Mailbox Red Stripe

I solve her Rubik’s cube, then peel off a blue and white square. The hallway leading to the stairs is bare of frames, just papery thin paint that can’t support a lean. I paste the blue, and then the white, and pray the paint slivers off and she loses a few dollars of her safety deposit. You’re an asshole. Yeah, I do know that much. There’s a bottle on top of the mailbox, an occupancy marker. I took a photo of it the first time, and then it became her own thing. Once, it was a wooden spoon my sister had whittled for her in Maine, with Zs and an unsanded base. It didn’t stay as long as the bottles. Sometimes they stacked up. I want to knock this one, it wasn’t even mine to begin with - it’s a quarter filled, and icing over. I’ll leave it, and she’ll see it and feel bad. She won’t. It wasn’t mine to begin with.

I’ve got a new door, or the new tenants do, as its uneven slope that blocks it from closing is no longer an issue of mine. The old one lies on the street, and I wonder if anyone would ever be interested in curbing a pulpy door like that. It was heavy,  scraped the floor and caught dust that gathered for weeks. I wonder if they’ll shave the edges of the new one. I wish I had thought to paint my door. Had I known it’d end up on the street, I’d paint it something nice and keep it. Had I known she’d bash the knob out, I’d have painted it, too. Now I consider, taking the door with me, keeping it in my backyard for a year, letting it warp and fold and forgetting about it at the end of my lease. Realistically, I’d never have painted it.

We walk on rocks upstate, and I slip when we reach the wet ones - she’s twenty, twenty-five feet away from me, looking out towards the mountains we came through. This is fucking awesome, do you - I haven’t seen something like this in… The back of my knee bleeds, and doesn’t sting, so I stand and watch her watching elsewhere. How long had it been since I saw something like this? I hadn’t seen much of it at all, at any point, anywhere. It felt good watching it, knowing I was a part of it from above - what makes this range different than the one she grew up in? I see more green than I could blurring my focus in a moving car. I’ve finished looking, and she hasn’t, but now she knows I’m watching her. She would’ve turned sooner, and she will, once she knows I’m here. I breathe loud enough for her to do it, and I wonder how much louder my fall should’ve been to make it come quicker.

I pull a drawer and clear the dresser to sit. Her eyes are red, upturned, focused on the wonky ceiling tiles. I like these so much, she says it to herself. She likes most everything at the surface level. This suits you. It feels like someone else should be here. I remember legal mediators, and the Jersey-turned-Chicago lawyer in my contacts. He was fucking his assistant when we knew each other, and all of their voice messages to me came from the same room. I look up at the wonky ceiling tiles, and she looks down. Why can’t I be a part of this, too? She’s moved on, to her fingernails and the hole in her shirt. I don’t have much anything else to say. I keep on watching the tiles, trying to see a sliver of artistry or beauty, and I notice a wasp nest budding in the corner.

I sweep glass shards into a tatty garbage bag, finding lost beads and safety pins along the way. She loved this apartment so much, God so much, she couldn’t stand it. She broke it apart from the inside, marking it, staining porcelain and shattering windows. It suited her, taking up the space I couldn’t fill, bleeding into my walls and wiping it against them. I liked it much less than the bottles left in the bathtub, and suddenly I was drinking a beer in the shower. I wanted not to like this, to unlearn a worn groove, and to turn the heat as high as I liked. I guide the bag of glass down the stairs with a hand beneath, catching tiny pieces of window between my fingers. They’re small enough not to hurt, and I brush them off into the street. I’m sweaty enough to need a shower, but decide I’ve already taken my last in this one.

We are watching each other. My ears burn. Suddenly I see her as she was years ago, young and soft to me, honest. I resist shying my eye, breaking the hold as glory rips through her head like an ear infection. I settle on a concave of the chest, crushing the breath I held, releasing something to her that felt like an invitation - I smell her, and I can’t figure where the anger went. I forgive my irregular breathing pattern and let the fall of my chest rest on her own, surrendering to the chipped paint and stained pants, the glass between my fingers and the night sweats, just for a moment it washes away. It’s fine, then. It’s fine, and it’s fine, and for the first time in the world, the tide will not pull back in. This is so extraordinary, so just, that the moon holds its breath and the world stops to stare in awe as everything is healed between us, as we disregard the unpainted door on the street, and I am reborn. In a moment where a choking laugh would find its place, I squeeze her so tight she pinches me. Ha ha! It hurts us both, and I lean against the opposite wall. I want to fight, and knock the hooks out of the walls, and knock the wind out of her and myself, and throw up all of the acidic anger sticking to my insides. I hate that I want to smell her again, that she watches me as if nothing ever happened between then and now, that she is standing on my newly washed pillowcase. I smell rain. She’ll forget about this tomorrow, and I’ll sleep with a pea under the mattress.

I drive past the green house, three times to burn the image into my head. A few blocks South, a Red Stripe bottle rests on a sagging mailbox. It feels alright, seeing it. I take a photo, and delete it later that night. It wasn’t ever my photo to take.

Art

‘Open door’ by Lynne Taetzsch

Acrylic On Canvas, 2012

https://www.singulart.com/en/artist/lynne-taetzsch-3573?campaign_id=202&keyword=lynne%20taetzsch&matchtype=e&gclid=EAIaIQobChMI59Wp18CC6wIVja_ICh1_SAlsEAAYASAAEgJFB_D_BwE