by Erika MeitnerMy student sends letters to me with the lights turned low. They feature intricate vocabulary, like soporific and ennui. Like intervening and kinetic and tumult. He strings words together like he's following a difficult knitting pattern. He is both more and less striking without a shirt on. I know this from the time I ran into him at Walmart buying tiki torches and margarita mix and, flustered, I studied the white floor tiles, the blue plastic shopping cart handle, while he told me something that turned to white noise and I tried not to look at his beautiful terrible chest, the V-shaped wings of his chiseled hipbones. I write him back. I tell him there are two horses outside my window and countless weeds. I tell him that the train comes by every other hour and rattles the walls. But how to explain my obsession with destruction? Not self-immolation, but more of a disintegration, slow, like Alka-Seltzer in water. Like sugar in water. I dissolve. He writes enthralling. He writes epiphany and coffee machine. He is working in an office, which might as well be outer space. I am in the mountains. The last time I worked in an office, he was ten. I was a typewriter girl. I was a maternity-leave replacement for a fancy secretary. I helped sell ads at TV Guide. I was fucking a guy who lived in a curtain-free studio above a neon BAR sign on Ludlow Street and all night we were bathed in pot smoke and flickering electric pink light. Here, the sun goes down in the flame of an orange heat-wave moon. The train thrums and rattles the distance, and I think of his chest with the rounded tattoo in one corner and my youth, the hollows of his hipbones holding hard, big-box fluorescent light.
