incandescent

“You’ll be fine. Just be honest with them because, I mean, you aren’t lying..your interview clothes are packed away.”
“You think this is too casual for an interview?”
“Well, normally I’d say yes, but now that I think about it, most places are more casual these days, especially colleges and universities, but what do I know?”
She laughs, “Thank you.”
“Just take a deep breath and let them know you want this job..your mom is right about that part, but the shoes however--”
Her arm-punch grabs my wasteful attention aimed at her waist as I bring her closer for a near-rhyme hug and an ear-whispered gasp: “Break a leg…just think of me naked if you get nervous.”
Her nervous laugh grazes my ears and lips greeting the soft part of her cheek. “I love you,” she says over a silent gaze and the quiet sound of her lyrical turn down the hall of a green mountain interview.
“I know,” I say in our non-cliché and colloquial response, pausing in the doorway of an office without air conditioning and tracing her lovely sway all the way down the outdated corridor, like a break at the end of a near rhyme line.
I trace the memory of survival in our Tucsonan-tiled home, how I couldn’t have survived without the conditioning of our in-house air, how I cannot survive without her, now that we are leaving Ithaca—a destination for most, but for me, the center of my radial orbit—the epicenter of my fault-driven circular patterns, my gorges cousin nestled in the knuckle of a finger lake and its tributaries, their behavior led by bi-polar weather patterns.

ITHACA: IT’s tHe creAtive poetry of non-fiCtion when love is A mess.

---

“I don’t know, it’s just that Belle & Sebastian is tainted for me, because it reminds me of that last month in Tucson; it reminds me of that hellish desert and the music you took with you on those long walks at night,” she sighs with frustration, “well, it sucks because the music is so fucking brilliant you know?”
She doesn’t remove her concentration from the curvy road paralleling the stream stealing my concentration until I turn to respond, “I know,” is all I can say after I focus on the afternoon Vermont sun, speeding through the trees, hanging on her hair and face like a hand-blown glass ornament reflecting the flutter of candlelight. I am flickering with the electric pace of a question, “Are you incandescent?”
“What? Am I like a light bulb?”
“No, I mean the alternate, less-known definition.”
“Which is…?”

---

“I gotta figure out what the hell I’m going to do with my writing.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, what the hell am I going to do with all these fucking blogs? I haven’t even begun to think about how I will put them together in some sort of coherent or patterned piece and—“
“But that’s the beauty of them, Ashley.”
“What? No...I mean, whatd’you mean?”
“Exactly what you told me, what you love about them…I mean the way they begin from the present and back up into the past, like a car in reverse—“
“A standard or automatic?”
“Does it matter?”
“Hell yes it matters! have you ever tried to put a standard in reverse? the sonofabitch never wants to get in gear…”
“I mean both as a collection and within the individual blogs, which makes the audience, the readers, do most of the work in piecing it together…oh, and the fact that they are normally written under pressure—honestly documenting your life as it moves along…but wait, didn’t you already say all that?”
“Yes; however…comma,” she laughs like a hyena or a machine gun, though I've never heard either one, I know she must know that “the past/present template isn’t always consistent, and you need consistency to make something like that work.”
“Isn’t that why we edit?”
“Yes, but…shit, I don’t know, I guess all my steam is gone, and now I’m using clichés even in conversations, and I have to figure out plan B, since I never had the forethought to come up with a second course. Listen to me, FUCK! goddamn, fucking A!”
She remembers the pre-curser to my thought’s course, coursing the interstate veins of Oklahoma and cursing through the over-the-phone and cellularly-driven interstate-exited conversations, nearly-driven off the road by a nearby truck driving us off course, and she conducts the business of why we say, “I know where you are going, but I disagree with your destination.”
“How can you disagree with where I'm going even if you'll always disagree with me? but just for shits & giggles, I’ll ask how, or...why??”
“Because I’ve read some of the newer blovella blogs, and, Ashley, I love them just as much as the ones you wrote when your behavior reflected the extreme patterns of our disorder.”
“No, remember? It’s order, we are making it a bi-polar order, though I do appreciate the fact that you are willing to own it, despite its unfortunate social stigma. Even if the new ones are just as good as the old ones, I have to make up many of the conversations, especially since you and I don’t talk as much, and most people aren't comfortable with someone else putting words in their mouths, no matter how beautifully written they are, you know?”
“I know."
"I know you'd know that I'd write this next line."
"But Ashley, that’s the beauty of creative non-fiction...plan B is synonymous with make-it-up-as-you-fucking-go! ”
I laugh at the imaginary reference to a real conversation we had a few days ago, as I finish typing a typically and skillfully fabricated response in my blatantly fictitious non-fiction created voice, “Brilliant! You’ve just given me the new direction of something to write home about.”
"Did you just say you're coming home?"
"Hell no! D'you think I'd write that in my own fucking blogella?"
"No, but...didn't you call it a blovella just a few lines ago?"
"Yes, but I also said that I wanted something to write home about...didn't say anything about coming home."
"Oh," she said, she maybe said...I don't know, since the sunsetted construction cones indicated a New York traffic-patterned, summerslowed and retroactive response.
---

