Dark Hope

(An excerpt from unpublished manuscript, "Homesick")

I tend to be optimistic in emergencies.

I’m in the living room, sitting in a chair I never use, trying to collect the last of the day’s light. There’s been a blackout. My neighbor tells me in the courtyard it could be hours before we see light, and on record, it’s the hottest day of the year, so until now, the neighborhood has been working to stay cool in the suffocation of the day of one hundred and eleven degrees. I think about how I must find new ways to keep my mind busy—all without thinking about my marriage to electricity.

The sun has begun to set and I don’t own a flashlight. Even though I was raised to always have one in case of emergencies, I never remember to buy batteries.

There’s something about the whole flashlight thing that silently disturbs me: an eye of light, a limit in perception, and the vulnerability of moving amongst the dark.

We’ve been out of power for only a half an hour and my dog, Max, is panting; there’s a heat wave hysteria building up in the house. He circles the living room with doubt and suspicion. It’s still too hot to open the doors, even at eight thirty in the evening. I open more blinds to bring in the last of the summer light. It’s the most my neighbors have seen of me inside my house, since I keep my blinds tightly closed to reduce the heat of living in central California. I’ve learned the less Max sees on the outside, the less likely he will bark while I’m at work. From the standpoint of the living room, he’s been reduced only to sound. The sound of the rod iron gate squeaking, the mailman who slams the rows of mailboxes back into the stucco wall, the City of Fresno emptying the recycling or garbage bins, the beeping of a delivery truck as it inches its way out of the six-unit complex where I live. I light the candles on the mantle. It’s been months since I’ve taken the time to do this. When I lived in San Francisco I didn’t feel “home” until I lit a candle in the window. I always said a prayer or a wish and imagined the wishes traveling over the city. Maybe it was the act of intention. Hope recognized.

The power flickers on. The refrigerator growls. The air conditioner clicks on. My house becomes bright, and then everything shuts downs, dies. Sometimes hope works that way. Unrepentantly it will arrive, only to recede, and if we’re lucky, the process repeats itself. I think about how sometimes months, even years, can drag by, where all feels lost. Maybe hope is overlooked, never lost. I carry the candlesticks and travel towards my windowless bathroom—a dungeon with a built-in fan in the ceiling, a box that sucks air and sends it…well, somewhere. It took me weeks after I first moved here to get used to the noise. I couldn’t put my eyeliner on straight with all its humming, the blades gnawing at the air.

Beautiful amber rays flicker from the candles back on the mantle. Illuminations of a dance scatter themselves down the tiny hallway of the apartment. Each movement has intent, and relies on the darkness for its beauty. I wonder if this is how hope works.

I return to the chair by the window. Darkness sinks into the center of the room, a purple-black haze through the room. My eyes are beginning to adjust to the dark. I’m forced to be left alone with silence until I am seduced by song. I am guessing it’s a sparrow on the other side of the glass. I don’t know the names of birds who sing or the ones who don’t. Since childhood when my fascination with birds began, I have never stopped to ask if there are bird species that didn’t sing. My neighbor tells me, when we simultaneously step outside into the shared courtyard to get fresh air, that it was most likely a mocking bird. “A mockingbird…of course.” I say, stunned that a bird, with such a beautiful name, might have been on my rooftop, serenading into the stillness of the early evening. This bird has captured my heart. I admire his patience and his melody as he continues to sing to find love and once again, I feel sick with hope.

Passing Time

Stones and Sand
I stand at an unnamed river— or at least I don’t see a sign. Later, I’ll find out I was on the official Blossom Trail in Fresno County. I should have known by the blankets of flowers covering the mountains . I watch my dog Max cool his paws in the river and slowly walk to the center of the river on his thirty-foot leash. He pauses when the river reaches his belly. Long swirls of fur are beneath him as his little dog-like fingers grip against stones and sand. This is the best I can I do. I wish I could let you run off leash, but I may never see you again. I’m not sure you’ll come back to me if I set you free. All these tests with love. Sometimes, you come off like a grumpy old man and can’t hear me when I call out your name--my words getting stuck in your long golden brown goatee. I from above this underwater world; it's safe here amongst the silent diligence of the river's microorganisms circling and bouncing off my feet.

The nature of hope, which includes the act of loving and letting go, is of the same. We become conditioned to either engage or avoid the conversations of the heart. You are a grown man who told me I was "...all he ever wanted, so it’s was best to let me go." I think about you working at your desk in Fresno, your back humped over, broken, and wonder if you can feel me think about you. I imagine that enough time passes you may forget about me, and like Max, your memory will soften and you'll become foreign to how freedom feels inside the heart.

