You are more than an echo.

Today, I am rice paper. Vellum. Glancing in mirrors, I barely noticed my features. I woke up this morning and took a small parcel from my bedside table. I removed a needle and thread and quickly stitched a few sutures in my bottom lip. I listened a little too long to the throaty coos of the mourning doves that nest beside my window.

There are quiet times and there are loud times, and lately I've been confusing the two. I walked two miles in the cold to a doctor's appointment yesterday. No good news. I sat, staring in fascination at a child playing with a toy in the waiting room. He was sliding wooden blocks that were painted bright primary colours along intermingling metal wires that curved into various loop d'loos. The red and blue and yellow shapes screamed at me. He was rushing them to their destinations. They plead with me to stop him. I asked the good doctor what this reaction could mean, and was met with a blank stare. “I'm not your psychiatrist,” the look said, sternly. I hear all sorts of things.

I light a cigarette and inhale a puff of smoke. It stings my freshly sewn lip. I plod through the house, barefoot, to the kitchen. The slapping sounds of my footfalls echo in my head. On the counter, I find a typewritten note. “Not today.”
Dropped o's.

I'm thinking about what I am most disappointed by. In the end, I suppose it will be the lack of innocence in everything. The corrosion of all lovely things at the tipping point. I guess only time will tell but the anticipation of it all is killing me.

I used to dream often of the west coast, though I've never been. I got a job in New York as a copy editor for a real estate company. I read ads for penthouses that I would never be able to afford, checking for spelling and grammatical errors. In the end I lost that job because I often changed correct spellings to ones that were more aesthetically pleasing. I liked to see the letter “a” in serif fonts. I would unknowingly submit paragraphs full of a's for publication. My very last ad simply questioned “Do you believe in god?” over and over and over.

And now I'm back in the midstates and my dreams have moved south. I dream of roving around on a Mexican playa with no thoughts of prosperity in my mind. No thoughts of fame or wealth or compensation for a day's work. I come to roads where there are chalk outlines that I recognize to be the shapes of people I know. The skies are so clear in my dreams.

Have a cup of coffee and I feel better. Pick up the paper and thumb through the pages, pausing at the obituaries to scan the list of names. Have the presence of mind not to read the actual columns of words that so easily sum up a person's life. It would just depress me anyways. Do the crossword puzzle.

When I'm done with the puzzle I take a hot shower, get dressed, and walk downstairs. Notice that my neighbors are home, their children are shreiking in delight at a television that is tuned to a children's show. I hear cartoonish voices chattering. I have no television in my apartment. Sold it before I came back from New York. I can't watch shows because my mind wanders too easily. I imagine what the characters on sitcoms are doing while they are not on the screen. I miss the storylines.

I collect my mail from the box and notice that my neighbors have a package waiting for them. Shuffling through the mail, my eye keeps going back to the box. What's inside? A toy? A new telephone? Some books? What do my neighbors read about?

The last letter in my hand shakes me. It's from an insurance company. Possibly a check. I don't want to open it.

My mother passed away six months ago. It was a hot August day when I got the call. We hadn't talked for awhile. My sister called and asked me if my brother had called me yet. I told her he hadn't, and she said “You'll probably want to sit down.” I knew before she told me. She went on for awhile about the circumstances before she came out with it, and when she finally mentioned it there was a pregnant pause. She expected a reaction. I told her calmly that I'd fly in as soon as possible. For the next week I put myself on autopilot. I stared for countless hours at my mother's lifeless body. I put on a dress and some makeup and greeted people at the wake. They all wanted to hear about New York. I politely told them stories about my neighborhood. We talked as if we were not standing next to a corpse. I tried to feel sentimental when I looked at pictures from years ago. After trying to muster some emotion I decided that it was best to just get through the week without crying. On the plane ride home I started to think about the fears that I had as a child of losing my mother. I often woke up in the middle of the night and crawled into her bed, waving my hand over her nose to feel her hot breath. Satisfied that she was alive, I would fall asleep next to her.

It's happened, I thought to myself, she's gone now. Not so bad, I found myself thinking. Not so bad as I thought it would be.

And now, standing with the check in my hand I felt a little nauseated. Some technicalities with the insurance policy had delayed the issuance of the check. It seemed that they thought that my mother's death might have been a suicide, which would have terminated their responsibility to pay out. It didn't feel right to argue for the money so I just waited it out. A few weeks back a nice lady called to apologize and tell me that the check was on the way. I thanked her and gave her my new address.

