Seeing Things

I love how the moon shines through my window at night. Most evenings when I settle into bed, and later, when I roll over, the moon is there—that great luminous orb in the sky—peeking into my room, filtered through the diagonal run of mini blinds and my pale blue window sheers. And while I know the moon is out there, above my bed, beyond the window, it steals into my room in slices, in shadow, and so what is revealed is also partially concealed. And for some reason, I like this. Like the idea that the moon illuminates at the same time it shadows. And so I pull the sheet and comforter over my body, and think about the moonlight functioning as a symbol of how we see--this moonlight that settles like dust across my bed, across my nightstand and the lamp and the lighted alarm clock. Althusser talks about the non-vision inside of vision, which I want to think more about tonight. But it is the witching hour, and I am very tired…

Morning comes, announcing itself flirtatiously, bumping night off the stage with a lively slip of her hip. I wake, stretch; squint to bring the numbers of the alarm clock into focus. Gone are the night shadows, the mystery—and all is revealed. I take in the full sweep of my room: this old iron bed; the dresser against the far wall with the Clinique perfume and Helen’s open letter; the slipper chair in the corner with a pink linen skirt folded over it that has been there for weeks, waiting to be taken to the cleaners. What is here, really? What does someone see when they peer into this room?

I think they see that I am hiding. And I believe that this is true. I am hiding, waiting, in this temporary space…

Today I walk around the fountain on a cool fall morning, and the wind blows. I have my iPod, my sneakers, and my jacket pulled down to cover my hands. The last of the season’s leaves are shuddered from spindly tree branches and thrust by the wind onto the ground. They crunch beneath the rhythmic movement of my sneakers along the paved walking path. The sun moves in and out behind roving clouds; the fountain has been turned off. It is a season of dying, of quiet, of turning in. And yet I find it beautiful… The ending, the melancholy, the peacefulness of it. This is my favorite time of the year, my favorite time to go the Cape—after all the visitors have gone, after some of the shops have closed. I like to observe what gets left behind—the air pregnant with stories, with history, with loss and desire. I know it’s not what other people see…

He tells me last night of a book he wants, this man who really only wants one thing. There are tears behind his tired eyes; these eyes that have seen the world, seen the goodness of men’s souls; seen our son lifted—defiant and wet—from the bowels of my belly. Just one book. And of course it is about the thing he loves. And he swallows the choke of emotion as he tells me how they went to Joey and Johnny and Dee Dee’s house, how they cleaned, how they mowed the lawn. How they tried to pay back a seminal group who never got its due. I observe that he sees himself in that… And I also notice that it is getting dark, and that the hands of the clock tell me it’s time to make dinner, time to get my boy inside. And I see him still invested in his youthful passion—his dream—still viewing the world through that lens, as I close the front door and move into the kitchen, with the memory—the vision—of his tired eyes, his passion, haunting me.
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