The Bottle's Been Poured.

If I ever told a story, would you believe it wasn't true?

I walked into a room hazy with smoke and smelling of men. Not men in the sense of sweat and outside, but gentlemen. Musky colognes, tobacco, and dust from old tweed suites.

Drowsy, confused, I listened for familiarity. A bird fluttered to my right and landed on a coat rack heavy and dripping from wet overcoats. She cocked her head, cheeped, and shuddered her pale yellow down free of water.

Udo spoke, his quiet banter met my ears in shock. The context was wrong. He was speaking where his voice should not be. An ocean away from Germany, a thousand miles away from his Upper East Side flat.

This was neither, this was somewhere late into the night in the back corner of my dream.


Dreams are always a peculiar place to meet people. His face was all wrong, but I'm not sure what was wrong about it. It may have been too gray and it's possible it wasn't Udo's face at all.

Udo is a philospher, a teacher, and a very ornery German man who lives in the mountains of Switzerland during the summer and in an Upper East Side flat during the academic year. He's usually just let a joke roll off his tongue, wears very small round glasses, and looks like any older scholarly Grandfather ought. I spent dozens of Friday nights in his flat with he and his wife, talking over cheese and wine and crackers, about death and life and what it means to believe in justice, in YHWH, in truth.

Udo swung around, a broad smile leapt from his face and curled to my own. He really is an infectious character.
My heart warms immediately, it's like seeing everything familiar and safe, and having it greet you happily.

And then my smile fell as I remembered the day preceding this dream. I carried the weight of a gentleman's words until I couldn't, and then I dropped them. His words were too heavy, his sentences too binding. They terrified me and it's not because they weren't good words, spoken from a good man, but because they were not my words. They couldn't belong to me, shouldn't be spoken to me. Should be given to someone steadier, better, not someone always ready to run. So when he spoke them, I dropped them, and they broke. And I tried to pick them up, but I only spread them and caught them in my clothes and hair. Such good words, they shouldn't have to break, but I couldn't hold them. Too heavy, too binding, too good.

I shuddered like the little yellow bird had, trying to shake the little pieces out from my hair. But they held on, more like musk that settles in your clothes than water you can wind away.


Ah I just want to close my eyes and remember how I used to be, remember skint knees and tousled hair. Remember Laura Ashley jumpers, pleated and colored like my grandmother's drapes. I want to crawl backwards into barefeet and bugbites. Back to four feet tall and peach fuzzed legs. Back to sitting in laps and not knowing. Where I could eat a salad out of oak leaves and sit on pride rock, that fallen tree behind the house. Boys were gross, and even though Cameron and I french kissed on a dare when we were six, we thought it was the silliest thing as we stuck our tongues out and touched them together. Or the one time I found a white hair in my head; I was convinced my end must be nearing, so I prepared my last will and testament and arranged a funeral. Stuffed animals and my deer named Honey in attendance. My mother only laughed and told me I shouldn't even know about ends. My life was all about beginnings. Her smile was slight and she repeated, keep living and enjoy not knowing until you have to.




I don't want to see, I don't I don't I don't. I whispered it, aching over the words I broke and the mess they made on the floor and the bits that stayed in my clothes and hair. I was curled up in his lap, a little girl again. And Udo pulled his hands across my face and I sighed in relief as it went soft and dark. I don't want to hear, don't let me, don't let me I plead. And his hands moved to my ears and the pleas of the broken sentences were muffled.

I don't want to know, I don't. I said it adamantly, strongly. I mean it. Udo looked at me, with compassion but no pity in his eyes and shook his head. You've always known, it wouldn't change things. And he pulled a hair from my head and dangled it in front of my face. Startled, I looked and it was white. I've always had a white hair here and there, and he nodded. You've always known, known about ends and beginnings, known about all kinds of stories.

I shrugged away, Udo was no longer welcome in my dream. Yeah? So what now? If I'm doomed to break words and read broken stories, what now?

His smile is infuriating. It's the smile of a man who believes he knows something bigger, as he watches the ignorant thrash and tumble through their questions. His head is full of white, the little that's left anyway. He can't even remember beginnings or not knowing, so what does he really know? You can't even remember, Udo. What do you know? What help are you? I felt hot tears and my toes growing cold as anger rose. I just wanted to sleep and forget after I dropped those words and now all I can do is remember.

No good holding them back now, and my fingers were trembling. Through the blur of my tears I could barely make out the room, see the coat rack, with no coats remaining and the water dried up beneath.
Anything to say?

He told me I should write stories with good beginnings and beautiful ends. But the real story is in the middle. It's when old jackets get lost. It's when your tire pops and your knees get skint. When the sun goes down, but there are more bends in the river to float. When the whiskey's gone, but the night isn't over. The middle of the dream before waking. Really, he just said I should write stories that are true.