for rent

this is where she sat, where she put on her face. i always told her she didn’t need it and secretly loved that her fresh washed face was mine and no one else’s. she was otherwise a mystery to me, women like her are like that, a painting from a painter with a hand that was better than me, and art is better than man.

we met looking at the same santa monica apartment for rent, a one bedroom with a galley kitchen and what i imagined was a place for a small kitchen table and nearly a couch just to the left and a garage sale coffee table in front of that, a yellow tiled bathroom down a tight hall and a bedroom with a closet that smelled of old wood or an old woman, all of it for too much, but it was sixteen blocks from the bluffs and considered the beach.

we filled out applications, i borrowed her pen, i noticed her hands and the certain genius of her skin. the building manager asked if we were together, we both said no. i wondered if she hesitated. i walked out behind her through the courtyard and into the sun on the sidewalk. i asked her if she might want to get coffee, she said “coffee sounds good” and got in her car and looked through the passenger side window at my waiting face and said, “oh, you mean coffee with you” and laughed and said, “sure”. neither of us would get the apartment, but i would see her the week after for lunch, and a dinner, and everyday after that until it seemed like a life.

we’d buy an old house on the mountain or in the canyon to the beach, it’s hard to tell which is which, what was pushed up out of the ocean and what was washed away by a million seasons of rain. i’m in the house for now, what was our house, what is somehow her’s still, her grandmother’s credenza, her hung pictures and porcelain vases and the snug corner place she picked to sit in. it seems there’s space now where everything was crowded before, in the closets she complained about and in between the floorboards, dust and dna where her breaths were and the empty book shelves like bones. and what am i, but what goes bang in the night, the rattle of the wind and the tree branches at the windows, a dog bark at the black. i am nothing anyone can see, not now, not without her, a ghost in the green house up the road or down the street, what the neighbors surely must think.

i’d promised her, a flower garden and a walk-in closet, but you always keep more than you have space for and the flowers go on to seed. it seems the breaking is a part of any promise, like any life and death, the one draws the line around the other. it’s what i think now, i’m not sure what i thought then. it seems everything is pulled apart now, but even before these days, what we’ll look back on and call the end, the porch boards were growing crooked and dry rotting to where we didn’t dare walk anywhere, but straight in and straight out the door. i thought maybe all this would save us, but love does that, crossed fingers and picked up pennies.

i wait for the water to run hot, testing it with my finger, watching the water die down the drain, wondering if it will ever rain again or if it’s too late if it does. it’s hard to know what you have and what you’re stuck with, what you let go and what you lost. i loved her like that, like something i’d found, like something i could only lose. we’re born knowing, i think, four directions and where we’re headed to, heaven and hell wove into our still wet bones. and somewhere at our spines is some small part of the truth, some crumb of god that lives in us or all of us gods ourselves, all of us doing what only a god could do or a field mouse, a thousand lifetimes over and over until we remember to wash our hands and cover our mouths when we cough. i knew i loved her the moment i saw her. we knew it was over long before the end, like the two of us were burning the furniture to keep the house warm. and still i’m surprised at the house being bare, at the spaces where she was once, an emptiness at the front door where she’d leave her shoes.

there can only be something where there was nothing before. what the book she left on her side of the bed says, at least that’s what it seems to say. it seems there’s nothing left for me or for the hollowness that always fills in behind me. the house is packed up, the old paint peeled away, attic ached and crawl spaced. my shirts are too big, this city is too small so there’s nowhere i can go now that i don’t think of her. there are things that are too big for there to be anything after. sometimes there can be only space.

everything is always changing, aging, moving thru time, everyone in this city is driving all at once. there’s talk of adding a lane to the ten, but it’s probably just talk, it will take years if it ever happens. they say the universe is expanding every second, 46 miles per second, the stars farther away, the space between things growing bigger and bigger, what the city planners try their best to fill in. it seems everything is getting smaller and smaller, wearing away and breaking down into pieces, tatter carried away by some invisible gravity of dark matter or ants, all of it becoming something else, something too big to see all at once. and even the things that seem the same are different, the sun and moon, her and me, the distance of our hearts in light years now instead of just moments.

science seems the opposite of magic, yet science tells us that matter is mostly empty space. i suppose it was a matter of luck to have held her at all.