I see a woman in a tree. She’s across the river standing on the largest branch. I envy and fear her at the same time. She’s leaning against the trunk of the tree; the rest of the tree hangs over the rapids. In her arms, she has a baby swaddled in a white blanket. A dangerous aerialist with rapids hissing below her. A man comes out of the brush carrying an armful of branches and logs. Everyone is doing what they need to in order to survive. What are you doing?

Water moves over the river rocks the size of heads of cabbage. I stare at the sparkles across the water until I don’t feel anything anymore, my vision turns to a muted white haze. This is how we’re supposed to feel when we pass time. Hours later, I rise from my couch to relive the tea pot from its hysteria. Max sleeps. His body, round, like a salamander.

Eros Love

I was recently asked if I was familiar with the three types of Greek love, in particular, eros love. This is what I found:

* Agape is the highest form of love, Godly love. This love is totally sacrificial and committed to the well-being of another. It's the fruit of the spirit that indwells us.

* Phileo is the a brotherly kind of love. It needs to be watched over and cultivated, or it will diminish.

* Eros is a sensual or sexual love. God invented eros love for the most intimate part of marriage.

Tea Tags

I set the air conditioning down to sixty-nine degrees when I receive the call that you're on your way over. I stop. I hold my breath…one…two…three. I let out a sigh. It worked, I think? My dog, Max barks. You’re at my gate. My senses return to overload. I bite my upper lip. I’m smiling too hard; I’ll give it away as to how much I’ve missed you.

We read our tea tag fortunes. Mine is about how wisdom comes with experience, and yours in about opening yourself up to love. I am thrilled you got the love tag. I pour water to the rim and our steamy bags float to the surface. I am suddenly hot again and look at you and smile. You ask if I want to kiss you. I flirt with "maybe." We talk about the temperature of the tea, it'll be twenty minutes later you'll confess you're afraid of relationships. The word trust cartwheels out of my mouth, but it is foreign to you and means nothing. It will take years for me to accept that the ears of your heart have fallen deaf--years before we even met. I write poems in the air.

Waiting for our tea to cool, I give you a tour of my new apartment. We’re in the hallway, between the bathroom and the bedroom. I close the bathroom door and turn to lead you into my bedroom. You gently pull on my arm. I cannot move. You have that smile that lures me closer; you lips and eyes work harmoniously together.

This will be the last of the memories I evict from my heart. I come alive. With life comes fragility, as does the opening of any forest flower.

Plans for a Rosary

Everyone dies differently. For my father, Breck, it’s drinking two brandies in front of the television with his bones locking up from hours on the recliner.

I watch him make his way down the long hallway when it’s time for him to retire for the evening. Tonight there is something different about him—he doesn't smile when I stand at the doorway, instead he's sitting at the edge of the bed, exhausted, his body broken from all the sales calls—on the road meeting clients, the cocktail parties, fishing trips; the decades before are with us. Even the sea has crushed him: the scuba dives, and being on his knees, praying to the wooden boards of a boat with all the prying, fitting, nailing, sanding, and painting. Eventually, when he couldn’t make the trip from the central valley to Bay Area, he allowed the San Francisco Bay Area Sea Scouts to pillage through his seventy-six foot boat. They took with them brass fittings, fishing poles, tackle boxes, generators, a dingy boat, life vests, just to name a few. In the months that followed, water began to seep inside the abandoned boat, and as the strength of the sea’s tongue pressed the boat to the sludge that had always lived underneath.

My hair smells like the fish (something I've grown up with). I watch my mother balance between the stove. Her voice punches its way through the grating scream of the exhaust fan that is unable to inhale the plumes of fish smoke and the burnt peas. I love you for trying. Her body is soft in her faded cotton sweats, her toes, always beautifully painted; her feet are two bouquets, just short from a dozen pink roses. She looks at me and says, I’m through with shopping and all she wants for her birthday is a rosary.

What We Leave Behind

It’s true—the bigger the space, the more one will accumulate. It'll be in one of Fresno's wealthiest neighborhoods that I'll attend my first estate sale. When my mother and I enter the mansion I smell urine, perhaps death.

People are strewing amongst the pockets of the house, lingering around the baby grand piano, in the closets inside the bedrooms; any one of these people leaning against the kitchen counter could be the owner this house, but the owner is dead. I become agitated by their ease, the way they lift their glasses of ice tea to their lips, casually engaged in conversation, the glass picture of tea at the edge of the counter.

