I found your letter the other day,
stuffed in the box where we kept the wedding stuff
and old tax forms,
the things we group together,
the things that are deemed important and must not be lost.
There it was,
typed out like a little book of secrets.
It was old, from the first time I moved to this city,
when the streets were still too narrow
and the people too wide. When I felt each day
they were eating me alive.
Something had me in its mouth and was chewing.
You told me it's okay to stop writing.
That it's okay to stop taking ourselves so seriously.
You told me about the pure joy of domesticity,
a meal well made, a curtain sewn by hand.
You talked about the beauty of women's work,
craft, and how we all had it wrong back in college
when we tried to be like men.
Tried to write the way men write.
I read your letter twice.
Then I stood at the window,
watching the snow coming down again and I cried
because you left and I never knew why.
Because the space you occupied was real inside me
and since then nothing has ever felt real again.
When I see my friends now, I watch them talk
and think someday they will leave too. Like you did.
They will just be gone.
We stood together in the woods, by the river when
you were married,
and I read your vows, helped to usher you into this strange new life,
not realizing that when you walked through that gate,
you wouldn't come back.
Not fully. Not to me.
It's waiting out there for me now,
In the light of Paris, rumbling little waves
in the rain perhaps
and I am here still, unpacked and ill prepared
heated with a slight fever.
Another river.
I have these rivers, the water kept.
I have the Mississippi in a jug on my shelf,
I have the Thames.
I've had the Seine before, but I was a just a girl.
Now I am grown.
It is the water that calls the water of me,
the tiny rivers in my arms,
the land of my skin.
I come back to the places where they come apart
where they meet bigger water and surrender themselves.
Places where they fall, separating drop for drop, each little cell.
To the places where they divide cruelly
my side from yours,
the way my skin divides my side from yours,
my legs are bank side
the river rolling from me, in those moments
where we come apart
and break down,
base,
animalistic,
coming to the water's edge,
our heads bowed in reverence.
This is a prayer of sorts,
a pilgrimage,
and when it is over,
I will feel full
for a while at least.
Understand the ache will come back
but not right away.
There is food in the pan,
simmering,
and the smell fills the house,
making my stomach growl.
I walk barefoot
one foot in front of the other
down the hardwood floors
from the kitchen
to the living room
with you
and we remove clothes,
my mouth finding yours
our palms
come together
and apart
and together again.
The soul
tells a story
that no one sees,
the tale of
these two people
over time stretched like an equation
carried from point A to point B
Point A when I was only twenty,
an abstract thing and now
thirty four
the skin freckling, the arch of the foot,
growing flat.
Two people
Yes, over time.
Ally Malinenko is the author of The Wanting Bone (Six Gallery Press) and Crashing to Earth, forthcoming from Tainted Coffee Press. Her first novel for children Lizzy Speare and the Cursed Tomb is due out in September from Antenna Books. She currently lives in Brooklyn and blathers on at AllyMalinenko.com.
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