To the Moon


Dear Eugene,

Last night, Halloween, firecracker night.

Earlier in the day, an umbrella with a big and heavy handle dropped on the floor of the bus I was riding, and Lady Worry beside me jumped like she was shot in the chest, hand on wound.  Before that she was staring at my big lunch bag like I was carrying a bomb.

I am sure she didn't react the same last night to each of the many crackings.  Violence, once you get used to it, becomes a tedium, a default element to work with and work around in the new normal.

Last night I pretended I was in a war zone, hid in my blanket and tried to fall asleep, the way a child in a war zone pretends it's just firecrackers on Halloween to fall upward to a feebly imagined heaven, the way the great British novelist R. C. Hutchinson pretended to have been one and many of the Poles in WWII driven like cattle in a long and most tedious train ride to Siberia wastelands and came up with a masterpiece that not many have read and probably would find sufferable.

Streets full of people
All alone
Roads full of houses
Never home
Church full of singing
Out of tune
Everyone's gone to the moon

Yours, Alex

Comments

  1. KateNovember 2, 2018 at 6:20 AM

    Dear Eugene,

    "Violence, once you get used to it, becomes a tedium… the new normal.”

    Yesterday, I thought of her gentle smile & longed to see her again. I took steps, mostly violent ones in my head, to resist contacting her. To see her would be to enter a war zone, an irruption of the insufferable, a firecracker moment, staring at death. The violence of metastasis would soon overcome her. I made plans to visit her next week.

    To her garden she once led me. I followed her from porch to grass, our steps eager & careless in the eve of Spring. We retraced on cobbled path her every stroke of design for the fire pit & canopy embraced by lanterns, rosebushes & herbs. She had just fallen in love & gushed over his handiwork in the shed. The platforms & stairways were all his masterpieces, she repeated, her eyes wild like firecrackers.

    I had imagined more conversations, an abundance of time & space with her in the garden under the constellations for many Springs to come. I had thought of whispering in her ears about the silliest things & lingering over tea or wine with her calico cat on my lap. I had idealized so much more with her.

    And now I just can’t write any more, Eugene, about the violence of fear, regret, distrust & “each of the many crackings” rampant in my life.

    “Streets full of people/ All alone/… Everyone’s gone to the moon.”

    Yours, Kate

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