It was a morning way back when, when she asked him, “is that some sort of old habit, the way you always talk to yourself?”
She lifted up her nectarine eyes from the Instagram poetry she was thumbing through, and threw the question in front of him as if the thought it had just struck her, obviously he thought, the thought had not just struck her.
Her mind had been cruising around the outskirts of her heart for awhile now.
Her voice had that soft but ever-so-slightly serrated edge it took to during those times of all things elegant and serious. She held the words back and let them bounce back and forth between her head and her heart again and again before they finally rolled off the soul of her curling tongue.
The two were sitting adjacent to one another at the kitchen table. Aside from the occasional Cessna passing over, the morning was gorgeous and quiet—almost too damn quiet at times. It is true that a sky without an airplane passing through has a blue mysterious depth to it all its own.
The ceramic tile that held the kitchen together gave his barefeet a comfortable chill. The weather was a bit too hot for this time of year. She had rolled up her sleeves of the flannel she was wearing as far as her elbows, and her perfectly contoured little fingers spun the coffee spoon around and around, always stirring shit up in her own little way.
He glanced at her graceful little fingers and the effervescence of his bubbling mind went flat.
Out of fizz...
She seemed to have lifted him off the edge of the universe and brought him back down to earth with a simple question, and now she was loosening the threads of him one by one—perpetually, emphatically, as if she would do it no matter how much time and space it might take.
He could only watch and say nothing. He said nothing because he did not know what to say. The few swallows of coffee left in his cup were cold now and looked like mud.
He was bound to get older in age, as was she. She was a mother. He was a father.
For him, she might as well have been on the dark side of the moon.
Off in the distance, a plane was getting ready to take off.
The strange timing of the question was almost too much for him. His mind went west in all directions. While in this room with her, a gentle wind slipped through one open window, passed through her soul and onto another’s.
Reaching out to take her in his arms, he couldn’t help but feel that he was wandering wildly through the chaos of her.
Again and again he would ask himself, “do I love her?”
But he could never reach a conclusion with complete conviction. All he knew or could understand at that moment were that the colored threads were dangling from the ceiling of his thoughts.
They were always there fluttering in the wind.
And here she was loosening them with each passing day in her own little way.
It was that morning when she asked him about his talking to himself. She laughed uncontrollably that morning—again. And they made love—again. He couldn’t recall what made her laugh so much. She probably just felt like laughing. He sometimes wondered if she had become involved with him just so she could laugh in his arms. Maybe she can’t laugh alone—who could?—and that’s why she needed him.
He crawled out of bed and went for a steaming hot shower. When he came back drying himself off with a towel, she was still lying in bed, her eyes pretending to be asleep, sunny side up and smiling, waiting oh so fucking patiently to be flipped over. He sat down next to her and, as always, he caressed her shoulders while his thoughts wandered back around to the threads of their existence.
All of a sudden, she stood up, got a little bit dressed, and went into the kitchen to brew a pot of coffee and scramble up some farm fresh eggs.
It was shortly thereafter when she asked him, “is that some kind of old habit, the way you talk to yourself like that?”
"Like what?” She had thrown a question his way that caught him off guard. “You mean, while…?”
“No. Not pillow talk. Just anytime you are you. Like, when you’re in the shower, or when I’m in the kitchen and you’re by yourself doing whatever it is you do.”
“I have no fucking idea,” he said, shaking his head.
“I don’t pay much attention to all the thoughts I have. I mean I sing to myself and win all kinds of made up fucking arguments with myself while I’m in the shower. But never do I talk to myself.”
“You absolutely do.” she said, toying with a spoon.
"It’s not that I don’t believe you,” the embarrassment of it all affecting his voice.
"I used to talk to myself a lot, too,” she mentioned. “When I was younger.”
"Oh, really?”
"But someone made me stop. ‘A proper lady does not talk to herself.’ They’d say & lock me and my thoughts in a closet—which, for me, was a scary place to be—stuck inside all that darkness.
After that, it didn’t take long. I stopped talking to myself, and even others for awhile—completely.
Not a word.
Again, he had nothing to say, instead, he just listened to the silence, and said nothing.
"Even now,” she said, “if I feel I’m about to say something, I just swallow my words. It’s kind of like a reflex. But what's so bad about talking to yourself?
It’s what comes naturally, is it not?
It’s just poetry flying through the sky."
"I feel you one hundred and eleven percent,” he said.
Still stirring up her own little world with a spoon, she glanced at the clock on the wall. 11:08 a.m. A loud plane, one of those B-52’s was flying lower than normal, began vibrating the entire house.
Waiting for the plane to pass. she spoke again, “I sometimes think that our hearts are like a desolate wilderness. Nobody knows what and the hell is out there, or how big the wilderness really is. All you can do is use your imagination with every little thing that comes crawling out of the wild.”
He sat silent.
The threads completely unraveled now, and both thinking about the wilderness within themselves for an eternal minute, before he spoke up.
"So, what do I talk about when I talk to myself?” He asked. “Allow me an example please.”
"Hmm,” she smiled, leisurely shaking her head every damn direction a few times, almost as if she were stretching out her imagination…
“Well, first there’s airplanes…”
"Airplanes?”
"Yep. You know. The things that are always flying through the sky.”
