the archaic ether

There are moments of inescapable beauty in my life that I hope to remember forever, but I don’t always write them down. Even when I do write it down and go back later to read it, it’s hard to tap into the feeling of that moment.

There are three moments I want to never forget.

One.
Early in our relationship. after we’d started living together, but before things became, well whatever relationships become. we had gone to bed. our room was painted blue. our bed was high. a quiet kind of majestic. I woke up. sometime in the early early morning, in the late late night, I woke up. And it was that time. that exact space. the breath you take right in between early early morning and late late night. it lasts for just that breath, for a blink, for a whisper. the one where the light is so dark it’s blue. the air is so bright it’s blue. there is no sun, there is no moon. there was just blue. everything was blue. light blue, pale blue, bathing blue. my mind was blue, my body. we had fallen asleep with sigur ros playing, the ( ) album. while we slept it played, all night, over and over again, on repeat, on a repeat where no song played twice. I woke up, in this light, this gorgeous aching light, drowning me, and this song was on, lifting me, and this is how I woke up. in that secret space, right in between early early morning and late late night. it was perfect, you know? no one else in the world was awake then. no one else was alive. it was me, it was that light, it was that song, we were a breath of the universe that lasted into always.

I close my eyes right now and I try so hard to go back there, to feel it again, because I want to soak it up, I want that moment to drip down into my skin, down into my bones, into my nerves, to become the disease from which I will die. I woke up, both above and below the heavy weight of sadness and beauty, not the sad and the beautiful that our culture has defined, but the sadness and beauty that exists without a name. How many times do we get that? It’s always there, but we only have fleeting, wavering, murky encounters with it.

———

Two.
In the bar. It was late afternoon when we went in. To drink. To have fun. There were a handful of boys. We knew some of them. They bought us a beer. And another. We played pool. I was warm and buzzing like a slow lazy bumblebee. I was dipped in honey. I buzzed my slow lazy way over to the jukebox and I found the rolling stones and I pushed the button next to “can’t always get what you want” and I had my beer in my hand, and I danced there, in front of the jukebox, a honey dance of sweet sugary thickness, and it was summer and it was winter and I could smell the grass and I felt the snow, and I danced with the rolling stones, there in the bar, and I buzzed my slow lazy way back to the pool table and I knew this is what sexy is. and I knew this is what honey and bumblebees are. and I knew this is what I am, a girl who plays pool with boys who want to fuck her (and nothing more), drinking beer and dancing a slow lazy bumblebee dance, and it made me feel good to be that girl.

I don’t want to forget pushing that button and not getting what I want, but getting what I need, dancing with the jukebox and my beer and those boys.

———

Three.
I found out I was pregnant. We’d decided to keep the baby, although really I knew there was never any decision to make. I was alone, g was at work. I was laying on the bed, headphones on, listening to my ipod shuffling songs around for me. Nobody’s Home came on. It was probably around six at night, in late winter, cold outside, dark in my room, and I didn’t have any lights on. I lay on my bed and I put my hand on my belly and I feel powerful and strange and scared. ry before he was ry. he was in there, letting my body make all his pieces & put him together, and he just waited. I had my hand there on my belly, my soft round belly, and I felt him waiting for me, and he felt my hand there above him, and it told us both that we were going to be okay. I cried and it felt so right, so exactly right, to be crying on my bed in February and listening to Ulrich Schnauss and talking with my little pellet of a baby.

It was a moment of understanding. He’d always been waiting. I’d always been waiting.

———

I started thinking that I don’t own those moments anymore, because I am losing their shape and their weight, my grasp is loosening. But it isn’t true. I do have them. they became a part of me; the pool that is my memory is deep, but each drop is in there, giving it its depth. So I know they’re there, it comforts me, even when I try to pretend otherwise.

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