Solitary Smiles

"The uncertainty of the future made them turn their hearts toward the past" (Gabriel Garcìa Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude).

Smells like nostalgia lately. The air outside feels like fall and leaves on the sidewalk and ghost stories and pumpkin patches. There's a crispness that puts a bounce in my step and makes me want to run invisible through the backyard at night like in the games of Hide-and-Go-Seek-in-the-Dark I played when I was a kid. There's such a freedom in the memories. Such space and open air.

If I'm going to talk about nostalgia, I have to talk about antique shops. I adore them. They're the equivalent of my Narnia wardrobe or a cardboard box time machine--anything can happen there. Magic exists in old, yellowed treasure maps and leather-bound trunks. My childhood is contained in the smell of dusty books.

I remember the room in my old house we called the Library with a spongy couch, a piano, and shelves of books. I remember looking at the covers of the books I was too young to understand  and making up my own stories from the pictures on them. A couple years ago, after we had moved and my siblings and I were all off doing our own thing, my lovely mother, bless her soul, was inspired to do some cleaning and got rid of most of them. The Three Investigators that were my imaginary best friends in third grade, the old fashioned set of Shakespeare, the books I had grown to appreciate for their content as well as their covers-- all carted to some thrift store or charity, never to be seen again.

Isn't that why we're nostalgic beings in the first place? The future can erase things, morph things, make us unrecognizable even to ourselves. But to look back on the past, that is an image that can stay sunny and soft and comfortably dust-filled if we want it to. Things never change. It's just an empty room we can return to walk through when we fancy. Antique shops are like those memories--those dreams--in solid form. 

I visited the Amana Colonies a few days ago with my bud Adam to go on a wine-tasting expedition. Our map was a little outdated and we ended up in Grapevine Antiques, which had taken the place of a relocated winery. I went back in time for twenty minutes. Polka music was playing in the background and the white-haired woman working was singing along as if she was the only one in the store. I had to stop myself from waltzing around through the china, lace, and leather ice-skates. It got me thinking about this poem I wrote last Fall for my poetry seminar.

Still

By Sarah M. Kosch

Remember the antique shop on State Street?
The one with the blue sign
in the front, I forget its name.
I was there in my dream last Saturday night,
entombed in the teetering towers of trinkets,

making a maze through lone lamp-shades and dressers.

Near paintings of black and white fruit and tin cans
I saw a watch on the table.
It had a crack in the glass face,
the hands standing still and the two unclasped
bands eagle-spread on either side.
It was half-past three two hours ago.

Back shelved books benign and shadowed
Underneath the yellow light.
I paused to peek at their spines

Searching for the gilded pages of Pilgrim’s Progress.
I had to have it, to own it, to make it my own

though I couldn’t work words into why.

A voice behind me hurt my ear drums.
The cushion of silence split.
“Here, take it,” he said.
He handed me the book but I stared at his eyes; black,
Smooth, sharp, glassy, alive,
Like the other side of a bedroom window at night.

I reached out slowly, touched the curve of his chin.
Let my callused skin catch
On the sand paper hair.
His lips were chapped and smiling, closed and soft.
A stranger’s mouth, strange eyes.
But he tasted like broken candy canes when I kissed him,

and I knew that I knew him, knew him like Christmas lights,
always familiar, always
soft fleece on cold
winter nights when they glow pink and blue
and diffuse the ice cube breath
to lightning bug sparks that I caught in glass

jars and kept next to me on the wooden nightstand
when I slept on Grandma’s pull-out
bed and it smelled like window
screens when it rained, rusty like pine needles
and old. Like the soiled sweater on the shelf

that you found revolting but I buried my face in and breathed.