Hothouse

I am driving back from El Paso & have been for three hours. You are quiet; you are letting me drive because the road is open & flat & empty or something, & I am grateful you’re letting me focus on the sun dipping in the rearview, restraining yourself from commenting on my drifting in & out of the lane, hands bloodless & shaky on the wheel. I pretend you aren’t searching for the right angle, that the silence is peaceful. When you finally speak, I pretend that the silence hasn’t ended; your words interlock with the radio, fitting between lyrics like puzzle pieces, like footnotes. 

I know this town grounded in a compass… 

I think you give up but I can’t tell if it’s you staring at me or the yuccas spattered across the landscape like parade-goers dotting the street, like bodies crowding the street. How can I admit that my every treasured memory was experienced from the backseat, & that now I’m carsick even behind the wheel? Every time I glance at the side-view mirror, envy blooms within me, the only two hints of deep green for miles sequestered in my throat & cheeks. The rhizome settles deeper into my stomach, feeds off the acid. I’m mulching. I think I interrupt you. “Are you hungry at all?” 

Asinine. But we both know that’s not what I mean. I mean appetite, I mean the deep pit occupied only by desperate, grasping adventitious roots & bile. I mean we haven’t eaten in so long that we’re emaciated— God, just look at us. But I’ve tried this before, insisted that he who eats My flesh & drinks My blood abides in Me, & I in him, & yet you never budge. I can tell you’re starving— right? I guess in the end I still can’t look at you. 

I keep going over it over & over, my steps iterate my shame… 

If the New Testament is ever revealed to have its own set of Satanic Verses, I’d not be surprised to learn it was the Devil’s pen which scrawled 1 John 4:12: No one has seen God at any time. If we love one another, God abides in us, & His love has been perfected in us. We are proof of this diabolical incision— the loveless in whom God is a chick pecking at the shell, the rat snake disguised as a lover. But you would never accept this infantilizing assessment, long-chewed but ill-digested, & it slithers back down my esophagus to flavor the simmering pot of vomit. I try again. 

“Actually, the yearning isn’t so bad, I think. It’s hot to the touch & it burns to hold. But its extended existence in the psyche or (uh) the soul (or the heart) demonstrates a zest (I won’t

say lust) for life that one can reflect on & receive as generally positive, & like when Mitski sings I love everybody because I love you, one can experience the inverse, wherein because I love everybody…” 

I grip the wheel tighter, white-knuckled & desperate for stability amidst the potholes of my own making, for something to hold onto.The asphalt cracks a little more. “Well, I love everybody.” 

I kept saying I just wanted to see it, saying “what’s wrong with that”… 

We’re quiet for a while, entranced by a distant mesa out the driver’s side window. Mesas are deceptive because there’s no elevational feedback; I mean it’s just flat, cliff face, flat. Consider the mesa-dwelling wolf hunting the mesa-dwelling deer through the thicket. One moment the chase is on, the next moment the chase is vertical, the next moment the chase is over. If I were that wolf, I’d try to draw up a quid pro quo with my prey: You run at 50%, & you’ve got my word that I’ll do the same. Then again, I were the deer, I’m sure I’d skip the meeting & take my chances with the plunge. To each their own. 

When you finally speak, you’re so quiet that at first I imagine it, but your voice determinedly peeks out above the radio’s static-backed hum, cautious, probing. I get distracted thinking about groundhogs, how your speech is similarly careful, but you know better than to appear as shocked; after all, you’ve already lived much longer than the average groundhog, even in captivity. At least their shock is expressive, external, while yours is masked… but I cut you off mid-thought to ask you to start over. 

“It’s fine, it wasn’t important. I was just saying, that’s how living beings were made: discrete, never merged. It sucks. I empathize. But everyone’s song is their own to perform, right?” 

“Well… you’ve never wanted to sing through someone else’s throat?” 

I mean mine. 

“I like my own throat just fine, honestly.” 

I don’t feel undone in a big way… 

I want to tell you the sculpture is already complete within the marble block. There’s no need for violence, the chisel & hammer in the glovebox; gradual erosion will do. I am patient. I want to tell you that the way to your heart is through my ears, locked behind mountains of Bianca Carrara, & that every time you speak the bird call sounds a little clearer. I don’t want a

sculptor, I want a river. I want to tell you that I promise, but I can’t. You’re a better liar than me anyways. I nervously swerve around a pothole instead. 

“I guess it’s less about attaining continuity with another individual & more about prolonging the anguish of desire. I think that’s noble, at least when the coals of that desire are stoked for all beings.” 

“On one coast a cinder, on the other a conflagration. I don’t give a shit you skimmed Batailles.” 

I laugh nervously because you’ll never know how sorry I am, & because I feel like your voice wasn’t always this loud. 

“Damn, I thought you liked me.” 

“If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be sitting here right now.” 

I should tell my friends when I love them… 

The truth is, I think everyone was right about amalgamated selves before they brought the gross sex stuff into it. I think exposure can look like cruising uncomfortably down I-10 together. It can look like me, anxious in the driver’s seat, sweat in my eyes, fiddling with the radio, trying to find a song that matches your voice. I dare you to agree. If all you wanted me to admit is that the right atrium does, in fact, burn brighter than the other quadrants, then I’d blush & say sure, of course, just a moment. & then bashfully: My everybody is the many yous, a sunflare for each solar system of yous, yous in whom everybody’s seen God & fought or fled, yous in whom God’s love is perfected & shelved. 

I got too caught up in my own shit, how every outcome is such a comedown… Now I begin to cry for the first time in three hours (or at least tear up, which is enough for me to have been taught to smother, but I have grown tired of smothering & could use some time off) because I experience a revelation that you carry like a burden: the pious butcher recites Tasmiyah but remains a butcher. The car clatters clumsily through another depression in the road. I drove right into it, preoccupied with images of you called to the light in my heart, nearer to me than my jugular vein, et cetera— you get the idea, you get these visions before I do. The sudden movement jolts us, & your curious ātman splashes unceremoniously— I wasn’t sure you could do that— into my bloodstream. I speak without thinking, which means I really mean it this time: “Sure you’re not hungry?”

& when you inevitably don’t reply, I bite the bullet, take in the external shocks first: the yuccas & mesas beyond the plexiglass, beyond the weighty absence in the passenger seat. I pull over slowly, listen dully as the song fades out, taking your voice along with it. I knew happiness when I saw it… 

Then I swallow the nascent shoots of hunger & heartbreak & half-hearted references to books I haven’t read & I’m honest for the first time all evening: you’re lonely in El Paso & I’m lonely in Roosevelt-or-wherever-the-fuck & tomorrow— when we somehow get to tomorrow— we’ll be 57,000 heartbeats closer to being strangers. The sun tumbles behind a mesa cliff (it really ought to know better) & drains the final fleeting daylight from our landscape. Dull-eyed out the window, your window, I struggle fruitlessly to differentiate the celebrant yuccas from the slain. I wonder if you’ll wait for me. 

(I saw it…) 

I daydream that future the whole way home & decide, in the end, that you shouldn’t.