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London Bridges

Azure Brandi

You’ve decided to quit piano. If this doesn’t surprise you, someone else will have seen it coming. All you remember is when your grandmother would rip off strips of Scotch tape and stick them on your keyboard by your princess figurines and you would write in Sharpie the chord letters and for years you only ever played the very beginning of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” but eventually even that song vanished out of your ears like sandbags slowly spilling out their remnants over time unnoticed. In park tunnels you played back the memory of your chorus teacher who lied to your class and said that she had taken a fall when clearly she was battered by her husband and she picked up her guitar and strummed you all a God Bless America song and you knew then you would tell everyone you wanted to be a piano-ist and so you all gathered in a circle criss-cross applesauce and you announced your life’s ambitions from the gilded age of eight. Later that day by the monkey bars your first crush told you in a meditative trance that he would be content making Subway sandwiches. The two of you played handball together for the rest of recess.

…

The terracotta benches umbrella-d by the Mission where all prayers are spoken and few truly received. You will not get your braces off this visit. A few parking lots over is the dentistry. When you ate dinner a few streets over on a patio with your father’s ex-lady friend who took half of the profits when they sold the engagement ring. Do not pass go, do not collect 200. The Mission still stands. The braces are off. Let the games begin.

…

“We’re sitting in silence waiting for this guy like the Second Coming.” When you burst out laughing, the chorus joins.

…

You sit on the subway, freshly-cleaned jeans avoiding the spot of piss on the seat next to you. A man enters the car, clocks your unwavering glance and makes his way to the piss seat. Cheeks down, you ride in silence for a moment. Your knees occasionally bump into his. You feel prickly warmth in your kneecaps, Pop Rocks in your heart. He is sizzling away at you and you at him. You skip your stop, enjoying your accidental then subtly calculated touch. You ride with him and he rides with you. There is no better way you would spend Halloween.

…

Your limbs tangled with his, he whispers to you this lullaby:

“I’ve realized that someday my mom will die. I do not want her to. I will miss her. One day I will be expected to form a love for someone who did not raise me, who did not know me as a little being, and - frankly - I do not see that half-ass love holding its own against the love I have for her. Tragedy, and we walk along rivers and sit under trees and bask in the sun while people lean back on rickety hospital beds in stale air-conditioned rooms and wither away and it pisses me off. It leaves me feeling helpless on Saturday at dusk. Reminding me I once attached myself to someone to feel physical comfort at night and will probably do the same in the future but hopefully this time will choose a subject more discerningly. There was a butterfly picture in the bathroom on C Street and I remember every time I would look at it as a child it reminded me of something my little mind could not put into language, and my current self still cannot. That ineffable sinking disarming pit of something that settles in your stomach in moments of peak stillness and solitude, the sense that one day you will not be here and neither will she and how fast time goes and yet how it is the one thing you know for sure will never stop. Though one day you will stop. And where will all the sensations you felt while you were here go? Will they transfer into the people you met, the trees you hugged, the broken spirits seeping into cavernous little cracks in sidewalks across the little patches of the globe that you wandered? What will be left of you when the ego vanishes, when the soul caves in, when the ancestors of children and mothers and fathers and spirits past beckon you forward, when the wind is your mark and the pulsing hearts of warm cheeks remind you what it was like during your little window here? I don’t want to go. I want this pulsing headache to go away. I am sorry and I repent and I atone and I am so sorry to have betrayed you and I hope I never betray you again and I fear that if it ever happens again it will be because I was too deluded by the fame and the wheelchair and the distorted mirrors on that patio and hallelujah echoes venture closer and I don’t think I can ever fully apologize to you and I don’t even know if I will play the piano anymore. I am writing to tell you I love you and I’m sorry and that intro to “Imagine” was the prelude to my rebirth.”

You nudge him to his side of the couch as he closes your old journal. He says your mind is his own during these hours when sleep is respite. The two of you cat-nap until seven pm.

…

You’re afraid you’ll forget him. The way his eyes beamed so intently into yours. But not in a creepy way. A look of pure curiosity. Unthreatening. The type of gaze that invites you to gaze back without feeling outwardly scrutinized for such long eye contact. Candle in the wind is the lover’s dim. You actually know what is unrequited in this world. It is the seismic, Sisyphean longing you must push yourself against each day, knowing that the boulder will come toppling back down when night falls and morning rises. Gravity heils and you hear the smack of your bare body against the gravelly ground, ad infinitum.

…

Into the mirror you rehearse your proclamation to him:

“The thing is, you are desperately searching for a body to love. You walk these cities in search of someone new, of something glimmering and enticing to sink your claws and fangs into. You expect a hefty hoard of willing participants, young women who know that you will treat them well until you don’t. Women who assume your promises of salvation and pamphlets from the Holy Church will cure them until they float away. You are a cult and you do not feel embarrassed when you market yourself as such. And they know deep-down that you are what you seem, but they step closer and get intimate before they realize they will spend the rest of their lives thinking of you. You are a parasite and you give no shits, all the while caressing our cheeks as our mothers beg you to leave their daughters alone. We ride in the backseat of our fathers’ trucks when we’re younger than you feel is appropriate to pounce on. You give us at least five more years before our first meeting with you. Until then, you hope we know the seeds are planted. It is only a matter of time before spring.”

You hear his keys dropping on the kitchen counter. You retreat from the mirror. You take your cue and emerge from the bathroom, dignity intact.

…

If there was one thing you could write, knowing it would be read, it would be this. Take note and listen up. There is a carving of yourself perhaps fourteen years down the line in which you are sitting on soiled sheets on your wedding night, buckled over in heavy sobs because the love of your life has devoted the rest of his time here to you and you inhale the cold realization that you may not want to do the same for him. Or that, perhaps, it is this very idea of commitment that you have been chasing upstream in the hopes it would rush against you as a form of hump day stability. The type of stability only true love can provide. But in this carving you realize solace isn’t stability and stability isn’t solace, and you rock back and forth on your knees fidgeting with your great grandmother’s wedding band now on your own ring finger and you think about the jokes you made in seventh grade about your fingers getting so cold that you feared amputation and here the balcony window is open and the air is meeting your long delicate fingers and they are turning blue-ish and you watch them discolor like mood-ring pencils. In this carving you recall what your uncle said about his first second third fourth wife - that love is an idea you rally behind so as not to look like a forty year old man ten years too soon. The words beneath the carving transcribe a careful truth: This man you married is not it. He looks like a wrinkled briefcase when he cries, even when he’s crying for you. The tears are because he wants to keep you but he is draining your emotional stocks. Movie stars aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. You recall your life like falling dominoes - most take the form of men. Coming of age is the process of throwing these shits out the window. Letting them fall, it is in their shards that you find your own reflection.

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Azure Brandi

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