do not close it. I want it to be as an equivalent, to match my surprise with its ragged grin, to surprise like desire come upon. The pin is the very picture of something undone—or an elsewhere falling apart from its lack. If I can call the pin image, memento, moment suspended, then the whole northeastern Ohio sky draws close, bends down here in Baltimore, and here come the cornfields along East College where, as a student, I’d ride my bike miles from town, south on Professor, turn east and be gone.
I’d ride for an hour, two hours and still not exhaust whatever it was I was trying to run out of myself. Along Hamilton Street, laundry hung on gray lines, even in the cold, in late October: boxy school jumpers, work pants in all sizes, the slate greens, the straight lines solemn and stiff, as I flew by. I’d slow down to pass the old Beulah Farm orphanage, its bare dirt yard and one-room schoolhouse, and sometimes the orphans themselves playing behind the splintering fence. Mostly, there were fields and fields of corn, which in the spring made the back roads into intimate hallways striped with light where the stalks parted like doors creaking open.
Once in the fall, a friend and I biked far, past fields of harvested corn. We rode not talking much, comfortably silenced by the wind in our faces, one pulling ahead for a stretch, then the other, until cresting a hill, we saw a white farmhouse rise up. Yellow police tape crisscrossed the porch. Below the Do Not Enter sign nailed to the door, we tried the knob and it opened. I crossed over with my friend, who in the shaded living room, amid the scattered stuff of disaster I surely kissed. Or, after poking around for a while, it was he who brought something to show me, a stained, crumpled shirt, a week-old newspaper, and, bent together over the object, we breathed our few words near each other’s faces, necks, closer still, until the decision to touch and be touched dissolved. It was something any of us would have done—used the props of the moment to frame, to give shape to our desire. Then, among pots on the stove with their lids askew, piles of mail, work coats and muddy boots by the door, the moment grew suddenly large. The weight of the unknown event, the lives we moved so easily among displaced us, and we left, quickly uncomfortable.
But while we stayed, we stayed because we were protected by a curiosity so certain of its task, that things—boots, mail, pots, our bodies—offered themselves, first tentatively and then with urgency, as if for us alone, solicitous as all objects of adoration, as all objects in stories lure us, irresistible and catalytic.
I felt certain nothing could happen to me in that house, or to him, even as we walked through the wreckage, because I could see us there. Even as we touched a few derelict things, isolated, stubbornly beautiful glass things—faceted doorknob, etched wedding goblet—even as he held up an old newspaper anxiously between thumb and forefinger, we were like characters caught in the instant of being created. Thus constituted, I watched myself leave the farmhouse even as I left the farmhouse, saw myself riding, even as the wind lifted my hair, downhill now and coasting fast, the fields on either side cut to stubble, the late afternoon clouds jagged and heavy as purple cliffs.
My bicycle was a blue three-speed clunker. I loved it inordinately. Riding to class, or home late after the library closed and town was shut tight, I’d practice feeling both its presence and absence. I would say, contriving nostalgia, “I loved swinging the bike under me and taking off ” even as I swung the bike under me and took off. I’d fly, and see the moment of flight in my head. I lived preemptively with loss, memorializing instances. Even the names of nearby towns, whispered under my breath at odd times during the day, for the sound, for the shape alone, names redolent of small bars and lake-side ease and postindustrial collapse, were both
I’d ride for an hour, two hours and still not exhaust whatever it was I was trying to run out of myself. Along Hamilton Street, laundry hung on gray lines, even in the cold, in late October: boxy school jumpers, work pants in all sizes, the slate greens, the straight lines solemn and stiff, as I flew by. I’d slow down to pass the old Beulah Farm orphanage, its bare dirt yard and one-room schoolhouse, and sometimes the orphans themselves playing behind the splintering fence. Mostly, there were fields and fields of corn, which in the spring made the back roads into intimate hallways striped with light where the stalks parted like doors creaking open.
Once in the fall, a friend and I biked far, past fields of harvested corn. We rode not talking much, comfortably silenced by the wind in our faces, one pulling ahead for a stretch, then the other, until cresting a hill, we saw a white farmhouse rise up. Yellow police tape crisscrossed the porch. Below the Do Not Enter sign nailed to the door, we tried the knob and it opened. I crossed over with my friend, who in the shaded living room, amid the scattered stuff of disaster I surely kissed. Or, after poking around for a while, it was he who brought something to show me, a stained, crumpled shirt, a week-old newspaper, and, bent together over the object, we breathed our few words near each other’s faces, necks, closer still, until the decision to touch and be touched dissolved. It was something any of us would have done—used the props of the moment to frame, to give shape to our desire. Then, among pots on the stove with their lids askew, piles of mail, work coats and muddy boots by the door, the moment grew suddenly large. The weight of the unknown event, the lives we moved so easily among displaced us, and we left, quickly uncomfortable.
But while we stayed, we stayed because we were protected by a curiosity so certain of its task, that things—boots, mail, pots, our bodies—offered themselves, first tentatively and then with urgency, as if for us alone, solicitous as all objects of adoration, as all objects in stories lure us, irresistible and catalytic.
I felt certain nothing could happen to me in that house, or to him, even as we walked through the wreckage, because I could see us there. Even as we touched a few derelict things, isolated, stubbornly beautiful glass things—faceted doorknob, etched wedding goblet—even as he held up an old newspaper anxiously between thumb and forefinger, we were like characters caught in the instant of being created. Thus constituted, I watched myself leave the farmhouse even as I left the farmhouse, saw myself riding, even as the wind lifted my hair, downhill now and coasting fast, the fields on either side cut to stubble, the late afternoon clouds jagged and heavy as purple cliffs.
My bicycle was a blue three-speed clunker. I loved it inordinately. Riding to class, or home late after the library closed and town was shut tight, I’d practice feeling both its presence and absence. I would say, contriving nostalgia, “I loved swinging the bike under me and taking off ” even as I swung the bike under me and took off. I’d fly, and see the moment of flight in my head. I lived preemptively with loss, memorializing instances. Even the names of nearby towns, whispered under my breath at odd times during the day, for the sound, for the shape alone, names redolent of small bars and lake-side ease and postindustrial collapse, were both
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