The Name I Will Give You – Ginger Jones

July 5, 2026

Sitting in my car, I call my cousin John and tell him that I’m okay and then I tell him some truth. I tell him that I might die if I go back to California but I will certainly die if I stay in Texas. His girlfriend offers me her parents’ place in Maine. She says I can stay as long as I like or until it gets too cold since nobody in her family has stayed in the house for over a year. Primarily because her older brother overdosed there and secondly because it is not actually a house but a renovated brick mill and barn that was meant to be a lucrative adaptive re-use apartment building till the nearby college shut down and the town was hit with an opioid epidemic, rendering the whole venture a loss. 

“You’ll be fine. Call me when you get there so I know you’re alright. I love you.” John is always there for me like this. Teaching me how to keep secrets. He was first person to get me drunk and the first person to show me how to get away with it. I hang up the phone and drive for two days straight stopping only in Nashville to sleep in my car. I have never felt so aligned with gas station bathrooms and cheap coffee. 

I look at peace whenever I can. I look at the shadows and flowers and I remind myself it is only a flower or a shadow and nothing more. The line in the road is only a line. I want to be like that, incontestable and understood. My inner child is dead because everything looks easy and I just want to be easy instead of everything I’ve already become.

My cupholders are full of empty cups and my dashboard is commemorated in receipts and dried flowers picked from the side of the road. I am resolved in my decision and in knowing that I will go further than ever to not be punished for my actions. I cross into a dream when I start driving in and out of the coast of Maine. The fog and light sedate me into a slower rounded pace. My eyes wandering to telephone lines in the sky. 

At the end of Transit Street, a two story brick building with a faded American flag painted on the chimney and a white barn covered in electric moss a few yards away sit outside a small coastal town. There is a liquor store with a deli, a church next to a library separated by a parking lot, a coffee shop, a diner, a bar, a gift shop, a bagel shop, an ice cream shop, an inn, a pharmacy, a small harbor with fishing boats lying in the mud, dilapidated houses overgrown with vines, a post office and lots of good trees. John’s girlfriend explains that the barn is best for me since it has a wood burning stove and can heat the place up fairly quickly as long as I feed the fire. The place is perfunctorily outfitted with a beat up white leather couch, a salvaged wood coffee table, a dining set with shaker chairs, a bed with an iron frame and a broken refrigerator. The barn sits beside a creek with a wooden bridge that leads to abandoned train tracks. If you walk along the tracks deep into the forest you cross a dam where you can jump into the lake and swim out to large smooth rocks that have their own trees on them. In the winter deer will walk across the ice, little fish freeze and the birds fly south. Everything is frigid and fire is the warmest thing you can never hold. Winter is a very beautiful thing I do not know about yet. It’s begins to seep through gray places. Through the creek rot and the low tide stench. Along the forgotten houses with their windows shut like tombstones.

The first thing I do is buy firewood at the gas station. After that I sweep the floors, light a fire in the stove and pull out clean sheets from a cupboard behind the back door. I don’t consider much except that I’m so alone and it is so loud. I feel like an illustration. The light is unkind in the morning here. It hangs over everything thin and metallic. It makes the water and trees look diseased and powerful. By afternoon the light flattens but there’s a night feeling under it. A black pulse beneath the grass and rocks assures me that I am not the only living thing here. I feel it kick from within me. It’s that pulse and unwavering impatience that I brought with me all this way. I call my friend Sadie in New York City and invite her to come stay with me, hoping she can help fortify me into the next part of whatever this trick is. I call her mostly because she’s too smart for her own good and she loves me and that’s good enough but primarily because she’s the only girl I know on the East Coast. She makes me feel like a person but not like myself which is something I need to feel like right now.

Two days later I drive an hour to pick up Sadie from the bus stop. She hops out with a backpack, a small duffle bag across her waifish body, a guitar in her hand and a sweet smile across her pale face, framed by her black witch’s mane streaked with white strands and the smallest little blue eyes you’ve ever seen. She looks so much like a girl and an old woman at the same time. She hugs me and she smells like a bonfire and drugs.

