Three Entries
By Niall Twohig
11/29/2020
We’ve driven up and down the I-5 more than usual. Strange days. Strange rides: Me in the front, Aislynn in the back, you back at home. Me alone. You by my side, Aislynn up in LA. Me alone. Last ride, it was like old times: just you and me. We hold hands. You drift into your thoughts as we near trestles. I watch the road: the strangeness of those two giant nuclear boobs, also deactivated now! I consider joking, but nothing good comes; I think, instead, of the day we watched Mark surf those waters. As I round a bend, I catch the coastline fully lit. Patti Smith plays over the scene. She reads Rimbaud’s lines to the rhythmic chant of Sufis. “Eternity. It is the sea mingled with the sun. What? Eternity. It is the sea mingled with the sun.” All of this—all of it—cleanses the senses. They are renewed. I feel what an alien would feel if it saw this sea and sun and you for the first time. I feel what an alien would feel holding this warm hand, feeling the weight of the car as it heaves forward at 80 miles per hour. Everything familiar is unfamiliar. A freshness found in our sadness for what must pass, what must be left behind. Molting. Shedding. Chrysalis, is the word you keep saying.
11/30/2020
Coronado. It’s strange being here, alone with you. Aislynn has been the center for near two years. And for near two years, yours has been a world of bending and squatting and lifting and changing and putting away her things and putting away your thoughts and desires for another day. I know you wouldn’t have it any other way. But it’s nice to come back to the world that gave rise to her. To us, to the illuminated world that reappears when we are together. Here it is. In the cherry red of the flower that reminds you, of sundown, and me: of nebulas. Here it is in the beach. We walk the strand, find our seat, always the same distance from the sea. You see my hands speckled with golden sand and call me a vampire. I pose you for a photo that never does justice to you or the ocean behind you. I’ll try another and another and another (only later realizing that the first shot is always the best; in it, you’re cradled by two rainbows). We stroll in the water and find the sand aglow. We both see as Blake saw: Light angels pirouetting. Galaxies dancing. I follow the hieroglyphs of your footsteps and watch the sea foam kissing your shapes into Infinity. Time flows, I think. Time flows. And here we are again. Here we are again. In our fullness. At the center of all things.
12/1/2020
Apart now, only physically, and only for a short time. I pray now, to your mom, who watches over you. She is cradling you in light.