Rick Barot

If it is true that autobiography is the art of choosing what you want the world to know about you, I choose the dulled Polaroid where I am unrecognizable because I have moved during the click and my head is a smear of hair, eyes, teeth. He had chosen me. A wall of bloodshot bougainvillea like a cascade of emotion is behind us. He stands there, wearing that first summer’s turquoise t-shirt, a hand on the back of my neck, his face clear as the face on money.

There was a scar on his neck, the shape and color of a faded strawberry. While he slept, I would sometimes put my finger on it, to the keloid satin of it. I was not there in childhood when the scar meant almost the end of him, but on those nights I thought of it as the token that let him pass through, to be here. His breathing, a small vessel rising and falling on a level sea. The new silver in his hair, like frost streaking a field. Sometimes there were words he gently said in sleep, my name, once, among them. Listening, I would lean toward him as to a mirror in an old story, yearning always to see not myself but someone else.

What is this thing all around you? It isn’t mere air or atmosphere. It is air that started out there where the stars are, air now rushing through the world you’re in, through the very body of you, through the house, the dirt below, on to the other side of the planet, to where other stars are. It is a furious river, this air, with everything endlessly dissolving into it. Your atoms, your molecules want to return to this river. You think the enclosure of your body is a sound boundary, you go for days, weeks, and months assured of its solidity. But the river wants its matter back. When you cry it is the water straining to be returned. When you grieve it is the bones wanting the same. This river is so fast it makes no sound, like a propeller turning too swift to see. The propeller wants you to step into it, into its face. How many times have you kissed him outside airports, and wept as he went inside and you drove away?