We stop for cinnamon doughnuts on the drive back and I listen to her tell me about her life and her band and her pathetic boyfriend. I feel relaxed in the driver’s seat watching sugar stick to the sides of her mouth and listening to her complain. I want to waste days with a friend and all their problems and none of my own like this. She softens knowing her words land on eager ears.

Overnight, the town starts to frighteningly cool under a holy autumnal chill. Sadie shakes in her leather jacket and knit cap. It’s impossible not to love the forest when you see it rust in red and orange. The foliage is sentimental to a Californian like me. Everything leading up to this is so dry and romantic. I hear women say that they feel productive when they get pregnant because their body does this great big thing of making a baby but I feel like I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop. I’m anxious and impatient. It feels like I’m building my own coffin from within the dirt. I’m put to work and now I’m sore.

I’m laid up under a tree and my eyes are closing while the fog rolls in.

Sadie makes the barn feel briefly like a vacation and less like a home. She puts her socks on the stove and hums loudly while they dry stiff with smoke and heat. She brings three books, several knit sweaters and a collection of miscellaneous pills in an old Altoid’s box. That first night it is so cold that we boil water on the stovetop to fill the bathtub. We steep our feet in the hot water. Sadie lights a cigarette and complains about sharing a shitty apartment in New York City with her even shittier boyfriend. The steam and smoke are a hissing blonde light. She slowly sinks her backside down the side of the bathtub, letting her arms float, hinging her legs at the knee and resting her head in between my legs. I use my fingers to comb through her unkempt hair and braid it into two fraying ropes as she gnaws at the cuticles on her thumbs. I think I could have a daughter like her. Moody, precocious, stubborn and small. The universe is going to play a big joke on me and give me a son so I can teach a man all the right and wrong things for eternity. Sadie is going to help because she’s everything I’m not. She has the ego of a man with everything and nothing to lose. She’s important to me for this very specific reason. She sees me the same way a man sees a woman as both a whore and a mother, with pity and regret, as if she were a better person for being so hard. I don’t tell her what I’m afraid of because saying it would make it ordinary and I would have to deal with it. I need it to remain enormous and private and soft while I still can. I can feel the heat rising to my cheeks and beads of sweat freckling my brow. The street outside smells like seaweed as the windows fog up with the distinct girlish smell of soap and secrets.

I open a towel for her to step into out of the tub. I wrap it around her and take her braids out from under the cotton to dry. Her face is so pink like a newborn, adorned with crow’s feet and deep lines around her mouth. My face has cooled and looks yellow next to hers.

“Thank you… I love you.” I recite it almost mechanically. Those are words I invented when I was in love. I made those words and now I say them casually like they’re in another language and I don’t understand the true meaning. I think that it’s supposed to feel this way for a while. 

𖧋

Sadie gets a job at the coffee shop in the town’s square about ten minutes away. The town is comprised of elderly people who’ve retired from big cities or moved in from smaller towns. They are, or once were, either tenured professors, social workers, potheads, writers, fishermen, biologists, conservationists or recluses. A group of seven or eight come into Sadie’s coffee shop every morning at the crack of dawn and sit on the mismatched couches and chairs, spending hours gossip-mongering and quarreling over the current administration. They often read in silence amongst each other, coughing and chuckling to themselves like old people do. It’s aspirational. On the rare occasion that I wake up early enough, I go to the coffee shop and sit on an old leather chair in the corner and listen to the old leathery people cough and chuckle. I don’t have a job and they can tell. I don’t have any idea what I’m doing and they don’t care. I find it hard to approach them whereas Sadie blends right in with her unearned wisdom and a twinge of shared jealously for young pretty fertile things. But I know that when I’m big enough they will want to talk to me and they will have small bits of advice and lots of good stories that will both bore and scare me. It feels like I’m harboring a fugitive from these people. I sense myself aging but I have never looked sweeter. My cheeks are rounder. My lips are softer. I’m flushed without lifting a finger. I look like I’ve sucked up all the life around me and left the townsfolk dried up.

