Migration

by Krista Madsen

It'll come when it comes, you said about your art, and now you're going. I suspect there won't be so much as some breadcrumbs sprinkled for me to trace your escape. And you were never one to have a drop of paint on your trousers. Not a trace.

Left with no evidence that this--us--ever existed. Except.

Not to mention.

In the weeks of your departure, we draw our lines in the sand. Prudent, you thought, to begin with the big stuff and work your way down. You dismantled one of the inner walls to open a wider route of passage, so I snuck a peak at that room you've been avoiding me in. A square studio we inhabit, perfect cube, and the only enclosed space that isn't a surrounding hallway-shaped blur of kitchen, bath, and bed things is that room squatting in the center.

x

I snuck a peak and witnessed: the horror of blank canvas. I have nothing to hide from you, you insisted, how true.

What I wouldn't do now for some red.

The sound of squealing and stampeding in the endless night as you dragged everything of wood and metal and magnitude and density closer to the door. Armoire, refrigerator. When the neighbors began to shout their complaints through the stairwell, you retreated to your inner corner and called her, which to me seemed louder still.

Your departure will make a writer of me yet.

You turned our bed into a vertical, one of the first large objects to join this uprising, so I gathered afghans and down and made something of a nest for myself to not sleep in. All this action chipped the paint and scratched the floor, but I resisted the urge to cover sharp parts, edges of bureaus, and legs of chairs with tape and gauze and band-aids and bubble wrap.

Some small relief in the fact that we didn't split the cost a year ago of the thick wooden plank we found at a flea market, supported on horses, so I'm at least left with something complete to write and eat on. I've hidden the saw under my pile of sneakers in case you insist otherwise.

Your images and my codes--your hand, my head--turned out to be two incompatible languages. We could not speak and see at the same time. Could not reach. Or for all our reach, could never meet.

I wave the white flag, shouting Surrender! Peace! But you, so used to my words-as-weapons, flinch at the abrasion of my raised voice. Not again, and you cringe.

Both prone to violence in our own ways. Your Art Brut, in theory. My attraction to sad endings, in practice. How we contradict ourselves now.

Items on my new shopping list: cushions and buoys.

You tried once to convince me that Art Brut had nothing to do with the brutal I like to link it to. I would have none of that, the words worked, whatever they meant.

What is life if not the most beautiful tragedy, I liked to say. I used to let you sniff the baby jar I filled with our nail clippings, hairs from the drain, the liquids we leaked. Funny how human emissions always smell like sea. I was happy to remind you of home.

Forgetting that we spend our lives searching for the way back home, and how to leave.

The last time I did dream, I met the woman of your recent infatuation, the one you can't stop talking to despite the distracting thump of my running shoes against your wall. Black hair that glowed blue in the candlelight, multiple tongues to your kiss. I can't dream again.

Ran laps around you in your room to keep up with my racing heart. When the doctors detected a murmur, I asked them if they could ask it to speak up. I threw my fifty pairs of running shoes against the sound, incomprehensible whispers of you cradling her voice on the phone. Some talk of colors I've never heard of.

You, of all people, were never going to hurt me. Inertia turns on such ambivalence: you were mud with your come when it comes, and now you're ceaseless.

We draw our lines in the sand. And I insist on five one-line love stories, in italics.

Five:
Cruel hiccup of Cupid, when on a whim, he turns passion into a sand-in-underwear sensation.

Perhaps it's your island ancestry, but you don't need any more beach. Perhaps I've become sand to you. A stinging sensation where there used to be soft, and need.

Reality sets in, in retrospect. How my independence depends.

I copied a Marianne Moore poem, "Poet and Person," on parchment, rolled it in ribbon, dangled it from the iron coat rack. The poet's panoply of crutches and wings. How did wings ever come to signify freedom?

What could be lonelier than the bird?

My fact once over dinner: Scientists have located the specific Mexican villages where the North American monarchs migrate to each winter. Multiple generations are born and die en route. No butterfly that begins the journey will ever make it even halfway.

In the beginning--when we began too soon--we used to share a daily fact upon your arrival home, empty-handed, from the studio, sometimes even less than emptyhanded, minus a few fingers even from the slipped attempt to slice something into art. In the beginning, before you gave up trying and got that office job and that office assistant, I would rub some heat into the severed fingers and sew them back as we shared our facts. I spoke of monarchs. You told me about that art and architecture building.

How much and how little there was to learn and teach. Our game grew out of favor. As did lovemaking. Until now, in the too-late time.

Hornier here.

