Memories

by Lang Leav

  Also by Lang Leav

  Love & Misadventure

  Lullabies

  Memories

  copyright © 2015 by Lang Leav. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of reprints in the context of reviews.

  Andrews McMeel Publishing

  a division of Andrews McMeel Universal

  1130 Walnut Street, Kansas City, Missouri 64106

  www.andrewsmcmeel.com

  ISBN: 978-1-4494-7487-4

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2015939470

  The Fell Types are digitally reproduced by Igino Marini.

  www.iginomarini.com

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  For Michael

  Reading you has made me

  a better writer.

  Loving you has made me

  a better person.

  Forget her tattered memories, or the pages others took;

  you are her ever after—the hero of her book.

  Contents

  Introduction

  Part 1

  Here & Now

  Part 2

  Remember When

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  I am hopelessly in love with a memory. An echo from another time, another place.

  —Michael Faudet

  Memories is a collection of poetry and prose, hand selected from my two previous books, Love & Misadventure and Lullabies. It also features some new writing I have completed over the last year.

  My intention was to create a book that is enduring, one that could be kept as a keepsake or given to someone special in your life.

  I have always thought of memories as fragments, like colored glass shards in a kaleidoscope. It is the source of great beauty in our lives, yet the cause of such heartache. It remains the bridge between our past and present—it gives weight and dimension to our very existence.

  I hope you enjoy Memories as much as I enjoyed putting it together. I know there are many great moments that are yet to transpire for you. I hope in time, you will find echoes of them in this book.

  Much love,

  Lang

  Part One

  Here and Now

  The Rose

  Have you ever loved a rose,

  and watched her slowly bloom;

  and as her petals would unfold,

  you grew drunk on her perfume.

  Have you ever seen her dance,

  her leaves all wet with dew;

  and quivered with a new romance—

  the wind, he loved her too.

  Have you ever longed for her,

  on nights that go on and on;

  for now, her face is all a blur,

  like a memory kept too long.

  Have you ever loved a rose,

  and bled against her thorns;

  and swear each night to let her go,

  then love her more by dawn.

  Stowaway

  I love the way he looks at me. Shy and half-cocked as though he is caught off guard, like he is retracing his steps to remember all the ways to make me smile. He brings me flowers every Sunday and tells me stories about mermaids and sirens with their sharp claws and beguiling lips. He says I remind him of the sea and attaches me to a metaphor I’ve never heard before, when I thought I must have heard them all. I think someone broke his heart once and now he can’t bear to be apart from the ocean. He said it’s strange how the smallest things can wreck a ship. Like a rock, or a wave, or a hairline crack in the hull. He calls me his little stowaway and he says it sadly, tenderly, as though I can sink him.

  Birthdays

  It is a ceremony, the blowing of candles, the cutting of a cake—the mess of cream and sponge in your mouth. The taste is sweet and familiar, like a newly formed wish, fashioned from all the ones you’ve made before.

  You don’t remember them in sequence—the things you ask for. You only recall those you wanted the most. Like the pair of neon pink roller skates you saw in the shop window when you were twelve. How deeply you felt their absence when you sat among the litter of torn wrapping paper and empty new possessions.

  Or the year you turned sixteen; when your best friend’s mother got really sick, and all you wanted was for her to be okay again. It was the year you learned that shooting stars were either a blessing or a curse, depending on what you wanted to believe.

  Then there was that year you fell in love. The one where there weren’t any candles—just you walking late at night through the city streets with your heart in pieces, wanting to give yourself to the first stranger who called you beautiful.

  Since then it’s been the same every year. As soon as the first match is struck, the smell of burning takes you backward through your memory. It stops you right at that moment on that warm, September night, as you watched the first trickle of melting wax hit the icing, and you couldn’t think of a single damn thing you wanted—because he was standing there, in the flickering light, asking you to make a wish.

  Poetry

  I know you have seen things you wish you hadn’t. You have done things you wish you could take back. And you wonder why you were thrown into the thick of it all—why you had to suffer the way you did. And as you are sitting there alone and hurting, I wish I could put a pen in your hand and gently remind you how the world has given you poetry and now you must give it back.

  Numbers

  Nothing felt like mine anymore, not after you. All those little things that defined me; small sentimental trinkets, car keys, pin codes, and passwords. They all felt like you. And more than anything else, my number—the one you boldly asked for that night, amidst a sea of people, under a sky of talking satellites and glowing stars.

