Magpie

Magpies gather bits of foil, aluminum wrappers, silver spoons or jewelry, all for the love of stealing. I’ve been just as bad, spending my time collecting imaginary lovers, not just as a way to forget loneliness, but because of an obsession with creation.

A fool, I convinced myself that I could care for nothing and no one that had not sprung from my own mind. So sad and selfish, I was worse than an Adam, for even the animals that he named and took ownership of came as a gift from another.

The other afternoon, I peered down at the pennies glittering on the smooth tiled bottom of the old fountain. A man in a grey suit came around, smiling at me and jiggling his pocket change in his left hand. Without really looking, he dropped it into the water. Silver and copper flashes splashed and spiraled downward. I counted the coins. Seven. He’d wasted seven wishes.
How many men, I wondered, had the liberty and confidence and freedom from superstition, to throw away not only their money, but seven chances at good fortune?

As I watched him turn and go, for some reason all I could think of was that old nursery rhyme, ‘one for sorrow, two for joy.’ I imagined the coins melting into tiny magpies – seven for a secret never to be told – and taking flight, circling around the man’s head and following him back to wherever it was that he was headed.

For two weeks, I have been stumbling my way into a brand new life. That is the only way to describe it. A clumsy crawl, a slow palming along the wall.

The true good in all of this is that I’m a participant, a point in the constellation of the living, once again. I listen, ask question. Say how are you and take care and thank you for your time and have a wonderful evening. More than that, I use my actual name, repeat it so many times that it seems tangible, like a very small stone, something I can put in my mouth and suck on. I guess I’m trying to suck the reason out of those letters, find out why for so long I have disassociated myself from my birth name.

By the river at lunchtime, the boatmen were waving goodbye to the land-people. I watched their pale hands and suddenly remembered my own, swinging at my sides as I hurried back to work.

It always seems as if I am waving to no one and no one is ever waving back at me.

“You’ve got the same aspect as O'Keeffe. I’ve never seen another single person on this earth with this. I’ve never heard anyone discuss this about O'Keeffe’s hands either; this is my impression of them, an aliveness, but you have the same thing. I distinctly remember sitting with you on the blue seats and your hands kept going up toward the side of your face and I kept thinking, what is it about these hands? And now I know. You and O'Keeffe, have your own distinct but same kind of energy in your hands. I’ve seen your hand like this exact image.”

A good friend sent me this letter and photograph of O’Keeffe’s hand by Alfred Stieglitz.

It reminded me that people can fall in love with you in the smallest of ways. In ways you never focus on, were not even aware of. Your individual and unconscious movements.

Some people can fall in love with your hands and they never have to say the worlds, but they love you, deeply.

When I was born my mother’s friend said, ‘What beautiful, long, piano playing fingers.’

Years later, I was sitting on a couch with a boy who would never love me and he took my hand in his and in the middle of our conversation said, ‘Look at your fingers, you should play piano.’

I’m stubborn, I suppose, because I’ve never learned to play the piano.

On my fingers, I counted each fake love I’ve had; I counted the men, like the discarded wishes laying at the bottom of the old fountain.

My fingers curled up tight into my palm. Thumb folded over to keep them in place. I struggled to remember past the twelfth fantasy. If there was a thirteenth, a fourteenth, even a hundredth – and there had to be, because I’ve been alone too long – those creations of mine had been abandoned, left half-finished, and even worse, forgotten.

If all these fake lovers transformed into magpies, what would it mean for me? Would I be lucky? Doomed?

Has a flock of a hundred magpies ever been seen?
Because I have potentially had one hundred fake loves in my life and have simply lost track of them all. Maybe some snuck away in the night, crawled out of my window-eyes, through the pin-prick pupils in the bright early morning light, and have become some other lonely woman’s dream-men.

All I know now is that the things we create are sometimes the very things we end up ignoring or hating.
I will love what I had no part in the most, what I never believed could actually exist.