In the days of your departure, you finished with the furniture and heavy machinery and moved onto the trunks and boxes, the books, the mid-size objects. It got hot in this airtight cell of ours, we unbuttoned our shirts, and suddenly our shadow selves couldn't stop overlaying each other. Sex in the shower, stairwell, we spilled out, the bus, in the public unisex.

Cold stars whose cores still burn, however secretly. In the night, the screaming and the weeping, in separate rooms, inaudibly. Which doesn't mean I don't hear you.

What I can't confess: that we needn't bother with the condoms now because I might already be pregnant.

The only idea of sky we have here is the word "Star" spray-painted on the brick wall facing our window, which I see for the first time when I switch seats and sit on your usual side of the wooden plank, dining alone on the last aphrodisiac. So it was there taunting you all along.

Four:
Your mango dream: market of insufficient fruit, then finally a potentially perfect one which you bought but never bit.

There is also a certain violence in not allowing yourself to get hurt.

I don't believe in painting dreams, you said. Inspired instead, however rarely, by some woman just inches beyond you. I know she, this woman of the moment, office assistant no less, is just a passing means to see me new again, before I fell and let you in. She, the already burning bridge upon which you'll leave.

Remember the minnows?

"Poet and Person," which to me, sounds like the way the lover and the beloved, object and subject, the reader and the read, exchange roles halfway through their separate trajectories that only intersect for a second before continuing elsewhere in the other's shoes. The way you, then I, crossed stars, switched seats.

So many piled objects in our shared space--and we never really had a living room--that it became impossible for me to run laps around your impending absence. With the door buried, impossible for me to run elsewhere either.

A year here in this would-be artists' colony where I thought we'd read over shoulders and collaborate, perhaps my book with your illustration and your painting with my poems. Instead separate trajections. I face the brick wall out the window as your boxes approach the emergency exit, trying to convince you: the alarms will surely sound. But the normal door is lost to us now. I consider using the saw to make a new one, but I don't want to give you any ideas.

Remember how, in the heat, we used to climb out onto the fire escape, drop dried petals onto peoples' plates in the café below?

Remember how we discovered along the riverbank--on that one vacation we took in search of water--that merely moving our arms above the river created a shadow that moved minnows? I used the word minnowshadowing in the book I was working on. You use me for the sake of a story, you said. Eventually I'll be used up.

My memories dismember me. I was bigger then. Sponged as I was with your wooing, laddered on your idolatry.

A picture of me? I used to ask about those pencil lines you could no longer quite connect, in the inner room, where it was cooler, you said, and quieter. No, it's not always about you, you said. My roots sunk into the silence. Worse: the horror now of blank sheets, negation before the replacement. At least though you have the courtesy to leave before you draw her.

I completed that book, minnowshadowing scenes, something about Degas and dancing girls, as you by day tried on the role of breadwinner, a new suit and cube, and where was she sitting then in relation to you? By dinner when I itched with the need to share, you were already emptied, expunged, and couldn't ask me the questions I lived to answer.

Our game grew out of favor.

Boxes inside of boxes.

Three:
She hands him her brain in a box labeled "Love me," wondering would he, and would that matter, to which he replies, "Sorry we are not accepting submissions at this time."

Degas Must Have Loved a Dancer, unpublished. About a male artist and a female writer--who else?--who opt not to experience their potentially perfect love in order that they might have more to create in their respective mediums. Not quite our story, but. I wanted to ask you do her portrait for the last page when she was finally ready to admit the words wouldn't work. Too late.

Of all times to be late, in the too-late time. I will drink poison, pop pills, throw myself against walls when I run out of sneakers, anything, and yet this thought: wouldn't this baby be beautiful.

The past I'm already nostalgic for overlays your face. Those eyes. The past I overlooked when I had it in the present tense, when I was worth winning. When you tapped my breastbone with a paintbrush finger, When are you going to let me in?

Role reversal: I stretch the neck of your teeshirt in order to make contact with some of that skin underneath. Collect a few of your thick hairs like porcupine needles on my pillow. At the $2 kissing booth, you once did me for free, and now I would give anything.

Eyes like lost children on your face. I can't condemn them.

Deadlines in the sand. I was going to write a novel by year's end. You had to get me to love you. We both succeeded, our successes were both failures.

In the beginning--too soon--when on a whim I asked you to move into an apartment with one window facing a brick wall and one room in a room, when I was in charge of my heart, when you were temporary to me. A relationship leased, leashed to real estate. One year, option of renewal. Temporary to me.

