When We Are Talking, by Cailin Elizabeth Goldberg-Meehan

crossword puzzles and cigarettes, the way the bed feels different sometimes, just the way the mattress learns to grow in spots – when we are saying just what we mean, when you thought, when you were small, when you told stories to yourself, how do they compare? It wasn’t my mythology – dresses and advice and well-lit kitchens – but you must have had myths of your own. Not a kitchen but maybe a dinner you didn’t have to worry about. Maybe it would just be there and you could take it for granted. Not advice, but light from the windows, and you are there on the lawn – illuminates the grass like specks of green foil and you are playing and this is what he will remember because most days you will come home and all you’ll want is a dinner you didn’t have to worry about and a consistent mattress. I know you didn’t dream of dresses – were they suits? Were they preppy and well kempt or perhaps a bit more subversive? I hope they were a bit more subversive. And I hope your hopes were high. Maybe that would ease the tension slightly. Maybe that would change things. Maybe that would allow the faith to grow a bit, the faith in things I cannot see – love and other unimaginables. When hopes are high, when we are disappointed, when we realize saying just what we mean is tiring, where can I escape to? The mattress is too much all at once. It is too much to think of escaping into it. And the blankets are too heavy and the crack letting in the cold air is at once too small and too substantial. How can it be both? But it is. And when I close the window it’s too hot, and throwing the blankets off does nothing, a ceremonious gesture. Sleeping on the floor, perhaps, might solve things, for I have heard that heat rises. And how funny a thing that is. To think of the heat, rising above the colder molecules, like some sort of great scientific triumph. And then I wonder who we are, in the molecular scheme of things. Everyone would like to be the triumphant one, surely, but there has to be a loser too; there has to be an equilibrium. So when we are saying just what we mean, that is when it has to happen. And then there is Selma to consider. When I was small there was a teacher with a snake and she would feed it rats and we’d watch him wrap himself around them and make them his own. Selma. She had a big skeleton in her short white room and I would think sometimes that I saw signs of life – someone would jostle his arm and the finger bones would shake and you would think about who he was when he was. Selma would wave her hands around. Molecules! She would say. (And she has a Long Island accent but I am sure it is a product of my memory’s mind.) She would say molecules! And wave her hand and I would look for them but see only dust. Dust from his bones, I imagined. How can you believe in something you cannot see? I am looking for it. And all we do is talk about it and I say I cannot believe you, I’m sorry. So when we are rising and falling in this invisible spectra, who’s to say where we’ll end up? Who could know where we’ll end up. I can’t take Selma at her word. I can’t believe that these particles, hot and cold, respectively, are invisible and that they have all this energy inside of them and furthermore that they are the building blocks of our selves. It is all too much. Like the mattress and the blankets and saying just what we mean and not knowing if we are hot or cold. My faith in molecules.

-- Cailin Elizabeth Goldberg-Meehan