Crepúsculo Essay -- Creative Writing Essays

Crepà ºsculo There is a word that I learned from Pablo Neruda: crepà ºsculo. It means twilight. I swim each night in the twilight of a hundred faces. These are the faces that I see through a silver mist. They are the faces that have found their way to that part of my brain where lost things are kept, neatly stacked, forever pressed behind frosted glass; forever just out of reach. . . . Joe’s face, from across my kitchen table, smiles his gentle smile at me. He sat with me in the kitchen for so long that night, watching as I sorted tiny beads into piles of reds and blues and glowing emerald greens. "What would you do," he said, smiling, if I just--" he gestured with his arms as though about to sweep his hands across the table, sending beads skittering to the floor. "If I just–whoosh." In remembering, we inject into our past a knowledge of the future; in this memory I know that Joe will die in a car crash in four months. Nights when his face appears I see him from across the bald, shimmering expanse of my kitchen table, dotted with gem-like piles of glass beads, and a burst of bright light explodes from his hands to mingle with my twilight sea. Whoosh. . . . I slid my items across the black belt, hand brushing across a sticky patch of dried lemonade. Wheat bread. Italian ices. Peaches. The checker paused, not sure just what to make of those peaches. They didn’t have a helpful little barcode on them, naturally. He was lost without the helpful little barcode. It was his first day. I smiled apologetically at the man behind me in line before realizing that he was not frowning out of impatience. He was staring at my face, my broken face with the blue and red bruise over my left cheekbone. The frown dissipated an... ...riage and children and a job he hates. He wears tattered bell-bottom Levi’s and oversized glasses with silver frames. I think of some of the Europe stories; a train wreck in Austria, a cabin in a Swiss valley: anecdotes experienced by someone I never knew, recounted by a man who wears Polo shirts and mopes when the weekend weather is bad. The horse is for his not-yet-born daughter–the first of two not-yet-born daughters. He plans to place it in her room, and one day soon he will rock her gently back and forth on the red-brown wooden saddle. He carefully tests his creation, and it makes a slow creaking sound on the asbestos tiled floor. A fleeting image punctuates the rocking of the horse, and he is standing in a cool valley in Switzerland, mountains all around him, mountains close enough to touch, yellow flowers by his feet, the cold pine air stabbing his lungs.