One year later: don't leave, even though I always knew you would have to. We have yet to try truffles.

No greater loneliness than this: you busy not talking to me in the next room, furtive, blank canvases. Unwatered world, where my love tends to sink its roots into dry cracks and silence, sadder than any singularity could be. I need the heat.

Two:
The ear--she fears--is only an erogenous zone if it happens to be listening.

I love you in retrospect, in the too-late time. Or do I just love now the way you loved me then, and is there any difference? Surely our blindness is a factor of not being seen.

In the wooing room, in the then: you brought me lollipops and lilies, filled a sketchbook with my silhouette, made shadow birds on the walls. You sold your blood to pay for our first date. Smooth move until you passed out halfway through the movie.

I love a sad ending, I said before we left early.

We were going to name our baby Chase, not that we wanted one but it was my game to name. You would have supplied the paints and I the ink, infinite surfaces for him to run away on. I imagine him halfway between your black marble eyes and my overlong limbs. Beautiful Baby Halfway. Understanding now why women think mixing liquids, egg and sperm, will make for some kind of compromise. Stay. Still, I'd do anything now to bleed.

Surrender! Peace!

In the hours of your departure, we have only gotten as far into a wave as one-degree bend of elbow, hint of wrist. Harder, this, than we would have ever anticipated. You gather the clothes and kitchen bowls, candles and lamps, empty frames, dead plants and cutlery.

One by one, in our year here, we've sampled all the aphrodisiacs: champagne, oysters, strawberries, chocolates, oils, toys, porn, drugs, lingerie, role-play. Stay, we have yet to try truffles.

You cringe at the sound of my voice, so used to me prodding you to perform, to be the artist you once were, share, play nicely. I'm afraid our words and whips only served to cripple each other, so I soften the delivery: tissue wrap the tines and knives so they won't poke holes in your clothes, and check my own underwear constantly.

Panoply of residence. My abundance of excess left little space for lingering houseguests: my crutches and spare crutches, my wings.

Remember our petals on the cafe plates? You and your Schadenfreude, your Art Brut, such cruel terms. In theory, in periphery, since you use them only in beginnings and ends. It'll come when it comes and now you're going.

Your former fact: the university's art and architecture building--of all things--was designed to make visitors as uncomfortable as possible. Rough walls that scratch arms in passing, ceilings so low they threaten to fall, precarious stairs too small to take one at a time, too big to take two. Treacherous and terrible, and this the house of art.

I assume the baby jar I present as a parting gift will seem as foul to you as piss, but you thank me with a hand tracing my lips, tuck it into the side pouch of a duffel bag. And to think I never noticed before that we are actually the same height in socks.

In the hours of your departure, I can't have you accusing me of getting pregnant on purpose, or worse, faking it. I would never invent this. Of all times--in the too-late time--to be late. I contemplate the many ways of the razor in the average American family: a father's face, a mother's legs, a child's wrist.

Before you go, I spray your cologne on a handkerchief and ziplock it in the freezer.

Specimen of you.

In the minutes of your departure, our fleeting present tense. Yours and mine. This and that, tit for tat. Pulling of teeth, spilling of seed. You snip a lock, I clip a knuckle. Down to the little things now, the ones that hurt most.

Panoply of residence, shared stories of our youth: That nail polish my parents used to apply to make me stop biting my nails and sucking my thumb--I developed a taste for it. You were a latchkey kid, coming and going as you pleased, watching too much TV. Former snacks mapped in stretch marks on your biceps and shoulders. A body at rest tends to stay at rest, a body in motion starts packing.

On the blank wall I ink: He cinches the clitoris with a wrench and cranks.

Eyes like lost children who don't know what they want to be when they grow up. Life is the most beautiful tragedy, isn't it?

What's an anagram for broken? Are there no buoys?

Is it possible you were moon and I was just tidal-pulled?

In the minutes of your departure, toothbrush and razor tucked in an overnight kit, I finally feel the fatal drip. Our final silence as you near the emergency exit, and my own false alarm. My period. The end of the sentence. The white flag turns red, the strength and solace of my favorite color at last. You hesitate as I once wished you would, but now this red light signals go so I hand you my latest, Encyclopedia of Limits, unfinished. Let it be some other woman's project to turn you into an artist.

Rilke: The sky exists only for clouds to form in.

All the boxes inside of boxes inside of boxes, boxes I lived to open.

I was hoping we'd break bindings together. Bread.

Body of.

Given, and shed.

One:
We didn't know where we had been till the door marked Eden clicked closed behind us.