The Distancing Properties of Perpetual Noise

I sit curled beneath where he sits crumpled on the couch, his eyes locked into brightness coming from the sliding glass door beyond my shoulders, and my fingers tug at loose strings from his robe. My canvas bag overflows with books. The air's stuffy and full of dust and cold. It's mid-afternoon and I spent my entire day here, wishing I were someplace warm and sandy with bodies of water spanning endlessly. He wants to know if there's still a place for him in my crowded future. He wants to know why I've suddenly drifted away like soil carried from slopes of a river bank. He doesn't actually say that, but I'm trying to make poetry out of this moment, give it a piece of something that's good.

Earlier today I leaned against the sliding glass door like rain, looking over the city from his second story apartment on the hill. Sun splashed brick-red tops of buildings, budding trees, the point of a steeple rising above them all, but I watched a fat crow bob down the sidewalk with dark feathers. I wanted to see the bird spread its wings and step into the air, leave behind the hard concrete of the looming city, and take me with her. Ever since I was a little girl, I've always wanted to fly.

I wait for him to look at me, and when he does, it's as if he sees me from a great distance. He knows that I'm already gone, drifting north to my unfinished stories and final semesters, waiting patiently for the letter that will take me away, let me migrate south. You won't even let me follow you, he says, and I look down at my hands. I won't say anything to comfort him. It would be a lie.

Outside, children's voices break what he's placed between us, and I mention I heard the kids walking down his steps again last night. For months he's pulled on his boots and flung himself from the front door, leaned over the steep flight of stairs leading down to the main road, and yelled at the kids to find another away around. They never listen to him.

More than anything I need to walk. I need to leave. Essays are waiting for me. My sculptures of dreams still need to be chiseled, scraped, smoothed out and baked in an oven so I can finally paint them with colors. But he holds on to me, wonders why everything about us still feels new. It's been two years. Things should be better now. I listen for the sound of a crow, the flapping of her wings.

Later that night, after I've gone home, he calls me. I tore down those steps after you left, he says. I finally tore them fucking down. He tells me he's sorry and I say it too. We mend the broken fabric of what we have for now, but I'm still thinking of the crow leaving the city streets, the cold corner of this part of the world, and the earth that's held her for so many years.