Down the street from the coffee shop is a bar called The Sea Dog. We order gin and tonics. I’m trying to forget that everything is changing. I’m trying to eat and drink with the men and women of the Sea Dog tonight where lobster cages hang from the ceiling and the window panes are fogged over and blue with the ocean waiting in the distant. At the other end of the bar sits a man with long grey hair and an even longer grey beard. He wears a dirty old trucker’s hat and wool button up. He is scrawny and old in the face. He has devilish green eyes and a buzzed grin hidden under his mustache. We introduce ourselves to the stranger. His name is Irving and he has lived in town since his first day on earth.  

“I live above the coffeeshop next to the bookstore.” He tells us. 

“Joe’s? I just started working. I’m there every morning. I open up the place.”

“I don’t go in that often, I don’t drink coffee… But I’m just upstairs. Sometimes I’ll come in and get that chai latte thing you guys make but it’s too sweet to have all the time.”

“You should try the dirty chai, it’s just a latte with a shot of espresso.”

“Sounds rich…”

“Yeah it’s a good one though, if you come in and I’m working, I’ll hook you up.” We offer to buy him a beer but he insists on buying us drinks. I am focused on my two drinks while Sadie and Irving talk pleasantly about the town. 

It does not take long for the gin to get me drunker and more depressed than I anticipated. The wind is howling and the leaves are tunneling down the street. I am among the leaves, shivering.

I occasionally pick up words from Sadie and Irving’s conversation…. Stephen King… Boston… Mercedes SL…  Lighthouse… Walmart…  Brown butter… Moose tracks… Do you smoke? 

At night I’m flushed with anger and exhausted. I press my face into my pillow and recite out loud I love you till I feel it land on him wherever he is. I love you sounds like I hate you. I miss you. I need you. Where are you? Damn you… You are always on my mind. There is nothing I can say. I never wanted anything to change. I’m so paralyzed with fear. I have no answers. I have no questions. I have nobody and everybody is after me. I wonder if you still love me. Maybe more now that you don’t know me. Now that you can’t see me and how I’ve changed. Love is so strange. I’m your prisoner now and forever. This is the big breakdown isn’t it… This is loss.

The next morning I’m awaken by a throbbing inside my whole being. My head. My stomach. My belly. My feet. I turn over in bed and groan. Sadie’s hand rubs my back but I am too sick to recoil from her touch. I’d like to run away from this feeling but my head is like a spinning top on the hard wood floors. Sadies beings speaking carefully to me, like a nurse or a landlord.

“You feel okay?” I refuse to answer her. I close my eyes and wince. I’m doing math. Thirty-two more weeks and then the rest of my life. That’s infinity. That’s eternity. My head is falling downhill into my chest. I look at my body. There’s something else in here. It’s mostly you.

𖧋

I’m walking all the time even though it’s freezing outside. I walk down the driveway to the road, cross the bridge and walk between the train tracks and the largest pine trees I’ve ever seen. Sometimes I find Irving and his dog there. I love his dog. She looks just like me. Red hair and unwaveringly devoted. Irving isn’t particularly curious as to why Sadie and I are here. I’m not so sure he even knows we’re here at all. If I had to guess, I’d say he’s around one hundred years old. He has lots of stories about getting lost in a town he grew up in. He likes to tell me every detail about the weather of each year.

“What’s worse, losing your mind or losing your life?” I ask him, unconvincing and childish.

“I think probably your mind. Losing your life is easy.”Also unconvincing and childish.

“Losing your mind is harder?”

“Much harder because you have to go through a lot to lose it. You have to get so far away from yourself that you can’t ever find your way back. That’s not an easy thing to do. It’s really tough saying goodbye to everything and everyone you’ve ever known…” 

His eyes are soft. I want to see the faces of everyone I’ve ever loved like this. 

