Houston, 2027 Thomas Waddill ‘19
W e are the first time you seemed to come to from the long dark of
infancy, buckling your seatbelt in the back seat of the car, smooth hot vinyl, your mother driving you to the YMCA for a smoothie and a swim in the indoor pool, fractured sunlight frantic on the white echoing walls; we are your thinking of that moment, the moment’s tessellation into years, the way you can’t seem to get in back behind it. Were there things before? Did you forget them? Did they make it out of themselves? We are your empty apartment in south Boston, later, when you are more tired than you thought you could be, looking at the faux tile floor, hearing the empty echo of your knock on the wall for nuts into which to drill a bookshelf. We are the sour smell of the paper mill that would drift down from somewhere outside your childhood town when the wind was wrong and the long verdant grass stains on your jeans. You are in the sludge of the hottest day of the year in Houston, soaked, looking at a yellow slip held to the windshield of your Honda Civic. A parking ticket. Below a stinking Callery pear. We are your sweating in English class right after Phys. Ed. We are the sons of flint and pitch; we are Titan! We are the first time you had a nightmare that followed you into the morning, the inchoate remainder of something unsayable and horrible – the disembodied legs of your dog bounding up your stairs, threatening and surreal. We are your lethargic terror immobile in a beanbag, at the top of your stairs, watching the legs draw closer. We are Concerned for You – Help Us Help You! We are the residue of your first wet dream, all embarrassment, all wonder. We are food poisoning on a Caribbean cruise with your family, during which you wrote your first poem, something embarrassing about what if your vomit was the sea? When you plagiarized Wordsworth, your summer reading. We are your multitudes. The fact is, many of us are March 17th, 2009, your last year of high school. We are the weird hollow feeling of a night in a town big enough for its light to pollute the sky but small enough for its stars to poke through; the midnight dome felt scraped out, as if the town’s lowlight pushed back space just a bit. It was a grey concavity with orange bleed at its bases. We are your reminder to yourself to write this down when you get home. We are Dave, we are Josh, we are Abby, we are you in the cluster of water oaks in the northeast corner of Rogers Park, where you weren’t supposed to be. We are the soft intermittent patter of falling acorns, we are the perforated hush of torn leaves in Josh’s high manic hands. Josh was lying on his back at this point: now, a premonition, a shadow in reverse. We are the mildly acrid smell of pot and humidity and decaying vegetation, and we are the burn of your thumb’s pad when the roach finally reached you and died. We are Josh posing riddles, uncharacteristically talkative, and Dave and Abby answering them, and you laughing, laughing. We are the one that you’ll be unable to forget for reasons unknown to you: “I have no body and no nose. What am I?” Dave answered: “Nobody knows!” And we are your inability to stop laughing at that. You are high now. Nobody knows. We are the woody announcement of the water oak’s compromise, of cambium cracking, the crunch of its folding bark, all impossible, all hap6
LIBERTAS
Vol. 27
No. 1
pening. We are a book that said: “read these.” We are the quick scramble out, we are Abby’s murmured grunt, we are you all turning around to see her not out of the foliage; she is in it, she is below it, and she’s grunting “my leg,” so then we are you thinking how this is all just some kind of joke or cliché, but really happening right in front of you. We are the fact that you forgot for a moment the real thing that makes this all really truly fucking insane, as you will describe it to your friends the next day – the fact that Abby was literally talking like twenty minutes before about how hard it’s been recently that her mom lost her foot to diabetes, how we were wondering how in the hell and why in the hell someone’s foot needs to come off for diabetes and actually sort of making jokes about it whenever Abby seemed really cool about it and kinda started laughing – something about glucose and capillaries. We are her saying that the main thing, though, is how her dad just seemed to totally check out, so it’s really just Abby taking care of her mom, and her mom isn’t grateful at all – we are the way you are all listening, because that was kind of the point of this was to listen to her, sort of show her a good time, we are you all listening, thinking, damn. Worst of all, we are your pausing when the tree fell, after Abby was saying fuck, help, for at least six seconds. You weren’t pausing to run up to the tree – you and Dave and Josh were there almost immediately, trying to lift the thing. No – we are the fact that you didn’t immediately pull out your phone to call 911. We are your first thought: fuck. This is it for me. You had gotten into college, two days before, which was sort of the reason you guys were out here – the reason before you figured you should include Abby because she didn’t seem to be doing great. We are your constant recursion to that moment of cowardly hesitation. We are the smell of sativa still hanging under the wet stench of the innards of a dead water oak flung out into the humid night. We are you finally getting Abby out (without calling 911) and taking her to the hospital because her leg is fucked up and bleeding and possibly broken? It’s not – but her ankle is sprained. We are the suspicious look of the nurse. We are the Greatest Nation on Earth; we are above this, we’re over it, we’re tired of it, we’re really hungry and hoping we can find something to eat in the next couple blocks or so, we are the long flight up to New York for a speaking gig at Columbia years later, we are you apologizing to a bumped shoulder, we are the flash of an old March: really, really sorry, Mrs. Dallory. You’d understand if we told you, if we just said it. We just wanted to show her a good time. We are every March, all March. We are the weird stench by the entrance to the Holliday Inn in Parksdale – was it Parksdale? Knotpark? Knotsdale – the Holiday Inn at Knotsdale where you and your parents and your sister crawled out of a car packed with pictures and china and two dogs and gallons of water and bags of clothes. 1998. We are the large man at the desk who charged you only half because of Christy. We are your mother saying if you ask one more time if David was evacuating (you could barely say the word) to Knotsdale too then she
