Make Heaven711
On a Manner of Making it Work
2 pm
At the beach under the shaded plastic dome, A is writing something in her notebook.
The wind is rocking the plastic and her small baby is asleep beside her. The sun is so hot it turns all our skin golden but the baby’s cheeks are pink and growing pinker. I want to know what she is writing and can’t help but stare at her every few moments. But every time she looks up she only looks at the ocean. After swimming, we all get hungry and make our way back. A routine we easily establish.
The house is beautiful, with tall ceilings and an indistinguishable generational wealth past.
I don’t understand the house, just like I don’t understand A.
But notice that it’s mostly windows.
From the outside, I watch all the guests who came move about effortlessly.
A woman’s face shrunken into concentration.
She is hiding behind her face, all that is left are words;
Beach, tomato, baby,
Her words are suspended from what her face is trying to say.
Like a voyage, they pass, and I observe.
My husband E and A’s partner are good friends and I hear small whispers of A’s life like a breeze thru an alley. What I hear from others reminds me of myself, which makes me pity not her but the fact that we don’t know how similar we are.
And because we both are getting to know each other thru other people.
They invited us to this island along with other friends.
The week before, I became determined to get closer to A.
It was the first time I felt really hopeful about a friendship.
On the drive, I said something about the islands being the perfect place for something to happen.
They are like guest rooms, telephone calls, doorways.
It seems like a while since ive been close to anyone.
5pm
After walking from the beach one day, I told E I wanted to devote more energy to people who would give me something in return. Immediately after saying it I felt cynical. Vulnerability is a stone rolling down, and it seems to pass me.
We reached the beautiful high ceilinged house, and I felt stupid for saying that.
Here I am lucky enough to be invited, lucky to know these people, but I don’t feel close to them. A light moving thru me.
10pm
On the last night the sky opened up and so much rain came.
The dinner was full of laughter, and no one touched down; we were all floating on the tall ceiling.
When the wind settled, those who stayed at the table passed around stories about others, a commodity I don't always understand. They looked at the ground and thru the windows.
I was pulling thread from the ground. I wanted someone to say something about their childhood. I wanted the conversation to arrive back at the table.
I was looking at A whose life I especially knew nothing about.
When no one said anything, I told them about the nap I tried having on the couch earlier and the sadness that came over me about my childhood. Guidless and floating. And I felt pity for myself.
Everyone listen but didn’t say anything expect for A eyes that were on me the entire time.
When I was going to sleep a feeling of regret came over me for sharing.
We spent three nights living and cooking for one another, and nothing happened.
Each morning, the light opens up and laughter is passed around.
It’s all beautiful and simple well, I guess besides that one time that C and F tried to twerk for a few seconds, which in the moment felt poetic, like after our exhausted bodies would collapse and we would tell each other something but looking back, it was probably nothing.
++++
When a woman is pushed up against a wall her true face comes out.
While all the other days she is simply hiding behind a second face.
A mask. A word; island, man, pain, sweetness.
August 6
When E and I got back from traveling, in a matter of two days, I wanted to improve our living situation.
A completely unrealistic ambition.
I needed it to happen immediately because I was fed up with no light in the foyer and no window in the bathroom and no couch that could fit in this hexagonal living room.
I was filling up inside. We just spent 2 weeks in beautiful rich homes and my life made me claustrophobic, small. But that’s how accumulated wealth is supposed to make you feel.
So we sit where the couch is supposed to be, and E yells at my negativity. He fears that nothing will ever be enough.
I’m filling up inside until he yells about that too
Out with it
So I say that I’m probably pregnant again, and truthfully, I'm not even thinking about the couch or the light or the window.
Just picturing a fat red pregnant couch birthing tiny balloon shaped babies.
We laugh and it’s enough to break the anger.
I say if we can’t agree on habitating, I will find myself a solution next year.
Bird built different nest
Yes, this plan did not include him at the moment
I imagined building a beautiful meticulously crafted house alone and sharing it with my baby
In this house there will be spoiling brass holding every corner of the door
No corner will go unnoticed and I will work dog-tired to raise this baby,
This ballon shaped baby will one day inflate beyond the room and float out.
I imagined that life and immediately felt guilty.
I couldn’t find a couch that fit this living room perfectly, so I blamed my upbringing and my mother, who built rooms but could never finish ours. Our house was always the last project.
In a complete state of unraveling, she worked 12hr days, making others’ spaces beautiful
While ours had an unfinished fireplace for as long as I can remember.
The drywall just ended halfway up the wall.
August 7
Im plastering a small range hood in the suburbs of philly.
Thinking the whole time about making heaven.
I have a trowel in one hand and there’s this swaying motion like making waves that I’ve adopted, and something about it reminds me of babies, the swinging motion maybe.
I’m thinking about people having babies as escaping for joy.
To escape the stone that weighs a little too much in their pocket
When I come home E is making gazpacho
Soon, he will bring it over with homemade bread
What is heaven if not seeing the couch as you already have it.
What is heaven if not seeing the clouds break open and cold rain falling.
You Can Make Heaven 711 Anywhere You Are.