“Then you want to get on 22A—“
“Which is?…north, south, east, west, Canada? or freed from fuckhead politicians, or freed from the fallible South, or, or free healthcare, true freedom?”
She laughs as she says, “Silly," or, and, or and, "I think it’s north or east, I mean, it has to be one or both..since that’s where we’re headed.”
“Thank god for that, but perhaps you should forget about that nap, since you haven’t shown me on the map—“
“How to get there from here? You’ll be on 22A for a while before the next step, but I don’t have to sleep…I’m not that tired, honestly, I can stay awake.”
“Ok, I’m fine, I mean, I did go to graduate school here, so I’m fairly familiar with these backroad signs, but then again, I did circle Lake George before I realized I’d made the worst wrong turn of my fucking life.”
“How about I just stay awake?”
“Are you sure? I think I can handle it.”
“No, I just needed a break from driving,” she puts her hand on my neck and massages the wheelgrip-sore muscles, and I try to mentally massage the forget out of my regretfully-sore muffled voices.

---

incandescent |ˌinkənˈdesənt| |ˈɪnkənˌdɛsnt| |ˈɪŋkənˌdɛsnt| |ɪnkanˌdɛs(ə)nt|
adjective
emitting light as a result of being heated : plumes of incandescent liquid rock.
• (of an electric light) containing a filament that glows white-hot when heated by a current passed through it.
• extremely angry : she was incandescent at the way the IRS acted.
• of outstanding and exciting quality; brilliant : Mravinsky's incandescent performance of Siegfried's Funeral March.

--Oxford English Dictionary

---

“I always cry at endings.”
“You always what?”
“Cry.”
“Cry?”
“With these words.”
“With birds?”
“Get me away I’m dying.”
“Ashley, are you talking about suicide again?”
“No.”
“Good, because I don’t want to hear about it if you are.”
“Have you heard one word from a litany of lyrics written by the band from the Scotland homeland you loved and found so dearly close to your defibrillated heart?”
“What? Did you say something about homeland security?”
“Are you on your cell phone?”
“Yes! Aren’t you?”
“No.”
“What?”
“No, Melanie, I'm not on a cell phone, for fuck's sake! I’m on an antiquated red rotary phone, and I'm sitting on a hardwood chair at the top of the stairs of our 18th-Century home in Vermont, you know, the green mountain state.”
“Yeah, I like that coffee.”
“Do you know why Vermont is called the green mountain state?”
“Huh, I might cut out, because I’m going into the parking garage at the mall.”
I move into the phase of non-fiction creation before I say...
“Vermont’s name is a loose translation of the French phrase: green mountain, see? vert—French for green, and mont—French for mountain, Green Mountain,” I take a long pause to pet the cat who has finally come out of hiding now that the house is quiet, or maybe she smells the catnip from the garden drying on the table downstairs, “Actually, in French, it would be ‘mont vert,’ since in French adjectives are placed after the noun, but--” the phone makes a noise I haven’t heard in years—the soft dial tone, the sounding alarm of the other party’s departure from the conversation without the approval from the first party's double-speak, like a lawyer requesting a sibling's focus on the state of affairs, namely her attention to every inattentive detail."
“...Mel, you there?” I ask out of the noiselessly notorious dropped cell call habit, as if I would actually get a response from a machine that doesn’t know it has been replaced by its contemporary counterparts.
I hang up. I opt to listen to the silence amplifying my newly-purchased, type-casted key strokes. I creatively-non-fiction our last phone conversation, held over imaginary coffee & scones, spanning the fanciful miles, the cell-phoned and falsely-written words concocted and spoken over the invented weeks ago:
“So, you think I should buy a Mac?” she non-make-believe-asked me.
“Yes, I highly recommend it," I highly and non-imaginarily recommended, "especially if you want to start your own photography business.”
“I’m afraid I don’t have enough money to buy one, wait…how’d you afford it?”
“I saved a thousand dollars while I was in Tucson, and the remaining four or five hundred I paid Tiff back when Ithaca College finally paid me.”
“Oh,” is all she could say, after years of bitterness and imagined monetary favoritism, origined from the imago middle english image of our appalachian ancestors, awkward as a potato in a blight, ignorant as a moth in an incandescent light...