“…You’re only free a little while.”

“I want to be free.” I say this mostly to myself. “Sometimes I just want my life to end.”

“There are only a few good ways of doing it and I don’t think you’d like it. You’re too young and too old to do such a thing… You should never talk like that. It’s not good for you.” He says it sternly in a way that makes me think he’s never said it before with true meaning. 

“I feel that way sometimes. Like I should’ve done it sooner, like it’s too late and now I have to wait till I’m really old to do it or whenever my time comes I guess.”

“Maybe you’ll be like me waiting for your special day to come. Maybe a birthday or New Year’s but I don’t like that one as much. I’d shoot myself through the heart though, not the head that’s for sure. It’s too loud, shouting a gun through your forehead or temple, I mean. The heart is where your soul is. You shoot that down, you’re really gone. No coming back when you blast your heart to pieces, right?” As if I could ever know. 

The smell of factory fumes and coal burning distill us from the rest of the world.

𖧋

Weeks go by and we’ve made ourselves at home now. Sadie has started to sing and play guitar at the coffee shop in the early evening. To our surprise, the old folks in this town like to stay up late and drink nearly every night and so after Sadie performs and closes up the coffee shop, we walk down to the Sea Dog to drink with Irving and his red dog. It’s a routine. The four of us sit at the far end of the bar away from chill of the window and front door with our pale ales and rosy cheeks. 

Sadie and Irving are settled in conversation with Dominic, a retired federal probation officer, and Nicky, a retired world renowned pro-skater. They talked about mushrooming and making wine. Everybody here loves things that grow and ferment in wet dark places. All that biology. I’ve always found it uncomfortable to find the romance and spirit in it but I know it’s there. The arcane knowledge of it frightens to me. The extension. These men love to nurture and brew and I think that makes them like mothers too. They want to have something for themselves that extends and breathes and lives. Something that has to be tended to in order to grow and replenish you in return. It’s all very natural. Perhaps I don’t have what it takes to see this through. I don’t trust elemental truths.

I need someone to take me home. 

𖧋

I’m growing and it’s showing. Sadie is shrinking into herself and taking pills I don’t recognize. She could speak for an hour and flatten the whole room. Even the candles looked embarrassed around her. She has an unforgiving way of making tenderness feel deviant. I’m used to space and sunsets but with Sadie there is no room. Everything she does lacks heart and it’s infecting me. New Yorkers are used to making quick and loud decisions in cramped places. In California we drive up and down hills to come to our decisions. I have not driven up or down a hill in weeks and I’m being indecisive but I don’t think I even have a choice in the matter. This is my only life. It’s all I have.

I still haven’t gotten a job. John sends me some money but I start asking Sadie to help pay for groceries and fire wood. Throughout the week, I drive some forty minutes to the grocery store and buy chickens, vegetables, tortillas, beans and herbs in a large canvas tote bag that I found in the closet with the initials JD embroidered on the side in navy stitching that presumably belongs to my cousin. The drive is akin to a constitutional like a hunt. I listen to music with the windows rolled down and heater on. It brings me back to you and me. 

The cooking is the only thing I can do to make myself feel important. I make hearty beef stews and creamy chicken pot pies and occasionally lobster slathered in shallot butter when Irving gifts us a fresh catch. Sadie smokes and writes songs on her guitar while I cook. I tear up when I hear her softly singing under her breath over lightly strummed chords while I chop and dice onions.

We set the small dining table with two long black candlesticks placed inside empty beer bottles and torn paper towels for napkins. I rush over the pot to the table and reveal our Sunday night brisket delectably adorned with roasted and stewed carrots, potatoes, celery, onions and whatever else I could find. A burst of steam unleashes the aromas of braised beef and red wine, largely rich and tender. Sadie takes the longest time to eat, with the daintiest bites, and monologues in between on various trivial things like morals and virtues and critiques on my cooking, whereas I ravish my food. More than often, we taste completely different things. It’s when we sit and talk like this that I realize I don’t like all the things I know about her and she seemingly feels the same towards me.

