kathryn ernst

indecision and reverie are the anasthetics of constructive action [s.p.]

[katemaciejowski]

and then

you begin to see

different versions of yourself

in their new lovers

[katemaciejowski]

mourn

maybe you died and no one else knew it but me

there are things i could do

like play tennis in alberta park

go to a movie

but i want instead

to eat pines cones

and scratch my skin off on tree bark

and you

you’re out there smiling

waiting for me

[katemaciejowski]

as though my brain is being steeped in some viscous fluid

each synapse doused

into a tasteless paste 

unbearably slow

some mild dementia

every year a sickness

like a seasonal allergy

the slobbery mess of the dog days

the august fog

[katemaciejowski]

denial

i am steamrolled

     flattened

     two dimensional

but you

in you i am able to turn my pavement-self back into the granular bits and pieces I was once made up of

i am the sum of all my parts

     elemental 

     floating

[katemaciejowski]

portland

while driving i remember thinking

will it take?

as though this place were a prosthetic limb

that my body might reject

some days it’s comfortable

others it’s not

home is a creased fold of skin caught between plastic

[katemaciejowski]

bamboo

like silver bellied mackerel

a hundred thousand leaves stray in open space 

patterns i cannot predict, some unknown science or chaos

air like water

this window pane 

the glass surface of the ocean

//

if i reach my hand into the sky

through the barrier of this room and open air

wavy, wavering, alive

would you scatter away

like tiny metallic fish?

[katemaciejowski]

The island was ours and we were the island’s. 

We’d established this strange, symbiotic relationship for the duration of our stay. Realities fluctuating, simple configurations of light, sound, and emotion woven together seamlessly, everything moving forward together in the only way it possibly could. It was as if we’d spent every second of our entire lives in some specific manner so that the world would bring this moment to fruition - this tangle of moments. Emotions were nonexistent until you wanted them. Exhiliration flipped on and off like a switch. Whole hours passed in seconds, while one minute bled out into days. We knew the answers to questions we’d ask ourselves in thirty years, tucked them away in some small space. 

And when it was over, we were thrown back into the chaos that led us there.

[quick-look]

Something about flying makes me very sad. For the fact that I can see everything spread out below me, so small and tiresome, cars headlights and taillights making up the veins of the freeways, red and white lights like blood cells, streaming away in tunnels from the arteries of cities.

I flew from Bozeman to Denver and then to San Francisco, over mountains upon mountains. I struggled to comprehend that each peak has a name, every cold and crested vista a tribute to some long dead adventurer. Flying is the only way to create the illusion that the world seems much smaller than I do - the lost musings of some architect who couldn’t make up their mind for mountains or deserts or canyons, and so they made them all.

[quick-look]

I wrote a short story once about a guy in college who believed that his whole life was a television show, that he was being filmed against his will for all of the world to see, like the Truman Show or something. All under the pretense that if such a show did in fact exist, it would have to be about him, because otherwise he would know about it. 

I think it may have been the most ego-centric story I’ve ever written, and for some reason today I started thinking about it. Thinking about the slow way in which we realize that we are not the center of the world. That only you are the center of your world, and you are small and fragile and relatively insignificant when it’s all said and done. It is a terrifying thought, simply put. I will die, and eventually some day after that, not one person in the world will remember who I was.

But the other side of that are the ways that you can make yourself big. I got a tattoo recently on my left arm, that says timshel. It means in Hebrew “Thou Mayest” but it comes from the book East of Eden. What it means is that if thou mayest, then inherently, thou mayest not. Rather than expressing doctrine through dos and don'ts, it gives us as humans the choice. The choice to do good, the choice to do bad - knowing all along that the way isn’t set for us, that we cannot lean back on fate to excuse ourselves from our deeds whether good or bad. 

I wrote once, perhaps it was here; We play host to chaos and call it fate. I think that at the time I meant it as a way to assuage ourselves through experiences that we cannot understand. Believing that each outcome was fated in some way, and giving in to the idea that whatever it was, it was meant to be. I suppose that all religions are like that. They give us all some kind of solid ground to stand on amidst a world full of chaos. But I think that the chaos really comes from each of the billions of us having the ability to say yes or no, to choose what we will and will not do. The fact that all of these different choices and directions can somehow lead us to each other, to love, to knowledge, to growth. What might seem like coincidence or fate, is actually a simple result of our own actions. And although it demands a considerable amount of responsibility in each one of us, believing that the choice is always yours is perhaps the most powerful thing you could believe. 

