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Throat Punch Essays

For Arle at Christmas

Serge Bielanko

Dec 24, 2021

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Sometimes I daydream about having a farm and a wife and some babies and watching the grass grow, but you have to meet the right person for that. - Conor Oberst

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In the kitchen, I hear them talking low, in suspicious voices. Not of crimes or takedowns or sinister moves, but something altogether different than that, I would say, judging by the rush and rumble of the words beneath the sidewalks of the moment I am living in: Up on a ladder/ my thumb throbbing up against a thumb tack/ all in an effort to hang a cardboard Santa Claus above the window over by my Civil War bookshelf.

They speak in brambles of hush/ small puffs of wispy breath. I catch no words and I understand none of it. They look at me together as I eventually move through the room by the front door to try and see what I can see. They watch me together and they freeze their words and I see deer on the ridge top/ I’ve jumped them and they stare me down.

I wander away then. I’m not part of this and I won’t be invited and I don’t need to be, of course. Arle and Violet out in the kitchen, Christmas lights, Christmas music, I’ve dialed in this nearly mental scene for them to live in. A stage for a play that they have to act upon, like it or not. My impulsive drive to decorate is perhaps manic, I’d say. Or something like that. It' happens in shotgun blasts of nostalgic buckshot that I launch through the roof of my skull at strange but kind of predictable times. December mostly, rarely earlier. The boxes having laid there in the side room for weeks now, I finally get around to cracking them open only when the anxiety has chiseled away at my unconscious to the point that I begin to lay in bed at night and fear a total and complete paralysis directly attributed to this disconnect between the slightly cruddy vintage plastic Santa Clauses in the box and my senseless vacillating between them and my motivation/ my drive/ my energy/ my Christmas fucking spirit.

But this now, these talkers in my holiday light, they capture all of my imagination at once. My wife, my love and my daughter, my star… throwing me shade as I pass the doorway to the kitchen and clock their low deep seriousness stop on a dime.

I wander away ashamed and exhilarated. They caught me, true… but who cares about that. A man must be nabbed red-handed at times if he is ever to appreciate the full and quirky magnitude of life’s madness. A hustler needs an occasional dark alley beat-down so he can appreciate the neon in the puddles of the streets where he roams. A fish needs a hook in the face to ever swim true wild and free.

I stop by the Nintendo Switch. I stop out of the sight of those two in the kitchen then and I squeeze the old school silver garland in my hand. I grip it tight, full moon in the sky. Under these ceilings, I picture the roof flying off into space. Between these walls with all of their barely visible holiday decoration tack holes, I imagine me out there on the wind-blasted prairie once again/ a place I put myself a lot lately, in case you haven’t been noticing my reincarnated bison jive I’ve been gently feeding you here and there across essays past. I let the walls go dark/ decorations fade/ and the tack holes from this past Halloween and last Christmas and last Halloween and the one before that/ some of them painted over, some fresh still/ pinhead portals into the walls of our home/ and I just stand there for a second as I consider what is happening here at this moment in time.

Violet and Arle talking secret in the kitchen.

The boys scattered in rooms upstairs. Legos or cell phones or maybe smuggled candy or picking a booger while staring at the cracks in the ceiling.

Milla somewhere. In her room, maybe? Maybe listening to Spotify in her headphones/ flipping through the artists she is encountering on her trip down through there. Finding things that make her dizzy with joy, maybe? Finding songs that speak to her? Her and Violet/ my Spotify kids. I hope they never take the headphones off. I hope the music never stops ricochetting around their beautiful skulls.

I stand there and the tack holes go to stars and the walls they fall to nothingness and the vast magnitude of all time and space is suddenly upon me there, stood there in my work dirty work pants and my black hoodie, my tired look/ my modern peasantry/ and I stand there and I stand there and I stand there and I feel the gusts of wind being born a hundred miles out before they slam into me with the ferocious intensity of a hellbent land bound and determined to kill me for the pure and easy sake of simply killing in the unwitnessed night.

Arle, my truest heart.

Violet, my purest mind.

Locked in inhibited conversation, brought together in this minuscule moment by, it dawns on me, my life. By my existence. By my being born once upon a time. I revel in that revelation a moment, twisting the old garland in my hands. How can I ever fathom the distinct randomness of every shooting star ever flown across the night sky somehow coming together in all this super subtle magnificence?

How can it be that Arle even exists, I ask myself as a dog slips by me, head down, probing for popcorn crumbs.

How do I stand in the light of real tried and true acceptance of what appears to be love when I have no idea what comes next?

