Landlocked

It is not that she does not want to do it (having heard how therapeutic it is), but that her imagination beats her to it. The project has its wingspan in front of her, complete with all the materials: the thick string, the wooden clothespins, the photographs (she and her mother, or her mother and her mother before her; he and his cousins, his father and him), the pieces of poetry she had written behind notebooks, or on her old report cards (especially the bad ones), the pressed, wilted, moth-gentle petals of an old sampaguita off a young vendor whom they said was simply part of a syndicate. It was going to be her visual love letter, a time off from graduate school and the kitchen, friends who wanted time with her, the part of herself that wanted only a manicure or a haircut, the look in his eyes that said “I know you even before you speak,” when all she wanted was to strip this heavy household of words. The project would draw the eye in, let visitors know she was more than she seemed, remind them again of the joy in togetherness she didn’t know could ebb into, not lack of passion, but rather a flexibility: an acceptance of the sight of a discarded sock or the lack of dinner, whereas before they went at each other for hours and hours, convinced that life had to be everything, pictures and ancestry and flowers and wood and yarn, thick, thick string that looked frayed but was sturdy, every little thing, every little thing, or nothing at all.

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