I know that I have so much more to learn in this lifetime, so many more clues to uncover, mysteries to tinker with, things to think and write about. But I believe that in timshel I have found a start. I have begun to understand the ways in which I am small, as well as the ways in which I can be big.

[katemaciejowski]

Early spring, by the water.

It's early spring. The sun sets low and heavy over the lake and a cool, insistent breeze floats ashore off the ice floes that have stacked up where the water would lap your ankles in the summer. It's marathon season. Steadfast runners materialize in the afternoon sun, stunned with the electricity of the fresh air. I can smell mud and dead leaves all around me, but even the air seems to be born again, rejuvenated by the steady pulse of winter. It has come alive again, awoken, it wants to share its song like the birds. 

It is cold and peaceful and calming by the water. It is quiet and the only movement is the distant tremor of the lake. The sun droops low and the color slowly fades from the sky, excepting the muted yellows and grays that lapse behind the ridgeline of mountains across the lake. The sun has tried to warm us and she has done her job, however briefly.

[katemaciejowski]

September 11, 2001

I think that I was passing notes in Mrs. Allen’s Alebra II class when the North tower was hit. I remember my best friend running up to me in the hallway after class saying that something crazy had happened, that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. I didn’t even know what the World Trade Center was. I was 15 years old, and I hated Algebra II and that was what mattered to me at the time. I guess everyone has their story about where they were when the towers were hit, or how they found out, or what feelings they had over it. Just like any tragedy of the world. I remember thinking about my mom telling me how it felt when Kennedy was assassinated, or I imagine the story my grandmother would have told about the day Pearl Harbor was bombed if I’d ever asked her, or a letter my grandfather might have written about D-Day. I guess maybe every generation has their tragedy.   You could spend a lot of time watching video footage on YouTube of the second plane crashing into the South tower. I believe there are probably people who do. Maybe people who have lost more than others, maybe they just sit and watch and maybe they’re torturing themselves or maybe it’s the one thing they do every single day that’s the same, and maybe that’s what makes it okay. Did people even watch YouTube yet in 2001? Are there more people running around with cameras in their pockets now so that they might catch the next tragedy on film? There were something like 200 people who jumped from the windows rather than being burned or choked to death by smoke or crushed under a million pounds of cement and steel and gypsum. And someone made a video of them that starts out with a picture of one of the towers with some sort of clip art angel floating above it and it’s been viewed 2,828,199 times. I don’t think there were very many angels hovering over those buildings that day, unless you’re counting the people who died in the initial crash, the ones who were blasted immediately into a million particles that flew up into the sky above it all and slowly fluttered down like feathers might, or snowflakes, slowly and whimsically like they were allotted some final prolonged moment of peace before landing on the sidewalk a block or two away only to be trampled by the running feet of strangers. 

I heard in a news report that one of the jumpers landed on a fire fighter and they both died. I once read that if you threw a quarter off of the Empire State Building it would be going fast enough to kill someone by the time it landed. But then I also heard the distance to the ground is too far, and that the quarter’s path would more likely pull it back towards the building itself. How fast do you have to fall to fall straight down?

I remember watching the news for what felt like a million years when I got home from school. I remember just watching the video of the second plane, of the first building collapsing in on itself, of the man falling and falling and falling yet never hitting the ground. I remember thinking how strange it was that the building appeared to implode on itself, that it didn’t fall sideways like a Jenga tower. I remember getting that feeling that it was wrong to keep watching. I remember promising myself never to look at car crashes for more than the moment it takes to register that there has been a car crash. I remember writing something long, pages long, in my journal, something that feels like the last true thing I thought about that day. I like to imagine all of those 2,606 people who died that morning continuing their days like they pictured them when they woke up. They would have liked to finish their meetings and breakfasts and expense reports and cups of coffee and picked up their briefcases and hand bags and laptops and light fall jackets and walked out of those buildings and on to home. Was it warm that day in September? If only someone could have gotten in the elevators of each building that morning and gone all the way to the top and gathered every single person on every single floor and led them out, slowly and carefully, one by one, like a grade school fire drill, so that when those planes crashed into the World Trade Centers they would have been empty. And the streets around them would be empty and all of the people who were inside would be standing outside in the blocks surrounding them watching in a giant circle. And then they would have gone home and hugged someone or kissed someone or called someone they missed and told them how much they loved them. And even if they were the loneliest person in the world, they would look out their window and know that someone had given them one more day. The truth is, it’s November 17, 2010, and it’s been 9 years, 2 months and 6 days since this happened, and that isn’t relevant at all besides the fact that for some reason, in the past week, I have read a book and seen a movie about that day without intending to. And though both were about September 11th, the events of that day were incidental to bigger stories, stories about families and friendships and love and things being complicated and things being simple. I guess that is the sad part about it. Not that 2,606 people died tragically all at once, but that they died at all when there were so many other things going on in every single one of their lives. Even if there wasn’t anything at all. The sad part is that something as jarring as a nationwide tragedy will never be as jarring as someone you love dying before you got to say goodbye.

