#killarney clary

[from Killarney Clary from “Who Whispered Near Me”]

I always daydream good dreams, make imaginable only the best. I would say that we should leave this place, start over, knowing change is destined to be right. You would say, “Yes, we could do anything.” I would tell you I admire you and you would believe me. The grand confrontations and cozy chatter are in my head constantly while I try to work or sleep or listen.

I try to think of anything else -- complicated ideas, puzzles, or money. I would ask Jim to tell me if I make it difficult for him somehow and he would say I do. Though that kind of clearness is only fantasy, I pretend it strengthens me, that anyone could tell me anything and I would understand. I don’t know if imagining is fair. I don’t know how it works into me, convincing me of friendship and success, but it’s a chronic music to me now.

The sky would be cold over the city park, but I’d walk alone miles from there, out here, in Redlands, the “Friendly Place.” And I’d wonder as I crossed to the fragrant groves if that long, low boom was the end of Los Angeles, about my sister, her new baby, and the uncountable bits of color and talk. Still, I would be telling them, they would be telling me. Still, someone’s back is turned and the ugly worry leaks.

It’s a real dream now, the patient one, the one that moans “hold on” but offers no handle, no features. After straining in the haze, I carve out old photographs -- of Kathleen and me in matching bathing suits in Balboa, of Chris the day his glasses were broken. Am I only juggling, like the cormorant fisherman, the lines between us, the tangle I mustn’t doze from? “Attend,” the birds whisper. “We quicken.” But their wings don’t move; their hearts don’t beat; and the tiny earth attaches to body with invisible threads to the arguable melody.

There are more of us. We came out of a time when birth was happy. We are prizes. Perhaps we shouldn’t have been so important, so healthy...

We were sold on dissatisfaction...

I am very lucky but that’s not life. And maybe no more than  any person born in any year, I want but don’t know what, feel unsettled in a sea of similarly restless faces. The breadth of possibility makes choosing seem evasive. We decide but we are slow and small with doubts.

It was 1954 when my parents moved to have room for me. I remember a box my mother packed for me to store at school, filled with canned milk and soup and Hershey bars.

Two thousand good nights. My checked uniform on a hook. My face to the hall light because that felt like a day in the sun. Not fear, not loneliness, but my preference for sleeping near the window and near the floor, humming.