Drinker of Ink

by Shannon Castleton

I resent my parents for insisting I do everything early, as if early is better. I am tired.

He’d touch his fingers to my chin before brushing them down my neck, the whole time watching my face as if even the stars weren’t so luminous. Leaning toward my lips, he’d hover a minute before kissing me like he invented it.

How does one even rate a kiss? If kissing were a class, I’d take it.

Anyhow, boys are a drain on time until a woman is gainfully employed and settled and buying expensive shoes and/or bakeware.

He has sharp adult angles and serious blue eyes that you can tell have read volumes and seen remote places; but his hair spikes up at odd angles at the crown of his head, like a boy who has been wrestling over a soccer ball at recess. And the scruff on his cheeks doesn’t seem too robust yet.

Perhaps he is Danish. Danish and sandy-colored, with the bluest-green eyes that startle and arrest you. He is tall and strong-fingered and casual, in jeans and a short-sleeve, knit collared shirt.

I didn’t feel as much as smell an absence: the familiar alchemy that was Maman—yeast,

beauty and poise alarm me. She alerts me to the spinning black hole that exists between the woman I am and the woman I wish I could be.

‘Hope is the thing with feathers.’ Emily Dickinson,

How do you read my soul like a book?

One should proceed slowly, and when two people make contact, they should walk a long way together.

My hormones make me a miserable feminist.

That’s evolutionary grace—that human beings have two arms long enough to hug themselves. But even as I thought the words, I knew that a person’s own arms aren’t enough. A body wants another person’s arms to hold it. It does not long to hold as badly as it longs to be held. Here, it wants another body to say, rest here a while.

But I also want to be held without sparks—that is, quietly, like the marble woman in Rodin’s Hand of God, the way she is curled in the rough-sculpted hand, obviously unfinished, resting.

If we are all walking the planet as discrete and variously shaped poems, the most obvious poem would be the least interesting, as well as the easiest to laugh at, judge, or discard. I would like to be known as unreadable.

“I have a body. With a body I do the most beautiful things that I do,”

Najlepša hvala. Which is to say, Most beautiful thank you.

“No. Hana is a poem. Just looking at her captures all the feelings and the words and the lifetimes in my being. Anything I were to compose would only reveal my own banality.”

to write is to allow pain and love and memory and time to exist outside yourself. You breathe when the words are out. You can live until tomorrow.

The human narrative that waking up matters, that commerce, love, industry, and art ensure that our planet keeps spinning.

any small thing in this world might fill you.

“Maybe we’d be too busy with happiness to sit at God’s meeting,” I said. “Maybe we’d be appeased, just knowing love lasts.”

The mere sight of her touched off a feeling of home, as well as hope—the difference between the two words just one letter—as if the English language’s linguistic ancestors understood that the words meant so much the same thing. Both are what the people of nations live for, the forces that sustain us on the roads we travel.

“I never imagined. How much. I mean, this. It’s so hard, but so happy. I wouldn’t want anything to be different—”

life is short and love is strong and no amount of time is long enough. Which is one reason why food and books should be delicious.

The thought occurred that for my whole life, I have feared what might happen; but in that moment next to Peter, reading a skeletal map of my life, I feared for what might not have happened. What chances, what risks, what words, what love might not have been notched into my life’s constellation. If hard hadn’t come with good. If sorrow hadn’t precipitated longing. If loss hadn’t intensified love.

We sleep in our nest, hearts broken and mending. We are torn and re-woven, day after day.