hue roesen

there are so many questions. so many with no answers that no one knows what to do with them. they pile up, these question weights, they make a mess. all of us stuck inside, there's never quite enough room for all of that uncertainty. even the oldest of us have never quite seen anything like this before. not for over a hundred years. my mother doesn't even know what to tell me, and she usually always knows; now she doesn't even know what to do with herself.

the fabric of reality is shifting around us, little earthquakes adjusting the terrain. and stuck inside we can only feel it, we can't see how things are shaking out. not until it's over, and we don't even know when that will be.

and all of those questions. they take up so much space, they fill the room, they climb the walls, they stop doors from closing completely, they poke out of windows, letting the wind and rain inside.

i decide to visualize them as material in my mind, depending on their weight, their delicacy, their conditionality, etcetera, etch-era, eek-etera. my own. some are concrete, some wooden, some porcelain, some metal, some paper, and i build myself a house with them, rooms built with questions, windowed by questions, decorated with questions. an uncertain house, with uncertain walls, with uncertain stairs that might not be there tomorrow. it changes every day. and sometimes i just curl up in a corner an cuddle up to the uncertainty, all of the way things could go and could be.

at this moment, maybe one room is a library, lined with a rainbow of luscious books, each filled with a memory and then blank pages because nobody knows what happens next, how could they?

you and me, me and you, that time we fell into a slow dance in my room in the middle-of-the-night dark with with no music (or had we hummed a little)((literally, perhaps, with energy - definitely), while we waited for my roommate to get out of the bathroom. we jokingly held each other at arms length like middle schoolers. talked about school dances, how i'd missed my prom, how i'd been so depressed at the time and also no one had asked. and we were whispering, and you pondering if you could have gone back in time and taken me to my prom, danced with me in whatever vintage fluffy confection of a dress i would have chosen. pondering the likelihood of your having even been permitted to take me, our 10 years apart almost exactly as it was and would forever be. and we had laughed (quietly) and kissed (softly) and danced (dreamily). and not longer after, we had fallen asleep in each other's arms. it evaporates into dot dot dots. oh the ache in that lonely question mark room.

and the huge window, with trees and flowers filling the frame becomes a screen where all of the wishes and fears play like a movie.  i imagine you pulling up to my apartment, buzzing into my building and me launching myself into your arms at my door. you holding me tight, and then slowly getting physically re- acquainted. we hold each others hands as we talk, fiddle around with our fingers as we laugh, trace each others faces as we sing, kiss each others lips as our energy buzzes and slowly melt back into a puddle of two people bundled together. i have never missed being held so much. never ached for it so palpably during this prolonged solitude. i also imagine you disappearing, you telling me there is no point to even trying because the world is too messed up, there's no telling how long until things can resume some normalcy (whatever that even means anymore), i imagine that maybe you don't care too much at all. why bother? i see more and more aloneness for me.

i wander into a different uncertain room. in it, i get a phone call that my slightly estranged front line doctor father has caught covid, imagine hearing only that he's gone. that he's left me on this earth with a finality more potent than all the times he left me alone at home. all the blank spaces meant to be filled by him, now for a reason more credible than lack of desire. i imagine the rush of widely diverse feelings, helplessness, the being stuck within four walls when i should be sitting shiva surrounded by family. and oh the complications of even that.

in another, the door of my apartment barges open, the building's new management grabbing us and kicking us out, destroying my art-filled, life-filled home. where will i go. nothing will be the same. not that it is anyway, anywhere.

i wander my question mark home, find new rooms, find nooks and crannies, run my fingers over forgotten worries resurfaced. it's an intense place, this house of mine. the only benefit of doing this work, of making my questions and concerns into a tangible space, is that i have also made myself a door Out. i can leave it. and you can too. you can visit your questions, let yourself stay a while and then go on and walk away back into your quarantine life, knowing at some point this will end. reality will insinuate itself sometimes and crash in in others, and everything in between. answers will knock down this house of questions, and leave a field of Possibility, where something new can be built.

at least this is what i tell myself from my room, looking out my window to the quiet street below. i try to keep my hands busy. and i wait (and create).

when i was a little girl, i would perch in front of the mirror and i would wonder what i would look like when i grew up. i would stare at myself, look into my eyes, say to whoever is in the sky -- please. please let me be pretty.

i was a bookish child, a lover of fairy tales, a climber of trees. i'd see my father go out at night with his glimmering women, leaving me behind.

please, let me be pretty.

