“Well, it ought to be easy, it ought to be simple enough
Man meets a woman and they fall in love
But this house is haunted and the ride gets rough
You’ve got to learn to live with what you can’t rise above
If you want to ride on down, down in through this tunnel of love.”
— Bruce Springsteen
Arle stands at our kitchen sink with her phone pointed at the lake on side one. I am moving around, tossing trash away, putting pots and pans up on the dryer so I can clear the stovetop to cook pasta when I see that she is seeing the backup. More often than not, people with cloggy sinks, people like us, we adapt. You learn to live with certain things because the solution requires time or money or both, and that’s just not happening today. I see her moving her screen around, and I think I know what’s happening. The Christmas lights hanging above her are sparking off the three inches of floodwater as a couple dozen scattered Fruit Loop lifeboats have risen in the right basin of the two basin sink. I begin to imagine that the sight of it here/ on the heels of a couple sips of pineapple hard seltzer at 6:30 in the evening on another unspectacular Monday night/ it’s all slammed into her with the covert force of the endless art that lives and breathes/ even writhing with maggots/ down in the infinite shallow cracks of poverty, more or less.
What she must be seeing: I must see.
I float my eyes down from her wrists, down from the pale freckled skin of her arms where they slip up into the dark tunnels of her hoodie sleeves, to the screen of her phone itself.
There, in a place where each of us dies a little more every hour of every day/ out where the world becomes ignorant and cruel/ out upon those existential plains of a virtual reality where all of us piss and shit and slit our veins wide open to dowse nearly all of the literature and practically all of the poetry and damn near every single inch of all the progress our wildly imperfect ancestors struggled to even recognize let alone accomplish/ lies the lost canvas of our modern imaginations.
And on Arle’s personal copy of it, I see that I was correct.
She is zeroing in on the color-dappled suds. On the soggy cereal floating. On the clarity of our shitty untended plumbing.
This all happens in a single swish, mind you. There’s no pause in my movements, nor hers. I notice what I notice as I spin away from the paper towel roll sitting on the side of the sink. Fluid, we roll, in a house of so many; moving swift and delicate between child and great dane; each of us river dancing the living fuck out of even the most basic everyday cha-chas.
You get so good at it. I’ve become a master at sliding and sashaying/ barely grazing the shirt backs of others/ hardly feeling the family all around me. This makes something like what I’m experiencing here, right this second, more special, I’d say. As Arle shoots her shots, I’m am drawn up into the bright lights of the UFO. I see what she sees only because she is seeing it. I am gifted the strange gift of something beautiful from our common world.
Just because I happened by.
Right place, right time.
Everything melts into once-in-a-while.
On the bed, the rolled-up cuffs of my Dickies emit unseen puffs of leaf dust and country dander. I climb under the covers with my work boots on and all of it. Zero fucks are given by me. I need to be beneath the big comforters, sense the heavy weight of them upon my bones. Childish as it may seem for some, I readily admit to my safe spaces at this point. There is no alpha male part of me knocking me back. I feel no lean tough rush making me snarl in the face of any of this.
It’s basic and simple stuff really. But it is such a rigorous journey to get to this place, you see. And that’s the thing. These enduring cottagecore needs I have, I missed them for so very, very long. Across my life, chasing all the wrong foxes. So many years gone by, me always wearing the wrong woods. What happened then, quite organically it turns out, is that all of these storm-damaged scraps of hard-earned wisdom mixed with all of these lucky paint chips, they rode together through cyclones and tornados. Fucking mice on a sardine can raft soaring high up in the wind, until eventually they find their way to me, whether that’s what they intended or not (no one knows, hoss). And then there I am. Here I am. Here I go again on my own. Going down the only road I’ve ever known.
Now then.
It’s maybe an hour before the sink water picture thing and I’ve come looking for my lady, guessing, correctly you know, that she might be up here in our haven decompressing from just walking in through the back door at the end of her own work day. The kids downstairs, their chaotic slam of presence. The dogs shooting in at the sound of the cowbells on the doorknob/ their eager eyes greeting her and begging her and needing shit. Beggar eyes as soon as you get home. I’m right too. Arle is already over there, under her side of the blankets/ her hoodie’s hood up over her head. Of all the parts of her she has successfully returned and rolled into this place now, I only spot her eyes peeking over the crest of the quilted waves. She is immersed in our private sea.
I need to be in there with her.
So I climb in unabashedly, without reservation or forethought. The thing I seek is so simple, so ancient and raw. I want to clack knees through our pants. I want to frisk fingertips, tug the lobe of her ear gently. There’s a euphoria that comes with all of this. We run into an early evening reunion and it unfolds like it does here not because we planned it or anything like that. It’s unscripted. Not part of the scene as directed. We are improv people moving across the stage now with total freedom and jaw dropping talent.
Death has missed us. Living remains. Punched in the face by our own raw realities repeatedly, we make our way back here like salmon or swallows or something. Drawn by what? Magnetic plates of dinosaur ghost steam shimmering up out of the Earth?
I have no idea. I’ve no fucking clue about love. About real love. True, true love. Overwhelming love dripped down on common people. I have no clue about magic unfolding. I only know that right now, unseen by anyone or anything- except perhaps the vulture squads above Millheim, who can see through human roofs and walls with a slightly murky clarity, as if they were made of Cling Wrap- we are both happy to see one another.
Hold me tight, motherfucker, on this late late afternoon.
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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.