How is it that I always find myself wondering how to let her know that I’m ready to give her all my prairie if she ever needs it? She wouldn’t have to explain anything to me. I would get it. I would understand. I would willingly get on my tip toes and close my eyes and let that night wind take me forever if I knew it would give her an extra day at the end of all this dreaming we’ve been doing, so tired and satisfied in inexplicable ways.

Mortuary silence is the space between gusts. When the stars shine harder and the coyotes turn to stone. There is a clear Walmart thumb tack laying on the sage brush ground, and it is alone there/ catching just the slightest flick of moon in its Chinese plastic/ in the ruts of a westward wagon long since passed/ I used it to poke a hole in the sky so I could see through.

And that’s what I saw on the other side.

Her. This one. Arle.

I don’t understand.

I don’t recognize this kind of luck.

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We will wander down at different times on Christmas morning, me and her. Arle will remain in bed, half asleep maybe, I just don’t know. But the early trek down to the Mr. Coffee and the dog’s hot piss on the cold dead backyard, that will be my trip and I like it. I love it. Tired I’ll be: as she lays still as bones in our warm blankets, my heat pattern going cool in the wake of my disappearance/ in the evolving story of my unfolding absence.

Down in the yard, I will be bleary with the predictable wine still working its way through my tunnels and caves. Long since passed my lips, the damn shit will still be playing with me when I open the back door, a dog leash in each hand, and I am pulled out across the mountain stones I set into the ground out there, pulled swiftly into the frosted grass by dogs with only one care in the entire world.

To splash piss down on this battered ground. To send piss steam up my nose.

In the freeing Christmas morning I will drink it in like Santa sleigh smoke. The last remnants of a hit-and-run/ I taste the metal piss with my nose and I am transformed at least this one more time.

Christmas morning has arrived again and I have made it and I am here.

Their hot piss sprays up onto my Vans in the peaceful dark. I can hear Angus’s steady stream and Malcolm’s broken song of pissy bursts. They look away from me/ they sniff each other’s work/ they imbibe deep meaning and primal messages from what they pick up in the whiff, I suppose, but it’s all lost on me. At least in the ancient ways.

Unless of course, you might consider me looking up at our bedroom window at that second, some kind of nod to some kind of glorious antiquity. I mean, I guess in a way, that’s sort of what it is, right?

Me and the dogs and the raging rivers of piss running downhill in the yard as I glance up at the window where she sleeps/ half-sleeps/ in the utter darkness/ but warm and okay/ while I’m out here in the elements wondering what I have stumbled into with her.

How the hell did I win her heart?

How the hell is any of this happening?

Christmas morning. Coffee brewing. Gifts under the tree/ I saw them on my way to the dogs. I will plug in the lights now after I head back inside, but first: I mean: this question hangs, you know?

I will look up at the window kind of hungover and I will hear the pissing end and I will search the sky for stars against the deep purple of endless desert flipped upside down, boundless prairie mirrored in the lake of the predawn sky, and I will point up at her in that bed just chilling/ and I will be filled with intense wonder even before I have had my first cup of coffee.

Wtf.

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And into the caverns of tomorrow with just our flashlights and our love we must plunge, we must plunge, we must plunge. - Bright Eyes

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On a rock in the field off of Sedgewick Avenue, me and Arle, laid out, her leaning back upon her hands/ her long slender arms propping her Earthly body so that I can lean back into her lap as the sun begins to set upon the battlefield at Gettysburg.

We lived that the other night, Thursday night, a Thursday that could have gone any old way but went this one instead.

I’d parked the minivan at the Pennsylvania Memorial and we just said we will walk. Let’s just walk. Down the road. Into the fray of all these vultures and hawks and boulders and mice/ into the chaos of this fading day/ these cold cannon barrels/ all this once upon a time that keeps bringing us back. So we did, we walked down the road towards the last hour or so of day left hanging in the sky.

Down past the woods on our left, and me talking the whole time, wondering out loud if this is where my ancestors came up onto the field that hot summer day a long time ago. Strung out and sprawling across the Baltimore Pike/ out by Rock Creek/ out by Wolf’s Hill/ the old books say/ the Fifth Corps soldiers were beat-up and tired but going mad for a fight. My Great Great Great Grandfather, Private Fred Marker, 118th Pennsylvania Volunteers was with them.

She must get so tired of hearing about him. But she never complains. She smiles and digs it because it makes me happy, keeps me alive somehow/ I don’t know how/ I don’t understand the ebb and flow of these things that keep me going. Who does, you know? No one does. No one knows what’s up.