“What?” She asks, breaking my stare. 

“What?”

“You’re being weird.”

“Sorry?”

“Do you like not want to talk or something?”

“No, no…”

“You actually haven’t said anything in like ten minutes.”

“Sorry I don’t know.” I don’t have words… 

“Alright whatever.” Sadie clears the plates and haphazardly cleans them by splashing cold water and soap over everything. She can sense my resentment. 

“I want to have a dinner here with some of the regulars from Joe’s, they want to come see the place and I think I would be nice to host people. It’d be a heathy change of us both… You can stay in the kitchen as long as you like, you don’t need to like exert yourself socially. You should make the this again, it was really good actually.”

“Tomorrow night? Can we invite Irving?”

“I mean like yeah I guess so.”

“He’s good people.”

“No, I know, I just don’t know about him like in our house.”

“Right… He only eats toast and hot dogs anyway.” We laugh lightly and politely. 

“No you’re right, he’s like always alone.”

“I think it would be nice for him to be included.”

“Yeah okay, sure.”

I buy a pack of hot dogs and extra bread the next day.

𖧋

Dominic, the retired probation officer, is the first of our guests to arrive promptly at six o’clock. He brings me and Sadie a case of his homemade wine. The next guests include Mary and Sarah, a married couple that graciously gifted Sadie a large jar of their home grown bud. A few more coffee shop regulars and their spouses filtered in and by seven o’clock we had a full house of about eight town elders but no sign of Irving. I left the defrosted pack of hot dogs in the sink.

Most of the women came into the kitchen in attempts to assist me but they mostly stood around lifting dust off the surfaces and scanning my face. I’m not sure what I’m supposed to say to them so I list off the ingredients and their significant roles which instantly bores and concerns the other women. 

We extend the dining table by tacking on a folding table to one end and a card table onto the other until it stretches nearly the length of the room. Sadie and I sit at opposite heads and at opposite ends of embodiment while the grey haired guests spill out between us. I’m sitting on a lawn chair borrowed from the yard while she occupies a beach chair that has been crammed in the closet for years. She looks lit from within talking to them. I feel dim and swollen. All I can think is that I’d rather be in love and alone than with all these people and nobody to call home. I miss dancing. I miss pretending to be okay and being watched while doing it. I wish I had wings that could fly back in time and just hover. I’m perfectly buzzed off of Dominic’s red wine which I begin to suspect is laced with LSD. Everybody is talking but all I hear is birds chirping. It sounds like Sunday morning. The dark edges of the room look buried and waterlogged. 

As the night progresses, the gathering minimizes to a handful of four or six rambunctious elderly freeloaders, smoking weed and downing bottles of Dominic’s dubious homemade wine. To my right, Jane, a tenured photography teacher from New York City has attached herself to me. She caresses my arm and holds my hand tightly, forcing our bodies to congeal. She is so near in fact that I could kiss her red stained lips with my own just by leaning in a centimeter. Her white hair casts a net, keeping me prisoner like a crab.

“You’re so beautiful…” Slurring her words with loony tune inflection. One of her eyes looking right through me to the other side of the room. “I love your hair and your cheeks – oh those cheeks! You’re so sweet, man…. Sadie is sweet too…. She’s soooo fucking cool… You guys are just so sweet, I just love you guys, man… I-I’m just so happy you found each other and came here to our little sea side town…” My hand atrophies in her tight fist that feels like it hurt her more than it does me. This is not the first time a drunk has seized me and found comfort in my cheeks despite my discomfort and agitation. It’s at this moment I realize I’ve spent more time with drunks than babies. I think Jane must have been an attractive woman herself in her time. I wonder who this woman was just as she herself was wondering the same thing. I want to lean in and whisper…Stop looking at me…

It’s past nine and still no sign of Irving. 

