On the Marking of Years
You do not see the glass before it slows. Only after it liquifies.
Sometimes I wonder if there are parts of a person’s throat that will remain parched forever, no matter how much water she drinks.
I’d like to go back a hundred years and try an experiment to see.
But if I did, I imagine a woman turning to me, after only the first sip, and saying “No thank you,” and turning off.
She’d find her own throat turning to stone and still repeat those same words, carefully.
11.
“I’d like to stop getting older,” Sophie tells me at dinnertime. She has a thoughtful look, a little constrained. “Maybe it could be five years before I get one year older. Or maybe fifty. Or maybe a hundred. Who knows?”
“Maybe,” I say.
“But then, if it was a hundred years, I might be dead before I even turned one.”
“True,” I say.
“So . . . maybe it would be better if only a couple of years passed per real year. Then I could grow slower, but I’d still grow.”
“Sounds like a plan, I say.”
She goes to take a shower. The water turns on. I shut my eyes.
I imagine a farm woman tilling the earth. Tilling and tilling, vegetables, flowers, gardenias. Camellias. Sunflowers.
12.
Decide what you want and go for it, the self-help book says. Present all the obstacles to yourself, then decide on the thorniest obstacle and make a plan.
I would like to make a plan for what happens when darkness finds us.
There would be dust and meteorites and stars, in a hundred billion years or six billion.
There would be long-legged creatures, the names of which I cannot even know.
Of course there would be no one to name them. That’s only one problem.
I doubt all this is what the self-help book means.
13.
Guns are for beginners, the woman at the consulate tells the man in front of me, after listing all the reasons she could keep someone out of the country. There’s also larger weapons and bombs. Nuclear stuff. She is speaking in almost a whisper, and I wonder if the man is a lover, or a colleague of hers. At first, I assume she is joking. But she continues on with her list, including fraud and drug trafficking, and I realize it is I who have missed the joke.