Laughing out loud, “why and the hell would I talk to myself about airplanes, of all the uplifting things.”
She laughed.
Then before speaking,, the movement of her fingers outlined an imaginary airplane, which looked more like a heart in the air.
"You speak the words so clearly, too. Are you sure don’t remember the things you say when talking to yourself?”
“No ma’am, not at all.”
She picked up a ballpoint pen lying on the counter, and spun it between her fingers for a moment, then she looked at the clock. It had done its job, three minutes had passed since her last glance, wasting three minutes worth of time.
"You talk to yourself as if you were reciting poetry,” she spoke.
Hints of red flustered over her blushing face as she said this. He found this to be peculiar and a little weird: why should my speaking to myself make her blush blood red.
He tried out loud—in his own way—to say the words in their natural rhythm:
"Whatever do you mean
reciting
poetry?"
She picked up the pen again. It was a yellow shitty plastic ballpoint pen with black horizontal stripes and a honeybee adorned upon it.
He pointed at the pen stuck in place between her thumb and index finger and said, “next time i'm buzzing around myself, write it down would you?”
She stared straight into his eyes, “you really want to know?”
He nodded yes.
She ripped a page from some dusty old notebook and started writing. She wrote slowly, but she kept the pen moving swiftly, never once resting or getting stuck on a word.
Chin in hand, he watched her the entire time. She would blink and think once every few seconds in irregular intervals. The longer he looked at her, the looser the threads of himself became. Her thoughts, which until moments ago, had been damp with the remnants of laughter now held his entire being together.
Truth be told. He, himself, began to understand his own self for the first time in his life.
A strange sensation of something long lost and forgotten completely washed over him, as if one part of a complex pattern had been stretched and stretched until it became clearly simple: he might never be able to be lose himself again.
When this thought came to him, the excitement was almost too damn exciting to bear. His being, his very self, felt as if it would melt away into a ll tat is ethereal. It felt like something had set him free without even lifting a finger. Yes, it was something alright and it was borderline divine.
And he spoke to himself as if he were reciting poetry.
She quit writing and thrust the paper forward his direction across the table.
In the kitchen that morning, their collective imagination held its breath waiting for something astronomically great to happen.
They felt the presence of something not of this world when in each other's company: The presence of something lost lifetimes ago, something which, with each passing life he felt like he was losing the memory of more rapidly.
"I know it all by heart,” she said interrupting his thoughts. “This is what you said to yourself about airplanes.”
The words he read aloud in his mind:
Airplane
Up there flying so damn high
'neath a zephyr tinted sky,
when I wished to grow up
I thought I might be a pilot
& possibly why
I feel
I’ve got somewhere to be
when lost in those nectarine eyes
so soft & skylit.
"All of this?!” He asked shocked. “This is hardly fucking poetry your majesty.”
"The whole damn thing,” she said blushing. “And I’d beg your pardon but I believe it to be really gentle and chivalrous.”
"I don’t believe it for a minute!" He said half embarrassed. “Sweet or not, it seems like some half-assed poetry to me.”
She gave her lower lip a little nibble and shared a sacred smile. “Well sir, believe what you wish, but you said what you did, and I think it’s pretty damn sweet.”
He offered up a lackadaisical sigh. “This is all too weird. I haven’t thought of being a pilot since I was a child. And how come I can’t remember any of this.
"Why, all of a sudden, would an airplane pass through my mind."
Off in the distance, an airplane hummed slightly through the sky.
"I haven’t the slightest idea, but that is exactly what you were saying to yourself this morning in the shower. Maybe you weren’t thinking of airplanes at all, but somewhere deep in the forests of your soul, far far away in the wilderness of your heart, some other voice not of this world was thinking about them.
"Who knows?" He said, "Maybe you're right. Maybe in the wilderness of my heart I though of flying an airplane."
With a polite thunk that shook the entire world, the ballpoint pen bounced onto the table. She raised her eyes and stared into his. It was a look that no matter how many times he fell back to this earth, his soul would forever shiver when certain eyes fell upon him.
They remained in silence for quite some time. The coffee in their dragon mugs grew cloudy and cold. The earth seemed to spin spiral-wise on its axis, the daylight hidden moon hung the force of gravity over their heads and flipped the tides of themselves just on the other side of fate.
The threads on the ceiling of his mind had come completely undone, colorful and dancing carelessly like confetti in the wind.
Time flew by in silence as a distant plane passed back and forth through the sun drenched sky. If Heaven was like anything, it was something like this.
He and she were thinking about the same exact thing: an airplane.
Was there an airplane hidden away deep in the wilderness of his heart. How big was it? What color was it? Where was it headed? Somewhere out of this world? How long would it take to get there? Would there be an open bar on it? Who were the passengers and who was the pilot? How many people would it fit?
They both thought about those questions for the swiftness of an eternity.
He reached across the table and ran his fingers through her soul, and then her rebellious hair. There was something tremendously real about how wild it all felt.
Because flight after all, like love itself, sometimes bumpy, sometimes smooth, and never too far away is always worth the ride.
"What should do we do next?” She asked.
"Well your grace, you’ve got a plane to catch. And I’ve got some exploring to do and places to. be, but besides all that I gotta go find out how deep this wilderness in my heart really goes.”
"So we best get a head start.”
Til the next time.
—Ryan Love
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