𖧋

I turn to Jane and cut her off from whatever she’s rambling about and asked if she knows Irving. As soon as the question left me I realized how badly I needed an answer. I had no knowledge of Irving outside of his thoughts on suicide, morose and mushrooms. 

“Alright so … I’ve known Irving since my freshmen year at Camden… I don’t know if you knew that but I actually graduated from Camden in 1986 and then I moved to New York and got my Master’s at Columbia and then I came back and I’ve been here really ever since but so… Irving and I met in town at the diner and well now it’s the coffeeshop, you know the one Sadie works at, yes? Of course… But back then it was a diner and he lived upstairs… He still does! Jesus fucking Christ man I mean… forty fucking years in that shit hole?!… But you know, he never married, no wife, no kids, no nothing, no nobody… There was this freshmen girl he fell for… crazy girl like ran away from the mental hospital crazy… seeing things crazy… and I think she got pregnant or something and lost her mind… I didn’t know the story all too well but… oh Mary knew her! Mary!” She ushers Mary over to our end of the table. Mary stumbles out of her seat and I realize then that I am most likely, the most sober person in my own home for the very first time in my life. 

Across the makeshift dining table, Sadie notices the hens clucking around me and for a second I think she might be concerned but I quickly realize it’s jealousy. She’s getting drunk but she remains patient like she’s in a competition for composure. She’s holding it together quite admirably. I’m always impressed by her posturing nature. She remains disembodied like she’s had a surgery where they replaced her heart with a brain. That same way I have a heart in my head. 

Eventually Sadie coaxes Mary and Sarah to the couch with the weed they brought. They light a joint, the cloud of smoke dancing above them, illuminated by the dinner candles and oppressive porch lights outside. They talk about a New York City that no longer exists. I feel a burning in my chest as I watch the fire throw itself against the glass door of the stove. My bones are cold and my head is flat. The air is filled with smoke and banter, making me visibly nauseous. I walk to the ladder leading up to the loft bedroom without a sound and thankfully nobody stops me. I rock myself to sleep to the sounds of something sinister and broken down below. How long do you have to spend outside yourself to know you’d rather be inside: a dinner party with nobody you love.  

𖧋

Sadie leaves for New York to play a show the following week. She wouldn’t admit it but she humiliated by my softness and desperate for something hard enough to push against. Something to wrestle against. Sometimes I envy the way she closes herself off to her femininity, the way she lacks compassion and empathy. But then I remember how I got here. The walls are slick with resentment. When she leaves, the air clears and finally everything falls quiet. At first the silence is punishing and loud. Her voice echos even when she’s gone. It rattles the glass in the windows and settled on the floor, swallowing the last of her whine. I look around at nobody and feel like I could see through things. My body was busy and now it was still. Objects flatten and time slows, all the while my body abstracts itself. All I feel is the silent heat I brought here with me and the second heartbeat. For the first time, I feel it. Carrying, full, tender, like a house. I greet the silence with open arms. I could shed a tear. All of sorrow passing through me. I’m inside myself again. I’m moved like a current under the dark waters. Warmly remembering its shape. The wind keeps worrying the house sharply and loudly. I feel it along the seams of the thin windows and floorboards. The woods are so close they feel almost human. There is a heat here that does not belong to me. It gathers and rests low and patient almost lick it’s thinking on its own. The walls breathe deeply. The light pulses and shadows are deadening it from all sides. Nothing is happening all at once. I wait for it to pass but it settles deeper and louder. Fiercer until I can no longer tell if it is sorrow or if it is simply what I am now. I can feel something perfect in front of me like a ghost. It’s you and the knowing that you are always with me. I do not move it or dare to name the feeling because it is already naming me. Yours.

I stand here and feel where it begins and where I end. It’s faint like watercolor. Me and the nothing. Me and you. We are borderless with each other. The wind keeps brushing the house and I feel it too. Like the outside has found me through a crack in the walls. I think that if I breathe too deeply the silence will grow enormous and I don’t know which would be worse: to become the silence itself or to watch it become me. I close my eyes to try and see it better but I forget everything instead. I am only now arriving to the sensation and I am completely consumed with the worry that this is the only question.

