Dancing With Everlasting Company

This piece was originally an assignment. It turned into a piece of my writing. This is my "mentor paper".

I was a freshman in high school and he was a senior. He had style. He was dark and wore the same chain around his neck everyday. He had a pocket watch. He was tall, much taller than me. And his teeth glistened because of their pearl perfection, not the bands of metal straightening them like my own. When I saw him I couldn’t speak. Even if I was mid conversation with another person I would stop and just look at him. My eyes could speak for me. I bet my pupils would get small the way they do now when my heart beats fast and I can only see one thing. His name was A.J and I thought I loved him.
The first time I saw him he was getting a breakfast burrito at the schools cafeteria. He looked glorious smearing hot sauce and ketchup onto that burrito and smashing it into his freshly stoned mouth. He drank coffee and I can remember thinking to myself about how mature and how handsome that was.
I was always early to my classes the first few weeks of school. I was nervous that I would get lost between one classroom and another, as if the school wasn’t composed of three buildings. I made my way to my Creative Writing class. So I sat in Sunny Wright’s classroom, which looked out into the courtyard. I could see some of my team mates from my JV Gold soccer team; the stoners were playing hacky-sack and casually recalling the previous nights joint sessions; the senior girls in their matching white tank tops with neon bras sticking out getting lectured about school dress code by the Dean of Students; and then there was him. He sat alone on a bench. But, he didn’t look alone. He had a book and it was his company. Him and his book. The bell rang. I looked toward the front of the room and when I looked back he was gone. My heart sank.
Then it rose, straight into my throat. There he was, looking around the room I sat in for an open seat. I watched him brush the hair out of his face and he brushed my eyes aside.
Sunny asked us to write. We could write about anything. I wrote about him. I wrote about how I wanted to read the time from his pocket watch only and sweep the hairs from his eyes so he could look into mine and see that I was in love.
I could hear a chair slide back and he cleared his throat as I looked up. He began to read:

“I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.
Silent, starving I prowl through the streets.
Bread does not nourish me, dawn disquiets me,

I search the liquid sound of your steps all day.”

It was this poem that gave me courage. When he finished his words my mouth made its openness worth it and I asked him, “What did you just read?” I created it in my mind that he would tell me he wrote it about me when he saw me in the cafeteria that morning.
He didn’t, though. He sat down, scooted his char in, looked at me, and replied, “Neruda.”
At that point, I didn’t know what I longed more for—his eye contact or Neruda. I copied that name down in my notebook and changed my free write topic from the boy in my classroom to the man in his book.

***

I ended up being good friends with A.J. and consider Pablo Neruda to be a good friend of mine as well. I told A.J. about my infatuation with his dreaminess one night over a beer after one of his shows. Our conversation turned into comparing favorite poems and deciding you couldn’t consider only one poet your favorite. However, if I were to consider one poet, one writer, one passionate communicator to consider my mentor it would be my precious Pablo.
Pablo Neruda has encouraged me to inspire my poems to dance. The thing that grasped me about Neruda’s work is that each poem has a specific dance. Sometimes, like in “I Crave Your Mouth”, the poem grabs you lightly around your tailbone with one arm and locks its fingers with your other hand. And with each verb like want, hunger, and search it holds you a little lighter. And when it comes to the end of the song, and the poem reads “like a puma in the barren wilderness”, you are dipped and your hair sweeps the ground you feel you float on. At that point you wish for a kiss just behind the ear.
Then there are the times where you’re dancing and before you know it your holding on so tight you’re standing still. You eyes are shut and your heart is fluttering and you think, you know, that at that point in time nothing more could create such perfection. It is the feeling of being confined to one area but that area is so large you could get lost and that person would still be there to find you. Neruda and I danced like this when I read “In My Sky At Twilight”. He spoke to me and whispered truth in my ears, he said to me:

“You are taken in the net of my music, my love,
and my nets of music are wide as the sky.
My soul is born on the shore of your eyes of mourning.
In your eyes of mourning the land of dreams begin.”

And when he was finished I opened my eyes and all I could see was the depth of an imaginary neck and my body felt held.

***

I remember not using my headphones on the walk to town from my high school the day A.J. introduced me to Pablo Neruda. I kept repeating Neruda’s words in my head and even spoke them out loud as I walked past things that were beautiful: Autumn outside the Orvis fishing store, someone unhooking a trout in the Batenkill river behind The Jelly Mill.
I was late for work that day at Ben & Jerry’s. My co-workers were pissed when I showed up and had a “lame” excuse.
I looked at my boss and said, “Jon, you wouldn’t believe what happened to me today. I had to go to the bookstore and get this book.” I held onto my first collection of poetry: The Essential Neruda: selected poems. And it was essential, and I had selected it to be mine. My boss, Jon, laughed at me, called me Slacker like usual and threw me an ice cream scoop.
That book dealt with a lot of my bullshit. It moved out of my Mom’s house with me and caught all the tears no one else would reach out for. It got addicted with me when I had surgery and ate and breathed nothing but Percocets. We broke up with my pig-farming-cop-running-good-girl-heart-breaking first love together. I wrote in this book the way the words made me feel and when. It documented how my emotions changed throughout years and different addictions ranging from drugs, to people, and adrenaline rushes.
I have never had many girl friends. But, I have always had one. Her name is Hannah. She is the friend I lied for in high school when her mom asked if she spent the night when in reality she was at deer camp with a 22-year-old, the one whose arms I cried in when I moved two hours north for college, and the one I drove across the country when she ran from that 22-year-old at deer camp. I have always been the one who gets pleasure from things that aren’t only physically beautiful. I am the one who can cry to the melody of a song or dance to the words of a poem. I wanted to share this with her.
I knew I wouldn’t be with her on her 20th birthday, and it would be the first birthday she didn’t have me to light her candles since we were six. I wanted her to have something special. I made her a card and wrote to her about how I knew that distance wouldn’t hurt us and we would always be holding hands. I tucked the card into the pages of special Neruda book.
She took the card out and handed the book back to me.
I smiled, laughed, and looked up at the sky. I knew, at that point, that the book I held in my hands could not dance with another. And we would dance till our feet were tired. We were to stay together through the rest of my story. The smile on my face is for all eternity; just as my collection of Neruda will be everlasting company.