiny twigs and bits of straw in your upside down river of dreams sloshing down all around you/ and you smile gently, warmly, but also brazenly like only you can manage to smile.
You better call me in nine minutes, you say. And then you spin back around, moving away, turned a millisecond to disembark, then gone for real.
Now I am me again. Older. Much older. I wish to make sense of the ride I’ve been taking with you here, but let’s be honest. The randomness of the writing leaves a lot to unpack. And in the end, despite the sorcery I think all writers fancy themselves dabbling in as they toil away at backlit screens all that bloated daydreaming of praise and acceptance, I have to admit that I also dabble in a slightly different variant of whatever this is as well.
There’s this other version, you see, different from all this believing I do when I lose myself in writing. And in this other place, well, instead of speaking with myself: instead, I swing a hard branch rashly, ferociously, in the blackness of this unlit room. And sometimes, I must say, it feels like I know precisely what I’m doing. Other times though, and there are many times like this, I have no idea whatsoever as to the point of my words or even the nature of their presence. I bash into walls. I slam hard into studs and then quickly again into hollow surfaces, all the while creating destruction unseen, but felt, and maybe understood. But loosely at best. The very act of imagining, for example, a bus ride long ago, with a person from now, a ride that never took place and sadly never will, and yet I treat it like it did happen, like it’s even happening now. What does that indicate? What does it say about me, about my willingness to suspend history and accountability in favor of a parallel past? What does it say to the reliance of a self-proclaimed essayist when he outs himself as being marinated in fantasy. I am so taken by the wall-less castles, the stuff of legends, the mythic lands.
And by that I mean just one thing: my past with her in it.
Black magic as fuck.
Witchcrafting for love.
On the phone, your voice is closer than I had imagined it would be today. I have spoken to you so many times now, so many calls to you because you like it best when I do the calling.
Today you pick up and you are chewing something. You know it is me too, don’t you? You know it is me from the ring of your phone/ the way the bell rattles a little to the left when the connection comes through/ the ringing coming off the wallpaper wall with more force than usual. It is suddenharsh, a thrusting of my cardboard swordness directly through your kitchen heart. You are eating potato chips when you detect an electrical current, a delicate whisper of a thing, tickling the hairs on the back of your freckled arms. It is magical and suspicious at once, but most of all: you know, right before it happens, as much as you have ever known anything in life before or maybe even since, that the phone over there (as you ride the intoxicating salt fat wind), is about to fucking ring.
It enters your body as nothing but certainty. Not a feeling, not a hunch. Not a guess or a hope, not an idea or even a sudden wondering. It is simple in its presentation to you.
You chomp on chips and you are looking out the window and then in the next instant you are being feathered with a plume of unseen energy and your body is on edge and the music on the radio is singing just to you (Lonely Is The Night by Billy Squier) and a bird flies by the glass and looks you dead in the eye and your gazes meet across the plane of differing existences and the bird, a common low sparrow with the heart of a lion, he snarls at you in this cool flirtatious way and you are feeling shaken in a curious style by this unexpected development when we finally get there.
Your goosebumps are out.
That phone is going to ring, you hear yourself saying.
And then the phone/ it’s a nest of hornets/ hit with a stick/ ringing all over your skin.
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Serge Bielanko lives in small-town Pennsylvania with an amazing wife who’s out of his league and a passel of exceptional kids who still love him even when he’s a lot. Every week, he shares his thoughts on life, relationships, parenting, baseball, music, mental health, the Civil War and whatever else is rattling around his noggin.