I am knocked up with the thought of him. This is not a sentimental resolution but the most terrifying wager imaginable. To give everything and ask for life in return, to remain empty. To create something that will outlive you and maybe even destroy you. I tell myself this is what it means to be an artist. 

Beauty without reverberation is a friend to me. The truth without escape and spoiled with excess. I am turned on by my own depth. There has never been anyone more in love with a ghost. I make love to the traces of a man. This was always my greatest perversion. Kissing and holding the hands of somebody larger than life. Following him like a leader. I love myself the same. 

𖧋

I walk around town with nobody and everybody all at once. I’m like a buoy in the harbor bobbing up and down while heavy traffic passes by. The library down the street is lit with dimmed lights that spill yellow into the street. It looks like a lighthouse, flooding the streets with safe passage. 

I walk through the hollowed halls inside and feel the knots in the dark wooden floorboard press into the soles of my boots. I find myself in an aisle flipping through titles in my mind. Wandering. 

I mindlessly select an unflattering edition of The Grapes of Wrath and open to find the library card underneath a faded stamp. In aged black it reads, Irving Walsh dated 1976. His name appears in different inks and different hands, it grows stronger and then lighter. Sometimes cramped and shaky. Sometimes long and slanted. Irving Walsh. Irving Walsh. Irving Walsh. Repeated till the it caves in on itself. I run my thumb over the grooves left behind by pens pressed too hard into cardstock.

A young librarian watches me from behind the desk with a gentle and unfamiliar concern. I think everybody in town has begun looking at me this way. Like I’m something terminal. She asks if I need help and I shake my head no without looking up or saying a word. My body feels swollen with secrecy and pungent with exception. Every movement I make feels delayed by several seconds as if I were underwater. I draw another book open and stand feeling split open by love and fear and weather. Cold and red. There should be records for such things. There should be a book of every terrible thought a woman has before becoming a mother.

I find myself imagining Irving young and uncomfortable in his body. What kind of boy he might have been in a place so cozy like this. I can’t picture it correctly. Maybe he was born covered in wool beside the river with his little red dog. Maybe he emerged from his mother smelling of firewood and sea water. I imagine him sitting alone in his apartment upstairs above the diner before it became the coffee shop when it was just a diner, snow against the windows, reading in his rocking chair with a shotgun hung on the wall, waiting for his life to begin and missing the moment it did because he never did leave that damn room. 

𖧋

Back at the barn I stand in the bath tub testing the warm water. I place my hand low against my stomach and feel nothing at first then a faint movement like a fish turning beneath dark murky waters. I close my eyes immediately to summon sensation so that I can try and register the feeling. The lights outside hum like a choir harmonized by the distant loons. The whole town feels suspended beneath the wind breathing in its invisible fire. I think of Sadie in New York where everything is fast and public. For a moment I hate her so much I nearly feel young again. I sit myself down so that my back is up against the cracked porcelain rim and the water covers my legs and waist. I keep my hands in the water till instinct tells me to cover my face with warmth.

I think about the day I will bring this child into the world and holding him to my chest. I think about you in the room and your grip holding my hand. The things you’d see and tell me. That’s where I belong. In your eyes. In your mouth. I’ve always belonged there. I will give myself a new name when I give birth. I will give my baby my name and then I will have none. That would be right. That would be something you would have liked. On my death bed I will remember being kissed and having a baby. These things are never forever. They are infinite. They are soul. This book is about soul. The voice refuses eternity. It knows language cannot serve truth. Letting it come into you, restoring faith and letting it harden you. Let youth die, get ancient and be beautiful. There is no God, there is only love and it’s infinite. They are infinite because they end with you.

I’ll never speak again. There you are. There’s your face. I have no words. Thank you. I love you. 

𖧋