(no subject)
Dead Christmas
"About a million and a half years ago when i was in school and worrying about the ins and outs of every little path to the promisedland, i used to walk home with this girl for cookies and TV. So goddamned cold on those half miles home, a thousand days of warm doorways and rationed pop. But i guess you know how cold doesn't matter one fucking bit when there's someone like her.
Thats how it all works, falling in love with a million coincidences, hoping that you're not just noticing these things now.
I never believed in God and she never believed in showing up late to church, and it made me wonder what was wrong with the second best. I respected her for believing in God the way she did. But Sundays could get lonely when there were only your own damp clothes hugging you. I took her out to the woods on some Sunday, after much persuasion and hand grabbing, and showed her the same places my dad had shown me a million and a half years before when i was ten.
And so we stumbled through the woods, slow-walking at first, then breaking into a full run to pretend-escape the rain, we fell down and picked eachother up, and again the rain saturated our clothes and we collapsed on the ground and looked up to the sky and watched the rain fall on us. We were a million and a half miles away from everything and stupid and naive and falling in love with each other and every second. The weather was furious with us. And it let us know with a fresh torent and we abandoned our landing and made our way deeper into the woods as one last protest to Sunday deadlines.
We found a river a few hundred feet later and we stopped at the ledge above it and I said:
'Say hello to the river Carrie!'
'Say hello'!
And we slid down the embankment and managed to make it about half-way across before it was up to our pockets and we turned back. We discovered we had been betrayed by our senses during our descent, and saw something we hadn't seen in the embankment on our way down, about 15 feet of box-shaped decaying planks enveloped by the mud.
We looked at the structure and she grabbed my hand. The building, a telling gray-green now from a hundred years of snow, barely resembled what it was when my grandfather built it. My grandfather, a carpenter, was also a beekeeper, of all things. As it was a thing of those post-depression years to keep a side-job like Roosevelt told you to.
'Keep yourself moving Davie.' he told me on some dead Christmas.
'Keep yourself moving because there's always someone catching up with you.'
How much gravity that might have had was negated by the aftershave of that coarse man, overpowering and skewing an 8 year olds perception of the future or the future's responsibilities.
We made our way to the foot of the embankment and scurried up the ledge, making our way to the mud-effacted structure. I ran my hands over the decayed wood and it was a hundred years ago again.
..And my dad was telling me to tie the rest of the wood together while he looked for the door. I took off my gloves to lace the twine in and out of the wood and the cold burned me pretty bad and, it was real tough to concentrate and I kept looking up to see if he had managed to get in the door yet..
And so there we were, frantically searching the same wood to cajole an opening. After a few minutes of digging mud away from flaking paint and pine, we found a boarded entrance and the nails gave way to our prying. And i looked at her and motioned for her to go first and she smiled back at me and pushed me through the door.
We searched the cabin, through old boxes where the bees were kept and found some matches and got an oil lamp going and talked about the rain and her life outside of the woods and she pinned me on the floor and kissed me, and a thread of light caught her hair and for a second all i could see was auburn sunshine.
'Your grandpa used to spend the whole damned summer out here, smoking these bees and jarring. And he'd bring me out here sometimes, and we'd wash out in the river afterward.'
I touched her hair and we rolled on the damp wood floor and fumbled for eachother and the cold of the rain encased us in the room and she took off her shirt and i didn't know what the hell to do so i took off mind and christ we were only 15 and i kissed her a little longer and we put our jackets over us and slept.
We woke up and the one string of light creeping through the doorway had crept down to our feet and she saw me looking at the door and pulled my head back towards her face.
'i love you davie.' "
-Chris Haynie
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lol i love that, i dont know why.
♥