One day I called myself.
Reader, you may ask, “How could you call yourself.”
The answer has to do with the nature of relationships. I have a relationship with an image (several really) of myself from many years in the past, in and around the time I met Juliette in the Lake Region. I was in a boat, fishing with friends, good friends. One of them said, “Is that a branch.”
It’s a person, I thought. We came alongside and I pulled her out with help and I would learn later that Juliette couldn’t swim, but, luckily, had learned, when she’d fallen, the art of buoyancy. We wrapped her in a jacket and made for the pier.
Her family ate on tables cut close to the floor. They gathered on their knees at the table, reached for bowls of things, talked loudly through the meal. Juliette and I would take walks after dinner. We’d sit under a tree and watch the water and Juliette told me that her father thought I might be too strange for their kind.
I see myself at the river. I hear myself saying, “I must be strange to him.”
Juliette told me his story, how he stood at the window of his house and said, “How can I make a life here?” I remember feeling guilty. I remember wanting to make love to her under the tree.
Her father lived where few could touch him. In his smile I saw abandonment. I saw how the political lives of people killed the young. I heard the miss-used speeches of preachers in whatever language.
She never wore her hair long. She had small hands that made deep impressions in my arms. (I can still feel them. I can still see the tips of her hair as the light would passes through.) I felt for the saplings in her arms and legs, and on her lips I tasted the residue of sweetnesses, vivid sauces, the tangs of citrus. I heard the numerous languages she spoke into the phone, sometimes hotly, sometimes in the tone of birds. Too whom, I asked, but it was really a whisper. “Friends from school,” she said. “There were so many.” She was the only one who ever slapped me. She was the only one I ever heaved over my shoulder and raced around the couch saying, “Ha, I have you.” She once fed me a small bean with chop sticks. Seconds later I wept from the pain.
So much that when she was gone, I felt as if I’d leapt from a rapid place to tumble painfully through slanted grass, bumping against a stone, stunned. I’d shake my head, rise, and imagine the days to come as weatherless or more like the shed skin of old snakes, carrying myself into a future where often I’d catch myself standing at the water or seated somewhere and hearing unknown words leaking from a crowd or in the light reflecting off dark water, I’d see my head penetrate and move on. You bear multitudes of selves and see them sometimes. Sometimes you’re are a figure on the floor; sometimes you’re a young man in a boat, reaching for Juliette; or you perceive yourself smiling because her father has promised to return that place you still can’t pronounce and kill the more canny ones; or you see yourself on a soft surface beside her: the oils, the slicknesses, the salts, the glow of the moon.
Or you pick up the phone. It’s the wrong number or it’s a relative. It could be anyone. And you become the person you were years ago, for a brief moment, because the voice on the other end of the line utters words you remember yourself saying. It happens fast. It’s speedy. You see yourself calling and at the same time you see yourself answering. In a moment, you’re both people, two flames aputter or briefly frozen or smoking side by side in a dim space. You’re of both selves, near and distance. And you wish that she was in between them.
