Tomorrow’s Clothes
My day starts with stoplights. Blue turned red. The road. My hands on the wheel. And songs about suffering.
This is what the morning sounds like.
I remember she tipped the bottle awkwardly when she motioned to me, pouring the rest of what was inside steady from her back-turned hand. The way she motioned, nudging her head quietly toward my glass like a question, it was like for a second we were alone in that kitchen rather than crowded in it, rather than loud with drink and expectation. For a lot of us, it was the end of our last college semester. Tomorrow our futures would start and we were celebrating, taking the night to enjoy standing still before we had to move again. And the way she moved the bottle toward my glass, in that one private moment between just the two of us, we acknowledged each other in a way the classroom could never have the size to hold. We transcended, two prospective lovers grazing fingers under a table. We exhaled, two children whispering in each others’ ears.
I moved my glass without thinking and watched the stream stain it red then slide down its curves, leaving them hazy and tinted. I had had this wine before. If I concentrated hard enough, I could almost taste the years gone by. The bottle was a 2006.
“I like to share good wine,” she told me. And I told myself I’d use that quote in a piece sometime. It was romantic and innocent, though we were neither. We were writers, at a dinner party, drinking Cabernet and reading our work behind a lonely stand-up lamp and the soft sound of a waterfall somewhere over our professor’s pool.
If you blinked too long you’d think it was rain. It’d be dark then, black, and the water, both forceful and submissive, would sound like some kind of answer, a metaphor for letting go or an analogy for all the different tomorrows we might have. We weren’t all young but we all had futures ahead of us. We were holding them, those delicate papers with letter-shaped ink stains lined from top to bottom, those palimpsestic ledgers that held all of our veiled confessions and all the articulate ways we tried to come to terms with them. We held them gently under that lamp, that beam with its neck craned over our hands like so many eyes and ears. And we became the rain.
The first day back I felt like I was visiting. My old job, it had me pulling staples, stacking paper, moving folders, writing file numbers. It had me pressing Enter on a keyboard and clicking a mouse. One person said, “You know you’ll have to put that English degree in the closet for a while.” She was making a joke. I laughed.
I was moved when Rodney read his piece in front of the waterfall. He wrote about music, old gospel records he’d gotten from his grandfather, scratchy, rickety old things he knew he should be too cool to like but did anyway. He was young. He’d played the albums to a new friend. They bonded.
“When we talked about music, we were actually talking about self,” he wrote, reading in his usual modest and affected lean. I watched him. I looked around the group, the half-glasses of wine and empty beer bottles. The plates with Greek olives and hummus and shards of shrimp curry. And I knew that I’d miss this. I wondered what had happened to the stiff and impersonal academia that I grew up on and learned to hate so many years ago. I thought about its fluorescent eyes and misshaped footprints, watching around the group as faces opened up at whoever was standing with their papers behind the lamp but before the water. And I felt that I’d finally fallen onto something real, something mutual and worth saving.
The wine was dark and warm in my chest now. It had almost gotten down to my fingers. The moon and the world were each outside of the patio screen. They were far away and covered in mesh.
When I got home I brushed my teeth and washed my face and stood in front of my open closet, staring. I scanned over everything, all the shirts I was sick of and the shorts I wondered why I even bought. I stood there for a while, imagining myself in tomorrow’s clothes. And I wondered what each article would whisper to the wind as they touched outside of my front door in the morning. I wondered how their colors would project off the sun and if they could hide the fact that, underneath the bright, they were just as desperate and over-thought as everything else.
I thought, These are my clothes. And I sifted through my sock drawer, pulling out the older looser ones and feeling their age on my fingers. I hated loose socks, the way they slid on my heels and lost their shape. Tomorrow I’d throw them all away, start again, maybe buy all new pairs in all new colors. I thought, Tonight I’ll sleep, and I pulled a shirt from the rack and held it against the light, at angles, examining it.
I thought, What goes with red?
I wondered, Is this what a grown-up would wear?
I stared. The closet’s yellow glow casted in bursts on the carpet and surrounded me in an electric cloud of half-night, where I could stay forever, be safe and never go to sleep and never wake up. I’d just wait there inside of it a while, quiet and weightless. The light was soft, it wouldn’t mind me staying. And the air was light, faintly sparking around my hands and head with some kind of energy, tiny, almost invisible flashes of heat. I’d just stand there as though I were floating in it, my own personal cloud of nowhere and nothing. And I’d wait. I’d wait for it to open up and turn me into rain again.
“hangers” from yyellowbird on flickr
This entry was posted on Monday, August 3rd, 2009 at 11:44 pm and is filed under creative nonfiction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
