Perestroika

The cicadas are winding in the trees like baseball cards stuck in bike spokes, or the tired teeth of an old machine grinding tightly against each other without oil, years away from its last lubrication, too dry and too fast.  Its hum, coming and going without pattern, chatters away above the air conditioner's sustained breath--this thing never seems to shut off these last few Indian summer days.

It's amazing that I can still be outside, after 8 on a school night, the sky still orange enough from the very recent sunset that typing is possible, that all things are possible...where (as Corso said) if you were a man--possible--as I am a woman--possible--all things could be possible.

But that's not who we are.

We are im-possible.  Im-plausible.  Im-potent.  There is nothing virile or growing about us.  We are a cut off stalk, the flower with no bloom, the thing that stretched toward the sky all summer and seemed sure to blossom but then, when the heat rose a little too high, snapped off near the ground and now the carcass dusts and grays the yard, to be mowed over this weekend, chaff beneath the blade, another sacrifice to the greening promise of what could have been.

I read somewhere that every rejection is an opportunity for grace, that we must take the 'no' of a person and turn it into a lesson of the universe, a momentary window into who we can will ourselves to become now that all we thought would be, won't.  I want to believe in this, I want to learn from heartbreak, from pain, from the years of trying to control and plan and trust and hope, I want to, but it is so hard.

Tonight, I feel foreign in this first of September sway, the breeze enough to lift strands of hair off my neck that tickle my cheek as they twirl past.  I imagine myself a Russian girl, deposited in the middle of Kansas, a landscape nothing like my own, noises in the trees I've never heard before, a heart full of dah in a country of nyet.

In my perestroika voice, I try to explain that the thing about Russians and vodka has nothing to do with being drunk--the r's clipped off against the teeth, my mouth barely opening to release the swampy words--it is not to do with the drinking, the alcohol, the want of escape from the life we know.  It is about heat, the blossom that begins to open in the center of the chest as the white fire slides down your throat, the swelling bloom that makes you feel, if only for a small moment, that you are not now, and never will be again, so cold and so alone.