  You said no matter how many times you erased me from your phone, you would still recognize that number when it flashed on your screen. The series of sixes and nines, like the dip of my waist to the curve of my hips, your hands pressed into the small of my back. Nines and sixes that were reminiscent of two contented cats, curled together like a pair of speech marks. You said if you could never hold me or kiss me again, you could live with that. But you couldn’t bear the thought of us not speaking and asked, at the very least, could I just allow you that one thing?

  I wonder what went through your mind the day you dialed my number to find it had been disconnected. If your imagination had raced with thoughts of what new city I had run to and who was sharing my bed. Isn’t it strange how much of our lives are interchangeable, how little is truly ours. Someone else’s ring tone, someone else’s song, someone else’s words, someone else’s broken heart. These are the things we inherit by choice or by chance.

  And it wasn’t my choice to love you but it was mine to leave. I don’t think the moon ever meant to be a satellite, kept in loving orbit, locked in hopeless inertia, destined to repeat the same pattern over and over—to meet in eclipse with the sun—only when the numbers allowed.

  A Writer’s Muse

  One day he will find you. He will touch you and you will feel a lifetime of indifference—of apathy melt away in a single moment. And you will ache for him. You will love him, in the way you walk a tightrope—in the way people learn to fall asleep in a war zone. You will bleed for him until the day he is gone. You will bleed for him every day after that.
The time will pass and you will feel robbed—and you will grow bitter. You will ask why, but you won’t get an answer. And that is when the words will come.

  The Stranger

  Does it make you crazy? To think he saw you—his eyes passed over you and if only there had been some small mishap in that pivotal moment. A spilled drink, a stumble through the door—his hand reaching out to steady you and it would have happened. A whole new world would have opened up like a vortex to swallow you both into blissful delirium. But you turned away, out of shyness or indecision and by the time you turned back, he was gone.

  How do you explain it without sounding unsound? That click you felt when your eyes met his, like the switch of a train track, transporting you for one miraculous moment, to what might have been.

  Then reality intervenes and with a shake of your head, you tell yourself to stop chasing shadows. But I can tell you now—what you felt was real—and you must always listen to that click. For it is the sound of your fate beckoning. It is the voice of your destiny calling. Sometimes it only calls once.

  After the Storm

  There are storms that change the skyline, that leave patches of blue where branches had once spread their brittle fingers. And in the aftermath, an eerie calm settles over the forest, as shell-shocked birds sing warily in the sunlight. The nervous flutter of their injured wings, barely audible above the hammering of a hummingbird’s heart.

  You once told me the wind is silent. How his sound can only be heard through collision. Last night, he cried with a violent yearning while he tore through the trees. As he brought down their twisted branches, I thought of the first time you said my name.

  You were the storm that changed the skyline. After the damage and the deluge, I could see things so much clearer. There hasn’t been another like you since.

  In 1953, we began naming hurricanes so we could remember them beyond the wreckage. So we could try to make sense of the destruction. This is the way I remember you.

  Memories

  Have you ever felt it? That split second before the feeling catches the memory—that small haven of neutrality, before the headlong crash into recognition. Your mind pulls him to the foreground like a snapped rubber band. And you think of the line he drew in the sand, the one you can’t seem to put a foot past. Like a tripwire, you’re afraid of the damage but you know you can’t keep standing still. And the world falls away and you’re exactly where you were on the last night you saw him, when he had his hands in your hair and his mouth on your neck and he never said a word about leaving.

  Now and Then

  I was always meant for you. With my tennis shoes and wild hair, dragging a case with a cello hidden between its velvet walls. Even then.

  I was always meant for you. In my black woolen dress and sapphire studs. Between hotel rooms and standing ovations. Even now.

  I was never meant for road signs with foreign names, or lovers who spoke in exotic tongues. For maps that were composed in a language I could not read and printed in a dialect I could not write.

  You said I was like a bird of prey, caged by my captors and made to sing love songs to the sky. You said my sadness was like the sun, beautiful from a distance but it hurt you too much to come closer.

  I was never meant for poetry. For words carved into history, like ancient runes that told the same tragic tale over and over. If any historian were to decipher the symbols hammered into stone, they would say I was meant for you. Even before the first mallet had struck iron, even after all civilization has crumbled into dust and the sky is set alight with a thousand exploding stars—even then.

  A Love Story

  Beyond the shores of melancholy,

  there was a time I held your hand.