[katemaciejowski]

Static Remainders

It is mostly on Sundays where I get to thinking that maybe I've missed out on all the chances I've been given. Once when I was in preschool we had all gathered in the basement of the schoolhouse, and it was graduation day. My teacher said that we would all be called up in order, and we were to make a line, and then we would march upstairs in a procession for the ceremony. She called through all of the names of the kids in my class and for some reason, my name never got called. So instead of saying anything I just stayed in my seat on the bench off to the side, and everyone else quietly marched out in the orderly chaos of a preschool graduation and I was left behind, alone. No one really noticed me and no one came back to find me until my mother came running down in a flurry when she saw that I wasn't with the rest of the kids. That's all I really can remember. 

Sometimes I dream that I'm still down in that basement waiting around for someone to call my name.

I had a friend who once wrote to me that so much of our lives depend on random encounters, how you might be a certain place at a certain time and meet someone very important in your life, or maybe some small thing happens that prevents you from getting there at just that moment and forever, that opportunity has disappeared. And you never even knew it. 

There is one constant in a lifetime, and it is an understanding that something is always going to happen. Whether we have any control over it or not, something will happen. It makes no difference if we are happy or sad, lost or found, alone or together, something will happen tomorrow, and the next day and the one that follows. And I suppose that collectively, this is what creates a life.

[katemaciejowski]

The Show

Once he had situated himself directly in front of the huge television screen where Broadway and Seventh Ave. collide, he began to spin around in circles, slowly at first, with his arms outstretched, fingertips reaching out towards the skyscrapers and high rises that surrounded him, and then faster and faster as he pulled his arms in closer to his body, surrendering himself to centrifugal force until he was spiraling out of control, his feet slapping the pavement sporadically and the lines that separated the  buildings from the traffic, the navy sky from the electronic lightshow, reality from illusion all blurred together in a prism of color and movement and nausea and he began to falter, his legs giving out from underneath him, causing him to stagger forward towards Broadway and then backwards into the oncoming traffic of Seventh Ave. until he finally fell down and landed between a metal sewage grate and the two wheels of a city bus, his words to the old man echoing in his head I’m a fucking genius while looking up at the gigantic television and swearing that he could see an image of himself there before him on the massive screen as the M6 crushed his skull and wiped him from existence like it does to millions of insects when they smash against its windshield every day as it drives around in ceaseless circles. 

[katemaciejowski]

Weaknesses

Is it sleep that truly rejuvenates our bodies? Or is it simply that parcel of emotion that delivers itself upon the wings of our actions. That emergent flood of the overwhelming. Being overwhelmed in the fact that it is still possible to feel a stong feeling at all over such commonplace things as sunsets and the smell of fallen leaves. Something becomes joyful the minute you decide that it makes you happy. 

[katemaciejowski]

backyard

[katemaciejowski]

[katemaciejowski]

Lullabye

Soon our faces will pale and the sun will hang lower and lower in the sky. We talk for months of our love for autumn yet every year when it comes it brings an unfailing melancholy. A little tune of sadness at sweet summer’s passing.

I sit here and listen to the rain as it steadily falls down from the dark sky and onto the leaves of the trees and the roofs of the buildings. Its constant movement only accentuates the stillness of a room and the incessant bright of bulbs under lampshades. It falls furiously, washing away the dust and smudges from our cars, relentlessly pounding on the unsuspecting grass and soil. If it were snow, it would have softly covered the town by now. It would have stacked itself upon itself for hours, sending minivans skidding across pavement, sending children out in boots on expeditions, the tiny molecules of their breath freezing silently and disappearing among the inimitable flakes.

Instead the lake just grows deeper with every drop, and more of us are lulled into a sleep, our dreams unfolding in gradients of black and white.