Open the Door

There is a secret I want to tell you. I am sitting alone in the room. The door is open. You can come in now. 

The secret is a blank space. That is its deception. Or, it is a pocket of time within a landscape of blankness. The secret is a moment. How one moment can take up so much space I will never understand. 

Time is loose like the desert, fathomless like the sea, time is a dense forest, an insurmountable cliff face, a grain of sand. Time is an illusion, of course. The moment expands and contracts; it breathes. It has taken on a life of its own.

What happened in this moment?

There are several things. A hurricane moves in a spiral, bringing strong winds and heavy rains, bringing destruction wherever it goes, and at its center an eye, a place of calm that is also sometimes the most dangerous. 

At the center of the storm, a moment of pleasure. Anticipation. Rise and fall of the air. Warmth. Her tongue inside me. 

The eye is surrounded by the eyewall, which is where the winds are strongest and rainfall heaviest. This is the most chaotic, most vicious part of the storm. The part that left purple bruises in the shape of fingerprints on my inner thighs. The part that cried out in pain.

Oh, oh oh oh oh

There is a hurricane on Jupiter bigger than the Earth itself, a red storm that has been raging for nearly four hundred years. With nothing to stop it, it continues to spin. I have told you my secret now, but nothing has changed.

I am sitting alone in the room, and nothing has changed. What did I think was going to happen? 

I have not told you anything. The real thing, the shame: there was a moment of desire. 

In that instant of consciousness, at the center of the storm, but also before that, before the alcohol took hold, before I made the decision that no, I did not want it, did not want her. There was a moment of desire in which I reveled in being wanted, in which I considered… A moment before it all spun out and there was only darkness.  

That’s the moment I get stuck on. There must have been something in the way I looked at her, something that made her feel like it was okay. If only I could remember. 

The thing about memory, about moments like that, is that they stay with you, like a taunt, or a haunting, pulling at the threads of you, daring you to come in, then pushing you away.

I am sitting alone in a room, empty coffee cup in hand. I don’t feel better when I say it (I thought I might). Because it’s a puzzle, and some of the pieces are missing. I can’t write them into existence, and I can’t complete the puzzle without them, and so I’m left sitting there. 

The door is open. The storm rages on outside. As on Jupiter, there is no land, no solid surface. 

Though sometimes it rains diamonds and I think, for a moment, I’ve found the thing I’m looking for. 

Faune Albert is an artist and writer from the Ozark Mountains who teaches writing at a small college in Western Massachusetts.

A Song for Faune