Wires barbed or hummed while you were away

A. calls from afar, and I emphasize over the phone. We speak the way we speak over the phone: a question, hello, how are you, I miss you, goodbye. We hang up and time extends as I newly reside in my own space. On the weekend, I wake to soundlessness and make a pot of coffee, which I bring into my lofted bed, where I drink too many cups reading a book A. lent me. Between stories, I clean the ceiling, shower, dress, refill the pot, return to bed. Bolaño writes some scenes well, some women incompletely. I put on leg warmers and walk around outside. The day shapes and then A. calls, anxious, and I am tired and stretched until I hang up and climb into the nest. I read Bolaño, who discusses sexual labor in fragments with large gaps and time. My apartment has a set of old store front windows and a partition wall. The glass has a crack beginning up high and to the west. When the temperature drops, it splinters and extends. Animals collect in the space between my ceiling and the floor above: nocturnal, they play on the pipes. A salesman has recently moved in to the apartment above mine. Also nocturnal, he and his friends spend the nights slamming up and down the stairs. I don’t mind these sounds, they enact a living, like sleeping with a conch shell covering one ear so to dream in echoes, oceans. When A. sleeps here, the sounds disrupt him. Risen into restlessness, his anxiety echoes over me. Without him, I seclude into the nocturne, sing along to animal beats, drums, the pipes above. I do miss him. It’s true. I trace the animal steps as they threaten the floor to break. I recall that story of a painter who asked his burglar to stay and love him, that he did, that they did, that they loved just because it was presented then given. The floor breaks and the animals and the salesman descend. I clean their cracks, ask them to stay, to imitate affection. I pose behind the glass window with a sign: “Who wants to stay?” I thought one could love just because it was asked of them, and it’s true sometimes, and I have. When A. calls, I wish to say to him, I love you. Also to the body that descends the house’s walls. Yet the motion this contains is a trapping rather quiet. I cellophane-wrap shells over all my crevices. Echo oceans. Stilted sounds. These rented homes, the deposits of dust, forever plastered over us.

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Aimee Wright Clow is a writer and visual artist with histories in Cambridge, Seattle, and Albany, who currently lives and works in Durham, NC