Drinker of Ink

by Shannon Castleton

I am not dropping my 9 a.m. class.

I keep feeling that if I were in New York, where my life is, nothing could change or ever go wrong, because I’d be aware of everything and everyone I love, and you can only be surprised to the same degree as your ignorance.

to dwell on the origin of pain is to become trapped in a loop—to circle the trauma as if in a semi-truck, until the tire grooves grow so deep, you can’t turn out to drive forward.

That life as I’ve known it and people as I’ve loved them will change.

And it is a fact, though I cannot cite statistics, that most people who die did not actually plan on it.

I have tried to believe that I came to St. Brigid’s for me, but I can see now that I am here for my parents. Because in their minds, if I trusted them enough to leave them, we were not damaged permanently—we were strong and brave and healing.

He gets all the uncomplicated options.

Ah, Peter Breznik. Sometimes you feel like the title of everything.

“It was full of sophisticated little chocolate chip cookies.”

(despite lingering embers from the sophisticated chocolate chip cookie affair),

I think that last bit had to do with my acute lack of sparkle.

So much happens to and inside every human being on this planet—it’s as if we are all small infinite worlds. And how do we connect? How do we come to see each other’s constellations?

I say food is another. I think every baked good and poem is a world. When you create one, you hand a person a view of the stars within you. When you eat someone’s bread or read someone’s poem, you walk the roads inside them—their memories, their joys, their sadnesses.

Words—I have never written this sentiment—failed me.

sat on the back row, missing every word of the famous poet for watching you.

I read you as a boy reads the girl whose mere presence and voice spark sudden fire in his chest.

You, Vivienne. Every fragmented detail.

I think “my” in this case is lifted from a kind of metaphor—it is the “my” of “my heart’s desire.” I leave you to work out how you fit in that metaphor, and then decide if it resonates.

Being held by Peter in the actual world was a sensation of starlight—that silver hum over the coast when the sky is still illumined, night trembling like water at the brim of a glass. I wrapped my arms around him, my face turned in, my ear at his heart.

I bounced to my tip-toes and kissed him. Quick on the lips, the way I might smack a kiss to a baby’s cheek. He caught my wrist as I came off my toes, pulled my hand to his chest and smiled—a blissful, adoring, full-toothed smile, his chin angled in the faintest questioning way, as if to ask, Did that count as a kiss for you?

I like this, I love this, I want to be your koala. Without warning, he began a new paragraph, kissing my jaw, at first lightly, as if to say, Next, we’ll see how you tolerate my lips on non-lip areas, like this delicate jawbone—kiss, kiss, kiss, kiss—do you like this, Vivienne?

“You kissed the shadowed skin beneath my earlobe and my heart exploded.”

Yes. I had a heart issue: It was holding me. “You are my heart issue, and I have never shorted out.” I shifted on his legs to loop my arms around his neck and study his face, probably like a drunk. “I want to be your koala. Did I say that already? You know how they cuddle onto things?”

His breath hitched on an inhale. “I want you to be my koala.”

“Vivienne, you’re better than poetry.” Suffice it to say: I threw my heart into kissing him—

“But I told her last Saturday that I’d already lost my heart to a poet who never looked at me for longer than three seconds.”

His hand lifted to cradle my head. “You’re beautiful the way birds are beautiful—the way they startle you from gray and inertia. The way each bird’s song is completely its own. And your words—I’ve never—”

“It is terrifying to be a parent. To choose to behave one way with your child, and then watch what comes of it. It is like planting a garden with aster and dynamite, but you never know which, and either sprouts up at the oddest times to remind you of what you did well or poorly.”