This is the part where I think of calling my mother to tell her that I stripped to my-nakedly-July & sun-burned-skin in the nakedly Vermont & sun-burned-sky, away from my southern-blighted-mother in civil war & strife, right in front of my sunbathed Vermont mother-in-civilunion, and learned how to say “good luck” to someone that I love without sounding like belle & sebastian’s “goodbye to someone that I loved,” and I didn’t have to ask my best friend “if she still wants me,” because she’ll be bathing in the Tennessee sunbathed smoky mountain “Y” when I call to say that I strolled across the way in a green mountain pool of frigid and moonlit water, like the sinks, only coldly better.

This is the part where I think of calling my mother to tell her that she'll never read or understand those words. Where I think of calling her to say that I eloped and didn’t invite her, to tell her we are living in a gorgeous house for free and out of love, with nothing expected in return, to tell her this is the way to conduct the business of motherhood, to tell her that I cannot conduct the business of sisterhood without placing my sister between a rock and a cliché, to tell her that I cannot be a daughter without replacing her, to tell her that her failure to defibrillate the rotary of her stubborn heart will burn down every last phone line from the Green to the Smoky mountains, like the Grecian and southern capital gone with the wind of mine and Melanie's namesake, like roman candles lit with the romance of incandescence of intolerance. To tell her those lines can’t be repaired like a broken end-rhyme once they’re spoken. To tell her that simile is similar to the syllables queuing up behind every word unspoken.

---

“Creative non-fiction is like—“
“Like what?”
“Musical silence,” I respond; she responds with silence, “You know," I continue, "like a pause, a breath, the space between line notes, the staccato rhythm of a line break.”
She remains quiet as we pull into the turnaround drive at the spring on route 79, the longest thirty minutes of your life—according to Martin—and remains quiet as we fill all of our water bottles and get back into the car, until at last, pulling back onto the road, she asks, “But what does that have to do with our conversation about our wedding?”
“Elope with me in private and we’ll set something ablaze,” I plagiarize Dear Catastrophe Waitress and beg her to consider a ceremonial taste of matrimonial haste instead of the cut-&-paste approach to vows.
“I know, but could we at least have my dad there, and my mom? I think my mom had a problem with my sister’s elopement because—OH SHIT!”
The halting friction between pitch tires and asphalt sounds the tell-tale melody of a dying stripe-tailed animal, resounding in the pitch cold night air.
“What did we hit?”
“A raccoon.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, what do you want me to do?”
“Did you kill it?”
“Yes, yes, I’m sure I did, I mean, I had to, I know it is dead.”
“Then there’s nothing you can do, so just keep going. If it were someone’s cat or dog, I’d say stop, but if you are sure it is a raccoon then hopefully it died a quick and painless death.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, what else can you do? Go back and make sure it’s dead, like a worn out aphorism people use when they’ve nothing else to say? God, I even quote myself when I’m not quoting others."
"Stop beating yourself up...even you told me not to do that. You are a good person so quoting yourself isn't a bad thing."
"Tiffany, my actions killed my words long ago, leaving me with the creation of fiction in the uncoordinated fashion of basing the true story on fibrillated vows."
"Does that mean you want to get married?"
"The institution and sanctity of marriage is no better than my word."
"Meaning?"
"Meaning your chances of faithfully repeating anything I say, word for word, exact, verbatim, et cetera, are about as high as the chances of an unadulterated marriage."
"Can I try?"
"To repeat my words?"
"Yes."
"As I long as I can have creative license with our promises."
She takes a breath and stops at the Giles street light, "What does that mean?"
"You can't repeat it perfectly; you'll put words in my mouth."
"But," she stops then rolls downhill in first when the red goes green.
"I don't want to get married because marriage is like my father's defibrillator," she looks confused, so I continue the analogy, "it's only there when his heart needs an uncoordinated contraction, it's the electrical equivalent of prompting the action of the natural rhythm of words..."

---

"Do you wish you hadn't said those words?"
"Which ones?"
"Well...the ones you said you regret and wish you could take back."
"I don't believe that words can be returned to the original owner."
"Okay, smartass, it's a hypothetical fucking question, so answer it with a hypothetical fucking answer."
"Who pissed in your Kashi this morning?"
"Ashley..."
“Oh for fuck's sake, here's my hypothetical fucking answer: Words are nothing but a queue of sinister unbelievers…and I’ll deliberately stand next in line….”
"You call that an answer?"
"You call yourself a writer? I haven't heard a hypothetical answer from you."
"You didn't ask a question."
"Ok, here's my question," I pause to place the phone on my non-numb ear, "If you had to choose between a stable marriage and torrential love, which one would you choose?"
"Goddamn you! you know what I'm gonna say."
"That doesn't count as an answer."
She provides the expected response. She is incandescent at the way her beloved rejected her projected proposal.

god bless the creation of non-fiction conversational relations