You meet them at Northampton Pride. They greet you with, “I’m into orcharding.” You do not know what that means. They continue to speak with words like “oiling antique furniture. Hot yoga. Beetles. Wetland delineation.” By the end of your date at the Roost, as you suck at the dregs of your almond-milk Smoothie Criminal, they touch your arm and look deep into your eyes and say, “I work on an organic farm.”
It is funny, you do not actually like almonds.
The potholes are deep, so deep that when passing by you can hear a faint whisper of song being sung in a tongue that you do not understand. The song has words, you know it does, but you cannot parse what they might be except that they are very old and oddly familiar. You may have already heard it at the Calvin.
When your car inevitably succumbs to a pothole, you cannot explain to the mechanic why there are claw marks in your tires. He does not ask. He will not look you in the eye as he does your alignment, and he sends you away with a bag of fiddleheads.
s̸̥̭̭͎͕̍ͨ̽ͅp̡̰ͩͥ̇̿ͫ̈r̫̜̐́̐̎ͩ̾͜ĭͯn̩̻͍̪͈̖͆̑̉̅̽ͅg͎̝͚͑̓̏̇̚?̷̩̗̿̿̌ͦͅ
“I cannot use wifi,” says the aging hippie, her wild salt-and-pepper hair smelling of hand-pressed lavender. “It presses hard at my bones. I buried my phone in my garden when Mercury was in retrograde because I felt the electricity gnawing at my essence.” She’s sitting in Haymarket, holding her iPad. “It hurts,” she whimpers, as she downloads Neko Atsume.
The Ethiopian Yirgacheffe from Rao’s causes you to speak Amharic for six hours. You are unable to converse with anyone other than the raving, homeless old woman on Main Street. She is fluent. She offers you her sober crafts and you are compelled to buy them, and it is then that your affliction immediately disappears, leaving you disoriented outside of The Hempest, wearing multicolored, lumpy hand-warmers.
“Wicked,” say the natives. All of them. The weather, the Bruins, the potholes, the coffee milk. It is all wicked. You don’t say it. You can’t say it. So long as you don’t say it, you think, you can still leave this place.
You wake up one day and your car has become a 2001 Volvo. There are Shop Local and No Farms No Food stickers on the bumper and reusable grocery bags from Trader Joe’s in the trunk. There’s a reclaimed bicycle strapped to the roof. You look up at Mount Tom and a single word forms, unbidden, in your mind: Soon.
Your beard is lush and magnificent, regardless of your gender, and smells delightfully of cedar.
Your fingers itch to go bouldering. You have never climbed.
This summer is wicked humid, you think, and it is done.
The person from Pride messages you on Kik, telling you of their new kayak. You meet one Sunday at the Bike Trail. They take your hands in theirs and say, softly, so softly, “stay out until the dawn and breathe in every part of the universe.” Their hands are worn and warm, and you are surrounded by hundreds of rescued dogs. There is compost under their fingernails. You are charmed, and it should be unsettling but you are too far gone. You can hear the numbers in your head, a tattoo, a heartbeat: 4-1-3.
The trees burn. Violent reds and orange and yellows draw in hordes of people from the southern places. The air is crisp, and no one is seen without a bushel of apples. The geese flee through the sky, screaming their farewell. You step outside your farmhouse share, pleasantly full from a breakfast of corn-cakes and organic agave syrup, and smell at the air. It’s there, hiding behind woodsmoke and the faint scent of pumpkin-spiced medical marijuana. It’s there, waiting. Waiting.
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