It would have had to have been, like, right here, I spurt at Arle, like right here where they came through these woods and stared down at the Wheatfield way out there but probably there was so much smoke and even if there wasn’t, it doesn’t matter because think about it! Those guys had no idea where the hell they were or where the fuck they were going! They were literally probably running across this exact ground, throwing their backpacks and bedrolls and shit right behind these exact rocks because, you know, these rocks were here back then! They’ve been here forever and so they are absolutely witnesses to Fred Marker and his friends. Jesus Christ, it had to be right around here, right around General Syke’s headquarter marker over here!

She looks at me and she is calm and cool. I feel somewhat ridiculous because I can see behind the scenes here and I hate that in a way. Here I am the Civil War guy/ 50-year-old HusbandDad/ hurling Gettysburg shit at his patient wife on an American evening and there she is just swimming in all my vomit and carefully curating the precise reactions called for in these situations when you are someone who truly loves a person who is, let’s just be honest here for a sec, wildly unlovable at times. Especially when he’s so up and down lately/ depressed/ anxious/ trying but played out/ all banged-up like an army hungry to fight because there’s nothing else to do now/ every other day has led up to this one.

Quick walking country boys. Slow straggling city boys. Swift moving city kids. Slow shuffling country child. Big ol’ rifles on your shoulders. Sweat pouring down your brows. You smell like raw onions and hot dog piss on Christmas morning and I stand out there on the road now and I tell someone I love all about you but do you ever think of me?

These battlefields can be so one-sided.

I want your attention, old boy, but where’d you go? I cannot feel you now as I’m rambling to my wife/ stood out in her eyes/ her smile like a feather floating on the battle breeze.

It comes and goes. It comes and goes. Everything out there: it comes and goes.

We end up laying there on a big rock then, out in the middle of some high dead grass, some leftover summer by the artillery on the road creeping up on Little Round Top. People are walking their dogs. After work, maybe. Maybe retired. No one I see looks like they’re thinking about soldiers. These people live here. They get it and all, but this is exercise, I guess. While I am here searching for something I cannot name, they stroll by, their voices mumbled, ones and twos, dogs on leashes, some bark at others and when they do I feel like that sounds right in this cooling air.

Arle lets me lean back into her and I just lay there. I am done talking now. It seems off, honestly. I look down at the farm way below us and I picture Marker running past the place on his way to the fight. But I bite my tongue and I roll my hand up Arle’s long leg and then the other one with my other hand.

I try to imagine how this can all come about. How can we end up here, on this rock, as the sun begins to paint the sky so intensely and with such astounding beauty that it seems, for a moment or two, that everything is fine. And that it always has been. And that the world working against me is just all up in my head, hoss.

I hear her taking pictures with her phone and I like that she is.

We talk here and there. Look at that bird. Is it a hawk or what?

I allow myself to melt into her arms and I think I am happier than I maybe have ever been. Or at least happier than I have been in a long time. None of this is easy. This living, man, it drags me down. I struggle with so much. I react and I run into the prairie night and I want to cut myself open sometimes with the rib of Fred Marker and spill out my blood with his dumb old bone and then what? I don’t know. Just relieve the tension, I guess. Let some steam out. Rip open my skin so she will see that I love her more than the blood in my veins. More than the times I have said the wrong things or made her cry or misunderstood what she needed from me or what she wanted me to understand.

I am a Civil War.

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Show a little faith, there's magic in the night. ― Bruce Springsteen

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She loves me so much. And I’ll tell you what/ I’m old enough to understand that now. And to understand what universes I can claim as my own because I love her so hard in return.

The sun goes down and the sky keeps changing and we sit there in the depleting light as the world drains color into the sky and our eyes take it all in together.

Dark blue. Light blue. Orange and cream. Purple like dying lips. Gauzy yellows are day old bandages. Pink streaks race the sky/ unstoppably pink/ like the burnt skin of a crying kid from Philly/ his wounds so bad/ they put him out under the elm tree to die alone in the night.

I don’t say any of that to Arle though. I am who I am. But I love her so much. I never knew this was possible. Howisthispossible? I keep asking myself. On a rock in the field, I watch the western sky show us everything. Her breath in my hair, I feel so alive in these bloody fields. I think about the wine in the motel. I think about her skin on my skin. I close my eyes and breathe in deep and I feel my lungs fill with all of us, the living and the dead.

Christmas comes early to me out there. The lady at my back, holding me up. This rock hard and cold beneath me and her. I keep my eyes closed but I take it all in, the soldiers running and the dogs having a piss and the thighs on my hips and the dazzling sky and Christmas is everywhere rushing into the smoke, headlong into my soul, like country boys and city boys, too.

Out on a rock by a cannon in a field.

And forever this place will be us.

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