i think i thought that if i were beautiful, he'd choose me instead. love me best; pick me, choose me - let me be enough. i was just a little girl, watching what it looked like to be a woman. how should i be? can i please, please be pretty?

decades later, face and figure bloomed to an acceptable degree, wit and pluck abound, failed relationships and flirtations trail behind me. men who think i am lovely, but who also did not choose me in the end. they saw but they did not see. another in front of me and there i go, afraid and worrying that i'm doomed to repeat the same fate over and over and over again, wondering how much hurt my heart can carry, that i realize my egregious childhood error. i could slap myself on the head it's as clear as daybreak:

it is Love.

to be Loved is what i should have asked for. that's all i really wanted anyway from the start. from flaw to shining flaw. from curve to wrinkle. from laughter to languor. from wonder to reality.

please. (Please).

there is not much to do today and so here i am; blank page, blank future.

what is even reality any more?

i sit in front of my windows, it's early spring. things are blooming everywhere, and the tree on the opposite side of the glass is getting ready to burst into green, make it so i feel like i live inside a treehouse, everything on the other side obscured. until then, i sit. i watch the bare streets, the empty schoolyard. every now and then someone jogs past, someone walks their dog. they have face masks on, they all do, or wish that they do, perhaps. who would've thought that with everything going on in the world, that not-so-suddenly suddenly there would be a plague ramming down the doors, breathing down our necks. it is here. it is…everywhere.

and you, (You), you are a borough away, locked inside. (my bright spot.)

a week and a half ago we'd woken in my bed on saturday, arms and legs wrapped around each other. foreheads touching, noses nuzzled. i ran my hands through the subtle technicolor majesty of your hair, steel-y grays and moody clouds blended with umbers and breakfast cafe au lait, your eyes a bright optimistic sky (even though weighted with worry), looking at me. and you sang to me a lullaby in language i don't know, and i'd wanted to cry for its beauty and how it begat a warm ache to crawl inside those notes and nestle up inside the sweet comfort of your voice, our bodies touching, always, grounding each other, your hands running over my rounded lines, sharp angles, making their way…

and now, all is quiet except for the birds chirping in the still spindle armed trees, and the blare of ambulances coursing through the streets. a quiet, unrecognizable city. and i, alone, in my room.

that last saturday, sprawled naked on my bed you'd curled your body over mine, weary of the day ahead, the calls to be make, the arrangements made and un. and you'd splayed your arms out across the sheets around me, us. marked it out as a territory, and whispered "this is quarantine"  and you smiled that smile at me, and i smiled right back and murmured "mmm i wish". because there, we were safe. for just a moment we were safe.

not too long ago you showed up in one of my dreams; my g-d it's been so long since you've done that.

i remember when i, 24, curled up with my head in your lap and, besotted, in love, toyed the question if we would still know each other when i was your age, 30 (, as if deep down inside i already knew the answer). you brushed your hands over my hair, touched my face and paused and said, yes. yes, you thought so.

but that pause.

in my dream i was sitting at a table with friends. the room was aglow in warm tones, the table was a medium color wood, and there was laughter and then you just showed up and sat down at the table as though it was nothing, as though it was every day, and you turned and you saw me.

you saw me with your big blue eyes that grew taking in my face, and i yours, and there was a surreal moment of recognition of You. You this person i once knew so well, or thought i did, and now here you are with a slightly aged face and my word how i know you so well, so not at all, not ever, did i? did you? and i remembered that girl that i was, and you that boy who had no idea what to do with her. when i woke up, i had to shake the warm glow of that room from my head, look around my room, remember Now.

i'm nearing the age you were, 34, the last time i wished you a happy birthday through the ether of the internet. after i deleted you from my life, to cut the anchor you had on my heart despite the years i'd already spent plucking out the thorns. i had figured, i've always wanted to tell you, it was for our own good. and still i wonder, i want to ask, if it hurt to realize i was gone, really gone; by then you were somebody else's, how much could i ask to matter, how much could you have let me?

and the years have gone on, and on and on. i don't even know if you'd recognize my insides anymore. because the truth is that getting over you required getting over everything that came before you. all of the things i'd never faced, that i'd wanted you (unfairly) to shield me from; the demons inside me you had unknowingly helped set free from down below to trollop through my life, above. i'd wanted to be saved. i'd wanted someone by my side.

but i had to save myself, my self.

the questions i find myself occasionally wanting to ask you age alongside me, shift with my experience, groan under my understanding: the arrival of my baggage, the accounting for each one's contents, the cleaning and shifting and organizing of that baggage. the living without that baggage or, well, with it as opposed to buried under it. all of the living i've done more solidly since i knew you last.