August 8
In the evening I was walking thru rittenhouse and saw the big red bus parked on the corner.
I made two loops around the park, thinking about the blood bank's deficit.
How in florida after a major hurricane the red bus would be stationed outside our high school for weeks asking young kids to donate blood.
I turned the corner and walked up the steps to the red rv’s door.
The woman asked me various questions about drugs, when I had eaten last, and about my sexual history; I wanted to lie to her, thinking that they probably filter the blood, but instead told her I was actually sick, and she immediately turned me away.
I thought they probably weren’t in that much of a shortage; that they were probably there so people could feel like they were contributing to something greater.
From the rv I turned the corner and saw a woman passing out pieces of paper.
I wanted to steer clear but a group of people made waves pushing me towards her
On the white sheet she gave to me a single leaf was taped.
Some incoherent sounds came from her mouth, but I either walked past too fast or immediately passed her off as crazy.
I looked down at the single leaf and single piece of tape.
It made me think of giving blood, but there was no real analogy, as it was 88 degrees outside and her gesture wouldn’t save anybody.
But she was giving up something and even though its not what we needed its what we got, which made me feel better.
The next morning at 6am, when I briefly woke up, it dawned on me there was no couch.
The dawn was so new. E was dressed, smoking and drinking coffee on the red couch
He smiled at me, and the fan was going off in the room. He brings me over a coffee, and I take it, not even thinking about how I don't drink coffee in the mornings.
Everything is beautiful. You are beautiful. The shower is beautiful. The coffee. How did you know I was awake? How was the beautiful coffee suddenly ready? I wasn’t sure if I was still asleep. Why does everything in this apartment, from the pile of books to the papers on the desk, seem so beautifully arranged?
+++
God’s work
It’s a July day of wind.
Leaves tore into the window. The curtain belching
God had the book of life open to PLEASURE
And I was holding the pages down with one hand
Because of the wind from the window
And wrote a list at the top God
Gratitude
Drugs
Flooding
Alcohol
Semen
Tears
Flooded
Time
God’s work
Baltimore ave turning river before me is a sign of god.
The kind of sadness a black suction pipe extracting you
In the form of a stomach virus leaves inside me a pool so large
Water is allowed to rush in.
In May, I walked around the neighborhood pleading
Around where the train cuts diagonally, I stopped and listened
A black woman is looking directly at me from across the street
And singing, Let Jesus do the work
God’s own calmness is a sign of god
The surprisingly cold smell of potatoes or money
Washes over at the beginning of a rain
To extract complete silence.
From these diverse signs of god you can extract just how much work remains
Put away your sadness, it is a matter of work.
I’ve been trying a lot these days to make everything feel better. I’ve been trying to understand how to cultivate friendships in a city that I’ve lived in for four years
When my stomach was at its worst, everything felt like work. I couldn’t see beyond the day. Id wake up with the feeling that today was already over. It’s an interesting feeling giving up hope before you are about to be married. As a kid, I never imagined my wedding, nor did I ever hope for one, mostly because my mother never married. So my desire for marriage came later somewhere from my own internal source. The weeks were counting down, and every day I felt worse. At one point I remember pleading to god to make me at least 40% better, and I would quit alcohol, call my god mom more often, give out more cash to people that needed it, give up gluten. I thought I was paying for all the times I’ve lied, or maybe I was lying to myself now and my body was sending out signals. Or that my mother’s trauma was finally resurfacing in some major way. I became consumed by the story of Thérèse of Lisieux, or Little Flower of Jesus as she was called. She wrote a memoir, The Little Way, where she tells us about her mother’s death and her insistence on entering Carmel as soon as possible, begging for permission to enter before she met the minimum age. Carmel is among the most severe of the religious orders, requiring real poverty, silence and sacrifice. Thérèse died of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-five, after suffering two years of complete emptiness in which it seemed there was no God at all.
I want to say that sometimes its a matter of believing. Or devoting yourself enough to believing.
Believing things will get better. That the sun will rise and you’ll find yourself facing the light seeing a thin band of wind blowing and the day will change.
It’s been some time since the wedding, and my stomach hasn’t fully healed, but I’m doing less pleading and more knowing that something is adding stones to your pocket and taking them away. There are days when it is so much easier. Other days it’s a matter of work.
Last night A sat down beside me and lit another cigarette and I felt both very close and distant from her. People were talking around us, and what I heard her whisper was something like “to embrace the tragic interchangeability of nouns and smile inscrutably or to call your mother weeping or weep before a painting. Or to find a way of touching down, even momentarily, and be made visible by swirling condensation and to know that one pole of experience is always caught up in the other but then to finally know this in your body. That a day is both a tragic storm and catching the bus by seconds. A body touching down, saying yes to everything, affirming nothing, your own body giving up until another day passes and some woman shouts to you on the street you are not meant to do this alone.”
She and I don’t end the night together, and she leaves the party with some other friends who came, but I feel something tethering between us, a silvery red line attached and traveling the distance of the city in our different cars, but now, today, the body can believe in elasticity.
xo,
toute petite nika
