Hammers Hitting Nails
musings on stupidity
I confuse the sound of hammers hitting nails with the sound of church bells ringing. There are seven doves on the power line. I count them and the spaces in between. I count the numbers on the houses and the steps to the street corner, the intersection of Constance and Harmony. A puddle I mistake for a mirror, momentarily. How strange it is to see the sky where the ground should be.
How strange it is to be wrong about anything. I do it all the time, misjudging peoples’ character or the time it takes for a red light to turn green. Every time it keeps surprising me. I walk the wrong direction when I reach the intersection at the end of my street. I keep walking several blocks before I see landmarks I’m not supposed to see. It’s odd how intuition falters, but I trust it still to guide me.
I met the love of my life twenty times, at least. I thought I could make a god out of anybody. I still know their favorite songs and the size of their bodies in comparison to me. When the lamplight hits an empty room just right, it makes a man where a shadow should be. And if you focus too hard on the way somebody’s lips move, it doesn’t matter what they’re saying.
Perhaps the miracle has happened already, perhaps the question and the answer exist independently. Perhaps every breath you’ve ever taken is making its way back to the lungs of somebody else, your soulmate in another city. The boundaries between what we want and what we’ve got are porous, we’re absorbing molecules of future needs through our skin unknowingly. The edges of our silhouette blend into a scene somebody painted once, a vision they had long ago in some half-remembered dream. A microbiome, dust mites in your lashes obscuring what you see. I am a hypochondriac, a schizophrenic communicator with my own beliefs.
God is based on feeling. God is somewhere close, but never in my view completely. A character named and never seen, the way they build a world by referring to it on TV. I’ve been wrong so many times, but I’ve been right just as many. You can define a word by comparing it to other things. And if you pick enough examples, one of them will be correct, you just keep trying.
Inside a book of Andrew Wyeth paintings, there’s a man sitting on the branch of a tree. He has copper colored hair and a tan chore coat and blue jeans. He turns his face toward the landscape, snow and the whole place is empty. Afternoon Delight, 1970. I can’t see his face, but I think he looks like the man I’m going to marry. It is a book about heaven, composed accidentally. I listen to the rain hitting pavement and imagine it is the sound of people clapping. I remember everything that anybody ever said to me. It comes out in gushes, like a nose bleed. I have never broken a bone, but I know the sound of it happening.
When I pick up the phone, it is you on the other line waiting for me. This conversation has been happening in all our lives, for all time, between strangers and the people in my apartment building. Perhaps every life is an attempt to get it right, and when we do all life will cease. And what a gift to be set free from all the things I thought were true and how they bound me. To give up the dreams that I had and that you gave me.
Magic happens all the time, in the quiet on the other side of the line, in the moments before you say goodbye to somebody. I am young, but not as dumb as I was when I was twenty-three. How foolish I was and how foolish I will be. The luck of being alive at all, of meeting future parts of yourself in the eyes and arms and broken bits grown over in somebody else, to be known in someone else’s certainty. What a pleasure to fumble around in the dark, to imagine shadows into beings. The rain sounds like something else and your voice is in my lungs when I am speaking.