there are moments i want to reach out to you and say oh my g-d i was so young and i was so dumb and i didn't know what i didn't know and nothing was as i saw it, and so i saw nothing as it was at all and i'm sorry, i'm so sorry about being that girl. and others where i still want to smack you across the face and ask how could you, how could you, after all those years, not have known me better, known me at all, not really.

i remember that time we wound up at a Beck concert, how we'd made out in the cab from the lower east side to washington heights. how towards the end of the night he played "Lost Cause" and how you wrapped me in your arms from behind and how i'd leaned my weight against you, and how inside in my gut i knew. and you knew. and still, we went on, us lost causes together. until.

and still, every now and then, i wonder what it'd be like to see you again. if a tiny corner of my heart tucked over to the side would swell, if there are any tiny embers left to swoon and reach for you. or if maybe i'd just be spooked by seeing you, a living mirror of the ghost of my former self standing before me.

and i wonder what she, what i, would do.

hello hello forgive me hello goodbye i forgive you it's you; it's me nice to meet you (again) hello goodbye hello hello hello i know you know you know i know did you i did i didn't you did. i want you to know good hello bye

thanks

you.

that place it was mine so many years ago. those halls, the courtyard, the auditorium, the parking lot, the classrooms, the desks. the learning, the laughter, the youth, the naiveté. it should have been a constant.

i left thinking it would always be there, those memories, those roots of mine. it wasn't perfect, but it was a part of my makeup, those years, a part of the warp and the weft that holds me together.

that day. my g-d that day, watching it all fall away. this time it was MY school where a shooter opened fire. it was so long ago that i was there, but in an instant, it could have been me frozen in a closet, running for my life. behind the desks, in closets of classrooms, running through those halls, the courtyard, the parking lot where i'd once rehearsed for marching band. 17 are dead. and the world knows my school's name, the town where where i grew up. my home, my home, all of it on display and good g-d the things "adults" say, when traumatized students rise up and try to make a change. it makes me shake. and i wish i could swallow a potion like in Alice in Wonderland, and grow big enough to wrap my arms around and shield them all.

it's been two months and i'm trying to figure out where this grief should live inside of me. it's that time when people stop caring, when you're not supposed to talk about it anymore. when it should stop feeling weird to be places where people are acting like nothing has happened. and it doesn't feel so galling anymore that people are laughing and having fun.  it's not such a shock. it just makes it stand out even more, this weight that sits inside of me. waiting for it to settle. to feel more settled. not knowing if i ever will.

- hue roesen

it was late friday night on the L train that finally came after a long wait on the platform.

we had sighed and leaned together, tired after the long day and the long evening, breathing in the reality of the train we had missed by seconds and the fifteen minute wait for the next. breathing in the minutes we were stuck waiting that weren't spent climbing into bed and curling into each other.

for whatever reason, this prime time travel hour was when they pressure cleaned the station, the mist billowing as though we were on the platform of a steam engine instead of the 21st century subway. further and further into the station we reluctantly shuffled as the cleaners followed behind in an awkward dance until, at last, the train came. packed with fellow friday night journeyers: some as knackered as us, some buoyant with youth and expectation for the remaining hours of nighttime; we hung limply onto a pole, jostled around by the lurching train, aching with sighs for arms and bed.

in new york city, the witching hour blooms with quiet moments of romance, like how you touch my arm and nod towards a recently vacated seat, smiling soft as i settle in and lean my head against the pole, eyes blinking with sleep. and when you sink into a seat across the aisle a stop later and shrug to me and smile because we're not sitting together, but across isn't so bad.

soon it will be our time. soon.

stop after stop after stop we go, zipping underneath the streets of brooklyn until it's our turn to depart. my heart smiles a skip that we arise simultaneously from our opposite seats to get off, the way to me becoming second nature to you. sleepy and delirious with the thought of home and bed and you in my bed, i wander haphazardly towards the doors as the train strains to pull to a halt with a jarring jerk and jostle. just as i start to sense the sensation of tumbling forward, your arm slips around me from behind tucking me into an embrace, and i sigh in surprise as you hold me there against you so that i don't fall down.

when you’re writing a poem in your head

but you don’t write it down because you think,

surely, i’ll remember this piece of awesomeness later

but then later you can’t remember, not exactly. 

and you know you know better than this, but still.

so... maybe someday someone will create a device 

where i can say inside my head:

 okay brain magic, record this thought poem

thing, and it will. and i’d be a bionic poet woman.