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Emily Lawson
Pacific Spirit Park, BC
- I made it to thirty. A year in hell, nursing memory. Two years living scan to scan, tense but present. It’s pouring today, January. You’re frying eggs at noon in the grey dark. Suddenly I’ve had enough remembering. Or maybe I’ve just begun to forget. I wanted this everydayness: crosswords, long walks to campus, groceries, ocean, rain boots, seasons, deadlines, libraries, outings, repetition.
- In the woods where we walk every day, enormous crumbling stumps are draped with the roots of new trees. On the nose, yes. That’s just the heavy-handed thought I love right now. Wasn’t it wisdom I wanted? Experience, philosophy—whatever secret truth I thought the desert meant. When I had cancer, I hated wisdom. I hated pain. I worshipped innocence and the young woman who could never have known what was coming. Today, at last, I don’t miss her.
- But somehow everything’s connected, after all. New Brunswick rearing up horribly again through the train window: that nightmare of hospitalization, chemotherapy, nausea, agony, bleak ugly confinement. I’m looking down from the window in the cancer ward, day after day, watching maybe the very same train. Now I’m really down there, flying backward, watching it all recede, having got my wish—and going to see that very friend, the musician, who I worked with on that Escalante chainsaw crew, to stay up late talking again.
- And later there you are, picking me up from the empty Phoenix airport at midnight, made of your own scent, wrapped in our whole life—tattered striped blanket on a bed of ponderosa needles, orange light from a streetlamp on purple-shaded snow, electrified monsoon winds, dark mornings, wood shavings, bandages, river water, cottonwoods, a decade compressed in one bright collapsing star, driving through the shadows now of ocotillo, creosote, saguaros, winding dirt roads, and after making love, waking up to a frosty sunrise and walking alone—silence and morning birds—alert, alive, knowing nothing is ever really lost—until I see you walking towards me, a bit weathered, happy, tired—sitting in the armchair now by the rainy window: there, right there.
- We wanted a new life. Walking on the wet stones at the edge of the ocean as the seals spy on us. Purple starfish, fallen Doug firs, Cretaceous ferns, early morning ferry rides—we made it, Shane. Sometimes it seems we’ll live forever. There’s a future now. But my dreams run just as far as tonight, with you, or tomorrow morning. We’ll walk the dog. Drive through the rain and blinking stoplights to see our friends. Your laugh booming out. Catch each other’s eyes. We’re always tired; it’s all enough. I love today; I love tomorrow. I’m coming over there now.