I’m told most everything in the house is for sale and when I find something, make an offer. It's difficult to focus on one thing when ribbons of people are streaming from one room to the next. Should I follow the pack of women to the bedroom where the king-size bed is adorned with handbags and belts or to the living room that's off the kitchen where framed artwork is stacked against the walls like playing cards? Something of great value hides amongst us.

In the bedroom women try on fur coats while others pull at the stacks of sweaters, priced at ten dollars. I can’t wear a dead woman’s sweater, can I? I move from room to room, trying to ignore that my skin is beginning to feel sticky. I head towards the kitchen again where I find more people, new people, drinking ice tea and carrying on conversation. On the shelf behind two shutter doors a row of cookbooks has collapsed. Somebody has already picked through what was once an immaculate collection. I identify a worn copy of “The Joy of Cooking” with its red and white thatch-style design. I imagine the woman of the house cooking recipes for her family. Now she’s dead. Her cooking days are over. My mother joins me in the kitchen. My mother is naturally stimulated by the entire sale. I expect her to sniff out the cashmere the others overlooked, or the gold bangles in a box marked, “Everything $5.” My mother slinks around like a cat, barely disturbing a thing, and over to a of row glass and stoneware. She flips items over to read inscriptions and signatures. She’s no beginner at this. I stand frozen, as if I just got caught breaking into someone’s home.

“I feel like this woman is going to come home from shopping and say, ‘What the hell is everyone doing in my house! Who the hell are all you people?’”

My mother thinks I’m being humorous, and maybe I am. I can’t tell right now. I follow her back to the master bedroom. I stand as my mother holds up sweaters to her body. I talk my mother out of the green sweater.

“But I like the color.” She smiles and holds it up in front of her.

I tell her she doesn’t have to buy something, just because we’re here. I point out how there’s a small tear near the neckline. I force the sweater out of her hand and back onto the sloppy rainbow-colored stack of sweaters. We decide to take one last look in the living room. The hums of voices begin to accelerate with the great flux of newcomers and there’s a great stir at the makeshift cashier area in the dining room, adjacent to the living room. By unexplained forces, we end up there.

My mother shows me a gold watch. I strain to see it in the dark living room. Why won’t they turn on any lights in here? Within seconds, she’s struggling to fasten the clasp, mind you, in the dark and shadowy living room. She decides to get it, even though they can’t seem to put it on. They tell her, “All watches are knock-offs and ten dollars.” She hands the woman sitting in front of the cash box at the card table a ten-dollar bill. Finally, we leave.

In the car, my mother hands me the watch. The sunlight is shinning on it now. The chunky-and-link-styled watch is actually quite beautiful. “Flip it over, Pilar. Inside there is an inscription, read it to me. I think it says 14K.” At that moment, once I realized the weight of the watch, my mother had found herself a deal.

“Yes, mom, it says 14K!” I hand her the watch, trying to fight back jealousy.

“I knew it!” Then, right there, appeared the glow. I’ve seen this particular glow several times in my lifetime now, typically when a new piece of jewelry touches her body. Silver does the trick, and for a while, she went through a pearl phase, but she’ll always melt for gold. She stops the car and asks me to help her put it on. We watch it shine on her left wrist, as she turns right to take us out of the neighborhood. “Now that’s a real estate sale! A lot of people say, ESTATE SALE, on their signs, but that’s just to lure them in. I begin to cry.

“I don’t ever want to go to another estate sale again!” I say, weeping even louder.

“Look at all that stuff she had…died of kidney failure…none of her wealth could save her…she left all this behind. Why do we have to accumulate so much stuff?” I don’t know where I’m going with all of this. I am spitting out strange sentences between my sobbing.

“I think the estate sale forced you to come to terms with your mortality,” my mother says.

My mother likes to stay on the surface of things. This seems like a profound and deep statement. I have no response for her. I continue crying.

We talk about the value of things…faith and how the real investments are the ones that are not often seen. The gold watch catches the sun, everywhere, I see sparkles.

The Truth of it All

I am standing in the center of truth. And, it is true: the truth will set you free.

I suppose I waited three, maybe four years, for this evening with you to reach this center of the unexpected. This language is not of this world; its wisdom was born from the concept of what it really means to love someone and expect nothing in return. Love does not seek it's own. Yes, I know, but we're not always prepared for the response, a reaction that is so profound, especially with those whose hearts have already hardened.