  My heart now bears an untold story,

  like a ship at sea, that longs for land.

  A great untruth, my lips have borrowed,

  a boundless treasure to line my chest;

  the wealth of words are in their sorrow—

  and words are all I can bequest.

  We will remain unwritten through history,

  no X will mark us on the map;

  but in books of prose and poetry,

  you loved me once, in a paragraph.

  And your love has left me, on this island,

  it has filled my cup up to the brink;

  yet I grow thirsty in this silence—

  there is not a drop for me to drink.

  Virtual Love

  We fell in love through screens, through satellites that carried our words across the aching void. Night after night, we spoke about hands on bodies and lips on skin. After the silence, I would think of all the girls made of flesh and bone within your arm’s reach.

  As winter gave way to summer, the dust motes dancing in the sunlight blurred into pixels, and I gave my heart to a photograph. I wondered how I could be so afraid of losing something that wasn’t mine.

  Then came the crossed wires, the signal jam. The static that grew between us—its dull, murmuring protest. And I would question if there were others just like me, who had found themselves caught in your orbit. Whether I was just another celestial body, sent up from the ground; when the moon—the original satellite—is the only one you see from where you’re standing.

  A Writer’s Plea

  Take me someplace where I can feel something—I want to give away my heart. Tell me his name so I can know love when it speaks to me. Give me someone I can write about.

  In the End

  I was ready to give it all up—everything. I was half out of my mind with love. And I didn’t think twice about what I was throwing into the fire, as long as I could keep it burning for just another minute—if only I was allowed to sit awhile longer beside its pale glow.

  That was how I loved you in the end. With my body cold and shuddering. With empty hands over smoldering ash, counting out the minutes.

  Pieces of You

  He knows I can’t tell a joke without laughing. And how I’m always talking about second chances. He knows I sleep all day and wake up tired. And I could never give anyone a straight answer.

  I cried the first time I told him about you. I said I was sorry as he held me so close. He said he now knew why my eyes were like searchlights. How they looked at the sky with such longing. And why I read my stars in the paper each morning.

  He left me one Sunday with his cup half empty. I padded downstairs and saw the writing on the wall. Outside the rain was already falling. And there were still pieces of you behind every door.

  She

  She was the sound of glass shattering—the sharp ringing in your ears. The perpetual motion of a spinning ballerina trapped inside a music box. The sad, tinny tune of La Vie en Rose.

  She was the zigzag in your straight line. The absence in your direction. She was every turn you took when racing through a hedge maze, against the setting sun.

  She was the tide that came in and out, like the breath of the wounded. She was the blood that flowed between heart and head.

  She was the book that was not written. The sentence that was not scripted. She was the word you wished you could have said.

  Reaching Out

  I have given so much to things that weren’t worth my time. When all along, it’s the people I love that I should have carried. It’s the ones I cared for whom I should have been responsible.

  But maybe I’m too late. Because I don’t know how to talk to you. I don’t know how to ask you if you’re okay. I don’t know how to tell you I am so afraid of losing you. How much light would leave my life if you were no longer part of it.

  I just hope you realize how much you mean to me. I just wish I could remind you of how beautiful you are. I’m sorry I haven’t told you in so long. But please don’t think I have given up on you. I will never give up on you. My arms are wide open. There is always a place for you here.


  Faith

  I whisper your name like a prayer—with all the hope of heaven.

  I trace the lines of your palm and draw a map to salvation.

  I hear the knock of your heart and I answer it like my calling.

  Home

  Do you think of me on airplanes? With your headphones snug around your ears and the clouds below? Do you think of my hands as you are exploring new territory—the freedom, the thrill, the rush? When you travel against the turn of our planet, does it take you back into the past?

  I think of you on jet planes. In thoughts that go a million miles an hour. Over toy towns and towers made of tin. Nothing feels real without you.

  Do you think of what could have been? In the early morning light when you wake up next to some stranger, wondering why you don’t feel a thing. In every bar room and bedroom where you’re forced into conversation or giving away parts of yourself—do you miss me?

  Do you think of me in cars? When every turn you take is driving us further apart. Does every road sign pleading you to take care, remind you of how much I want you, how deeply you are loved?

  I think of you on roads that stretch into the horizon. On roundabouts and signs that keep telling me I am going in the wrong direction. I hope you think of me as much as I think of you. I hope that every step will bring you closer, that every dead end is a messenger, willing you to turn back around, reminding you it’s time to come home.