I walk back into my apartment and put the envelope on a corkboard with a red thumbtack. Call my sister. She answers the phone sounding tired and I try to make the call quick. She never seems comfortable talking to me anymore. “The check's here. I'll get you the money as soon as possible.” She is audibly elated, as she says “Finally, they got their heads out of their asses.” I scoff and hang up.

My phone rings and it's Matt. He says he's at the door and wants to come in. I ring him up. He brings me fresh fruit and before I can say too much he is pushing me to the bedroom. He fucks me and in the silence afterwards I cling to him. Ordinarily I would have found this to be despicable but I smell his hair and his skin as he traces his fingers over my lips. He says nothing of the stitches and I love him more. Matthew never gets angry with me. He doesn't find my silence to be vacant. Having fallen asleep in his arms, I awake panicked. The fluttering under his eyelids calms me, and I think again to myself. Even if his breath fell silent and his eyes came to a rest, it wouldn't be so bad. But he has promised me that he will never die.

When we are both awake Matthew sits down at the typewriter. I watch him from the corner of my eye as he taps away at a story that he's writing. I bring him a glass of wine and look at the words that have appeared on the clean white paper. Matthew tells me that his story is written in the same meter as his favorite William S. Burroughs novel. I take his finished pages and lay them out in rows and columns on the hardwood floors of the apartment. His words at my feet, I take a small telescope from my bookshelf and hold it to my eye. I read the story in Matthew's voice. The o's line up. The a's are dropped.

It is lunchtime and I have to take my medication. I feel more tired than I should and realize that I haven't eaten in more than a day. I cut apart an apple and eat a few slices. I swallow my pills dry and offer Matthew the rest of my meal.

Sitting on the old orange couch I strum my guitar to the rhythm of the tapping of the typewriter. I think about the note that sits on my kitchen counter. I found it on the sidewalk on the walk home from the pharmacy. As much as it pains me to admit such a morose side of me, I had been thinking about how it would feel to throw myself in front of a passing city bus. What it would be like to give fate a big slap in the face, to laugh at the amount of control I had. I looked down and there was a small scrap of paper. Worn edges. “Not today,” it said. My typewriter drops a's. God's typewriter drops o's.

Matthew is finished writing and he walks over to me. “Did you take your pills?” he asks. I nod and smile. Matthew is the only one who doesn't look at me differently now.

The day I called my mother to tell her that my test results had come in, she was busy making a grocery list. I listened to her clamoring away at the cupboards, and wished for just a moment that I could be home to eat the endless supply of canned stewed tomatoes that somehow amassed on the shelves. I didn't know how to tell her, really. I'm not one for dramatics. “Ma,” I started. “You'd better sit down.” As soon as the words left my lips my face turned bright red. “You'd better sit down,” I'd said. How banal.

“What's wrong?”my mom asked. I told her as succinctly as possible.

“Ma, I just got back from the doctor and he said that the cancer isn't operable. I've probably only got a few months left.” I felt bad that I hadn't thought about it more before I called her. Even then, I didn't want to make it a big deal. “When are you coming home, then?” she asked. I told her that I didn't know if I would come home. She was quiet for a long time; a painfully long time, and then said “It's not right for a mother to outlive her own daughter.”

“Ma, it's okay.”

Mostly I was feeling bad for disappointing her. She had been so proud of me when I moved to New York. Told all of her friends about my writing job as if I had penned the great American novel. I came home once for a visit and found that she had even framed some of my ads. “I didn't write those, Ma,” I explained, “I just made sure everything was spelled right.” She waved her hand in dismissal. And now, I was throwing turpentine at the painting of the future in her head. Colours dripping down the canvas, all muddled together.

Matthew's hand softly touching my neck stops my thoughts short. He kisses my cheek and brushes my hair back over my ear. I want to tell him all of the things that I am thinking but I am afraid to speak. I am afraid that if I start to speak I will start to cry, and I am worried what Matthew will think of me. We have an unspoken treaty to only silently acknowledge each other's emotions. We speak of love in only the most visceral of terms. When we drink too much we get sappy. On all other occasions we act only vaguely interested in eachother.

We fuck again, right there on the couch. My hands claw at his back as if to pull the life from him into myself. My head becomes too heavy to hold up and I black out and I awaken to the warmth of blankets and an empty apartment. I am in my bed. I find a note under my pillow. It is handwritten. “You are more than an echo,” it says. I roll over and drift back to sleep.

I dream again of Mexico.

In my dream my mother's hand guides me. I follow her vague outline to the future. There are no hills, there is only flat land. But the sky is so clear. The sky is so clear in my dreams.