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Silver
I'm always impaling myself on silver things, things
my lover gives me
when I'm not looking. He buys me silver rings and puts them on
me when I'm
asleep. He buckles my waist with a silver belt, drapes me with
silver necklaces,
fastens anklets under my jeans, puts six earrings in the holes
of my ears. Silver
and never gold, because silver is the color of the accident one
longs for. It's light
that slants through rice paper shades, a face on the street
that carries you
through the solstice.
You can't love someone without hurting
them--that's what my brother told me
once. We were home from college, washing pots in the sink, and
my brother
had just gone crazy on LSD. He thought he could climb walls,
when he was only
scaling a chair. He thought he could see the truth, when he was
staring at a
shopping list. "But one thing I knew," he said. "You
can't love someone without
hurting them. I saw that when I looked inside my brain and all
the cells were
singing You can't love someone without hurting them. They
were beautiful, those
cells. All of them were made of silver."
My parents were getting divorced, just as I am now.
Light was coming
through the kitchen, the kind of light that makes you think you're
in another
century. "Is it fifth-century Greece?" I asked my brother. "No," he
answered. "It's
the Huang dynasty."
I wanted to hug my brother and say everything would
be okay: His brain
would stop singing. He wouldn't have to hurt people he loved. In
fact, things
didn't go well for him until he got a Ph.D. in physiology and
discovered that
those years of watching his own brain cells had paid off. Now
he lives in Rome
and writes papers with titles like The Neurophysiology of Indifferent,
Compatible Systems.
Sometimes I wake up at night,
impaled by silver, and think about my
brother, far away in Rome. I think how he's found love,
and hurt a lot of people
in the process. I also think of my lover in a small beige room,
surrounded by
flowering trees. I lie in bed alone, wearing heavy silver.
"Why don't you take those off when you go to
sleep?" my lover asks,
touching the scratch marks on my arms and neck. "For God's
sake, what are you
doing to yourself?"
I don't answer, because then I'd have to tell
him about the random silver
of his face the day he stepped out to meet me. Your face was
like that , I would
have to say to him. Don't you remember? It was the day
before the solstice, people
were racing around to buy presents and you stepped forward to
meet me. A week later
you gave me a silver bracelet. A week after that you gave me
silver keys. But none of
would have mattered if your face hadn't been an accident.
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