Independence Day

so many sheep i quit counting
sleepless and embarrassed about the way that i feel
trying to make mole hills out of mountains
building base camp at the bottom of a really big deal
and did i tell you how i stopped eating?
when you stopped calling me
and i was cramped up shitting rivers for weeks
and pretending that i was finally free

and you can't leave me here
now that your back
you'd better stay this time
cause you say the coast is clear
but you say that all the time

---Ani DiFranco, Independence Day

The fireworks exploded over our heads, the stars popping in pulsing rhythms, streaking the blackness with colorless brilliance. I pulled away from the camera with its infrared night vision to appreciate the reality of the fireworks through the majestic plate glass windows twenty stories above the city.

You were somewhere below me, having deposited me neatly at the front door and disappearing into the darkness to be alone. I was left in a room full of people that I only vaguely knew trying to explain away your absence. I eventually gave up all attempts.

Five years earlier, before I knew you, before I had felt the tug of your mouth at my throat or needed your hands and your voice to guide me to ecstasy, I was a young girl sitting in the high grass of a New England summer, far from my home, wondering. I lay then, looking up at the stars and letting the warmth wash over me. I watched the yearly ritual whose significance was lost on my adolescent mind with detached indifference, a practiced aloof gaze that hid my amorphous desire. I asked myself when you would come, to fill my lack, my emptiness, having no face nor history to attach to my need, I silently wondered and wanted in the heat. The sweat trickled down the nape of my neck, turning the curled tendrils into painted rivers against my skin.

The silence that followed the finale was a deafening roar of white noise. The cicadas and the crickets played their evening symphony, and I lounged back, hidden in the wooded grove where the older boys came to smoke weed and drink the forbidden beer that they had swiped from their parent’s overstuffed coolers. My older brother was somewhere nearby but I pretended that we didn’t even know one another when Eric and his neighbor Phil came up to me.

“Are you coming back to the house?”

“Maybe in a while, “ I threw my head back letting my damp hair fall to the ground, exposing the pale V of skin that opened down into my chest. Phil cocked his head, and his eyes focused on me. He arched his eyebrows at Eric and he sat in the discolored pine needles beside me.

“How long will you be in town?”

“A few days.”

“Do you wanna have some fun?’

“It depends.”

“On what?” he asked as he leaned in to smell the perfume of my neckline. I quickly turned my head, swatting him like a mare does a fly with her tail. He leaned closer and I could feel the warmth of his chest, the tight muscles under his shirt. He popped the top of a Budweiser and offered it to me. I sat up to hold the aluminum in both hands. It was with great effort that I did not make faces, but calmly, casually sipped the bitter swill with an air of bored sophistication. I leaned back again, this time a bit closer to Phil.

“Sis, it’s time to go back to the house, they’ll be waiting for us,” my brother’s intruding voice punctuated the blackness and Phil, looking sheepish, stumbled to get up, creating the illusion of distance between us.

“Ok, hey, don’t tell mom I was drinking a beer, alright?”

“Yeah, sure, whatever sis.”

We shuffled out of the darkened clearing, three boys and I, down slippery hill to the baseball field where the rest of the town had been watching the fireworks. The glory of victories past filled the air and the carnival added to the carefree atmosphere - unsuspecting, of course, that ten years later, their boys would be coming home in body bags. We went back to Eric’s house and sat in the basement. Phil stayed to the far side of the weight-lifting equipment, watching me, but not ever getting too close in the fluorescent glow. We drank a few more Buds between the four of us and when our parents called for us, we got up to go. I threw a glance back at Phil and he stood, along with Eric, to give me a goodbye hug. His arms encircled me and a shiver ran down my spine.

“Don’t fahget to cahl me if you come back to Wahtatown.”

I wouldn’t forget him, but it would be years before I was in Watertown again, and by then he would be in the Army and far too muscular and macho for my refined tastes. What is it about the Fourth of July and thwarted romance?

So I simply waited for you as the other guests shuffled out in pairs. When you finally showed up, smelling of sweat and beer I tried to kiss you but you just pushed me away with the back of your hand and a non-linguistic grunt. You pulled the white sheets up to your chest and tugged as you twisted, offering only your smooth back to me.

What could I do but offer myself to you? I didn’t know how else to feel love, how to express it. I comforted myself, burying my face in your back with the hot tears seeping silently down my flaming cheeks. You wielded your power over me unjustly, but I kept coming back for more.

The first time that you told me that you weren’t in love with me anymore, we had been lying across from one another, miles apart in a double bed. In the early morning silence I had been contemplating the growing distance in your eyes, but the declaration still felt like a foot in my stomach. You looked over at me, as if nothing were amiss, you took your hand to my face and you said simply:

“I don’t think that I am in love with you anymore. I was, but now I'm not.”

Then you proceeded to kiss my neck, and run your hands down my thighs, taking me because I let you. Because I had nothing left to lose.

When I was younger I believed, I truly believed, that I could make someone love me. That summer, when the darkness settled over me, I thought that if I truly wanted, the sheer force of my wanting would be enough to call love into my fold. Not just any love but the love of the one person that was eternally escaping. I knew that if I just loved hard enough you would have to love me back, but instead I learned that the only way to make you love me was to stop loving you altogether. It wasn’t the force of wanting but the force of not wanting anymore that called you back.

“What do you want from me?”

“I want you to know me. I am afraid of dying alone without ever being known.”

“Why have you come back for the last of my pride?”

“Because it is mine, you offered it up, don’t you remember?”

“Not anymore… there is none left for me or you.”

And still I wait for you to say something meaningful, for your words to soothe my pain, for you to find that secret key that will open up my love. You just watch me squirm in the silence which grows like a cancer in the breast of the little girl you once loved. You smile to yourself because you think that you have taught me patience. Perhaps you have. I am learning to wait for the next blow with my jaw set firmly and my feet planted in the ground.

The explosions are ringing in my ears as we sit silently in the car. You drove me to watch the flames over the river, but you still said nothing to make me change my mind. I turn to go and you catch my hand in yours. Your eyes implore me but you are unable to articulate the things you want to tell me. You want me to interpret your silences like I have always done. I won’t do it anymore. I think I’ll wait for the words to come, but maybe they will come from someone else. I waited for years for Phil and his body came home wrapped in a flag. His death was as meaningful as the one-sided conversations that we used to have late into the night.

I turn to go, trailing the years of fishing net behind me. The weaving was wasted but to entangle the siren in her own snare. And you ask me, “Penelope, do you still care?”