Spooky Action

SPOOKY ACTION:

This quantum mechanical phenomenon describes how two particles can be linked, so that measuring the state of one instantly determines the state of the other, no matter how far apart they are.

You, my love, live five stories high, above a street named for a colonial president in Brooklyn. I live near a burbling creek on a busy two-lane mountain highway in Colorado. We both want to be near our grown children since they won’t be calling to ask for help moving into their fourth apartment in two years, or free for the holidays, or for a baseball game, up for a weekend getaway….not for long.

In New York, the noise hurts. I plug my ears often. Then forget the pain, devouring spiced fish, chocolate and croissants like I am in Senegal or Paris or Harlem, because I am in Harlem. We rush back to Brooklyn, and everything is noise, noise, screeching, grating, noise. 

I cringe under the ripe haze hanging in the elevator. We take the dog for a midnight walk. I find the rats interesting, the dog does too. Then, high above your city, the apartment is quieter than my mountain cabin along a river and road. Your tall building is insulation from the wild below, as we sleep, deep inside thick walls - built decades before we were born.

What other lovers huddled here, caressing each other and their dreams on this island at the edge of stolen lands?

If these walls could talk. 

It is lonely in the city. I am the one that likes being alone, yet you packed your house and moved to Brooklyn one spring day. To disappear with the other 100 people getting off of the train. It has been ok. 

Back and forth, which is how everything is. 

Teeter.     

Totter.

In Colorado, I keen for the other part of me, the city armor part, the don’t-mess-with-me-buddy-lady. The answer-is-no-before-the-question-lady. 

Sap and pine needles fall onto your truck and the river is so low I see the white bellies of trout dragging along the bottom, but I am the one exposed. People trespass and I struggle to tell them they can’t hang out in my yard, to tell them that no the water’s edge isn’t public land, no, I don’t have to let them fish on my property. 

In Brooklyn, armor is easy. In Colorado I fall back into pleasing.

The garden is feral, taken over by chipmunks already and I hate them with the same ferocity you feel for New York City trash bags that you see seething under the plastic, alive with rats. Green tomatoes fall here like hailstones, abandoned to their fate since September frost browned the leaves and puckered their skins. The herons have gone, putting one last brown trout down the gullet and lifting off on dinosaur wings, toward Guatemala, and the winter will be so long in my empty bed.

We go to see Tom Jones in Brooklyn, watching septuagenarians gleefully throwing lingerie and granny panties onto the stage, we laugh and grate to Sex Bomb, we race back to your apartment for berries, cheese, Judy Garland on TV. In bed, skin pushed together, dreams and promises fall from our lips. Farms and mountains. Cities and music. Bookstores, recipes, grandchildren. I hear coyotes but waking fully I understand, it is sirens howling from the canyons all around us.

I come home.

The elk rut! A bugling noise, jarring as the subway just beneath my window. The bugle of an elk is pretty when it echoes down the canyon from far off, not when it wakes you up, 10 feet away, at four am and doesn’t stop until dawn. Plus, the fiend makes other, sloppy, wet noises - far more visceral. Unmistakable in terms of intention. He grunts and I miss you. 

You suffer alone, five stories high and I suffer alone on the last warm day of the year with my feet in the creek. But some part of you is right here with me, holding me steady as I lean down to pick a brazen aspen leaf, washed from somewhere high above us in the big mountains where fall has turned all the trees into blondes and redheads already. Or, maybe I am with you five stories high, taking the pillows away and offering my skin instead. Spooky action….

"Spooky action at a distance" is a phrase coined by Albert Einstein to describe quantum entanglement, the phenomenon where two separated objects can share a state or condition. Some say the phrase could also describe the connection between two people in love. 

Then suddenly, it is October, spooky season, with neither of us getting any action and another year of living apart, but what is time if distance isn’t real? How much do we have? How much time do any of us have? 

It is a question pressed up to everyone’s faces as one devastating climate disaster after another slides across the shining screens. Our love has a large carbon footprint which we dream of offsetting soon with a small house, net zero, where we will cuddle into old age. 

Won’t we? 

We have time.

I don’t want a dog after the mess of these beasts I got for my kids, but you always will and that will be fine. Soon, we will manage to have all our electrons together most of the time. The action won’t be so spooky so maybe the dog won’t bother me as much. Our skin will press pheromones into permanent placement rather than this chain-yanking addiction spiral we are in.

Still, we will be two places at once, with the larger parts of ourselves together and the rare, super positioned electrons out roaming with our grown children, in the dangerous world, trying to protect them in vain. The fires and the flood and the storm will come for them. They will have babies or remain childless. They will marry, divorce, love, mourn, wish, hope….no matter what we do. We will be apart from them, and we will be together, as each of us is together while the world goes super colliding down the drain.

The truth is, you worship at the altar of New York City as I do at the foot of these Rocky Mountains. Here are some of the electrons that have attracted us to each other and which we shouldn’t sacrifice. For example, I knew all week that I would go to the Symphony alone on Saturday night in Denver, a treasured secret pleasure, and you had all your kids to the apartment Saturday with girlfriends and boyfriends and theyfriends and themfriends and all Saturday we both were exactly where we should have been. 

Then, there will be another collision of electrons. Perhaps we especially enjoy this. The extra of it, when we arrive together in a solar flare falling into quiet northern lights then a long, contented sleep, during the first snowstorm of fall, after which….

You will fly home to Brooklyn and you will notice the sun disappear and the night cool the moon’s halo a few hours before me every time, and we will text hearts and happy faces…back and forth

Good night.

I love you.