When our two eyes meet for the hundredth time in the day, skies outside cloudy, a rolling froth of clouds threatening to boil over, caught in the red rhombus of a televised tornado warning area, something happens that was unlike the first ninety-nine.\u00a0 We are pulled inward.\u00a0 A glass is set down on the counter, unnecessary in our current orbit.\u00a0 One of those rare kisses that outmodes titillation, brief formality, or banal assurance.\u00a0 All of those kisses are meaningful in the way dimes and nickels are; they are cumulative.\u00a0 But sometimes we reach out, clasp our hands behind each others\u2019 necks, and from thin air draw a silver dollar.\u00a0 There\u2019s strength in the unpredictability of domesticity.<\/p>\n
The front door is to blame for most of it.\u00a0 A flat surface hanging on hinges reserved for our use only.\u00a0 From the street it\u2019s like all the others, staid and steady behind the numbers of our address, a hardwood defense of our privacy and behaviors.\u00a0 When we are out there, somewhere, beyond its fronting side, we take with us all knowledge of the house, its corners and walls, what state it\u2019s in, how many crumbs will attach to your bare feet if you walk across the kitchen floor.\u00a0 But when it\u2019s shut behind us and we are enclosed in our one and only home, we can\u2019t guarantee a converse knowledge of the outside, a confidence that things will stay where we left them: that streetlights have not gone out or that storefronts have remained intact.\u00a0 It would be ridiculous to bet on such unproven facts.\u00a0 Inside, though, we are the house.\u00a0 And the house wins by percentages.<\/p>\n
Behind the front door, our scents are kept intact.\u00a0 Sweat from over the oven accompanying spice and hissing protein.\u00a0 Odorants leftover from what we\u2019ve attached to ourselves cling muddled in the bathroom.\u00a0 The sleepy evaporations caught in wrinkled creases of the sheets release all at once when the covers are lifted.\u00a0 The aroma of cleansing products has a short half-life, dissipating by the second, relinquishing control to our trace elements.<\/p>\n
Fledgling descriptors of the time we pass inside.<\/p>\n
There are also the erratic paths we take, roaming from one room to the next in search of a single possession amongst all the other accumulated products, the one tool or balm or paper that will solve the current problem and restore balance to the house.\u00a0 Integers, foodstuffs, and notifications.\u00a0 Hammers, glue guns, or phone books.\u00a0 Foundation, stasis, reaction.\u00a0 When will dinner be ready and disrupt my frame of mind?\u00a0 When will the cat erupt and impede our argument?\u00a0 The strange thing about balance is that it always reserves a place for the next upset.<\/p>\n
It is a tumultuous house, uncomfortable with silence.\u00a0 Chop chop against the cutting board, steady blowing through the vents.\u00a0 Overlong nails typewrite the floor when the dog chases a small tuft of invisible intrigue.\u00a0 The stereo tries hard to ricochet its music into all the rooms.\u00a0 We practice conversations like instruments, beginning again and again, focusing on different approaches.\u00a0 Even when we are at rest the computers whirr, updating and checking for input, and our dreams incorporate and push our limbs across the sheets.\u00a0 Our lungs compress; breath rattles our tissues.\u00a0 We snore alongside the settling dust of the day.<\/p>\n
Would it mean so much if we were apart, if we were the sole tenants of our own lives and domiciles?\u00a0 Do the random patterns and nightly collisions of will and stress and fantasy enrich us?\u00a0 It seems inevitable that two people occupying a house must eventually become load-bearing walls themselves, that the edifice around them cedes some control and responsibility.\u00a0 After all, a house only touches at corners.\u00a0 We are much more flexible and desirous.<\/p>\n
I have time for one more paragraph.\u00a0 Then I have to attend to other duties.<\/p>\n
Sometimes she will say things I\u2019m unprepared to rebroadcast.\u00a0 And she assumes the windows are shut or that the neighbors are not on the other side of the fence.\u00a0 These aren\u2019t secrets or discretionary facts or even embarrassing code words, just personal sentences that are performed for a single audience, prepared for a specific judge.\u00a0 And when I hear, I allow for certain inconsistencies.\u00a0 I discern the meaning from known cues and familiar vocal tilts.\u00a0 But I can still be caught off guard when her words find a clandestine tenderness that escapes our established routine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When our two eyes meet for the hundredth time in the day, skies outside cloudy, a rolling froth of clouds threatening to boil over, caught in the red rhombus of a televised tornado warning area, something happens that was unlike …<\/p>\n