jacqueline goyette / essay

How To Solve A Day In Five Words

Down

2. From the sky on a clear day (compound noun): Friday morning and the light is filtering through the haze on my drive to work, blessing the Italian countryside with a barely-there glow. This is such ordinary light—the same light every day—but in the fog it feels sprinkled, carried, gathered—muslin that you squeeze out in puddles, the sun like a big round of cheese. The morning is dappled in it, and I drive through waves down the hill, moments above it, and then through it, and then out again. Back when I was young in Indianapolis, I didn't know the day could look like this—or maybe growing up I never looked at all, but here it is every single February—Italy is shrouded in mist. 7:45 AM and I am surrounded. Maybe this is what a vision feels like, a ghost, Mary Mother of God. Maybe we all see signs. Even the least of us. Even now. Words that come to us, spell their letters across our landscapes, scribble it tightly, leave us little clues.

4. in my chest (literal): It has been beating faster lately. I can feel it sometimes, when I'm sitting on the couch after a day at work, and it seems to want to go overtime, speak louder, tap my shoulder to make me listen. Sometimes I ask my husband Antonello to check my heart, to lean in and take my pulse, his breath fogging up my collarbone. I do a Google search to see if I'm normal: how many beats do we get in a lifetime? It tells me numbers I cannot comprehend: 100,000 in a day. 2.5 billion in a full life, each one counting down to our demise. It says to squeeze a tennis ball so I can get an idea of how much my heart is working with each singular beat. I sit with my cat Cardamom on my lap in the afternoon and we count together, our hearts of different sizes, different strengths. Our eyes meet and I count in a whisper, in Italian. Uno, due, tre. We could sit here, live a whole lifetime of heartbeats in the next twenty four hours. I hold Cardamom's paw, squeeze it too: like a tennis ball, but softer.

Across

1. an apparition (noun): Last night, I dreamt of my mother. It was a blurry dream, but I was in our church in Indianapolis in what felt like a closet—wooden doors opening, a long mirror. I was getting ready for a wedding, and I think it was my own. Like dreams do, the church turned into my living room, and my mother was there with me. In the dream I had forgotten entirely that she was gone, and instead I hugged her, touched her hair, ran my fingers through it (it was shorter, black with hints of grey: I teased her that it looked boyish) and I said I sensed something was wrong, because I must have known deep down that she was no longer with us, but in the dream I pushed it back, shook it away. She said nothing was wrong, what could be wrong? And I hugged her, held her, forgot how impossible all of this love was, told her I was so glad she was here. If I could go back now to the same dream I would tell her everything: the way we lost her, the back and forth, the years, all fifteen of them, that have passed too fast since. Or maybe I'd keep it just as it was, not say a word. Wake up to my heart beat and another morning without her.

3. largest city in Tuscany, center of the Italian Renaissance (360,000 inhabitants): Tomorrow I will take a bus there, alone (Antonello will have to work—he will meet us on Sunday) from the Adriatic to the other side of Italy, through the hills of Umbria, out to my father who is waiting in his apartment off of Via della Spada, visiting Italy for three months, in part to see me. We will talk when I'm there like we always do, down the sun-drenched roads of 9 am and he'll tell me that he plans to go home sooner than expected. I will listen and look around, watch the way this has become normal, meeting in Italy, finding the city filled with tourists, past the duomo, past windows that reflect me in different ways than they used to—this 45 year old body that I barely recognize. How our lives have changed. Now we step on these cobblestones, look out at the city: the carousel in Piazza Cavour, the artists selling watercolors with their own rendition of Tuscany in reds and yellows and burnt sienna, the tourists eating their hazelnut croissants, flakes falling on the bar floor like miniature blizzards of breakfast, coffee that is both bitter and sweet, the clink of the teaspoons, the clatter of voices. As we walk, my father's voice will come back. What do you think? he will ask, as if I have some say in the months to come, in the years. We don't get to decide. I'll hear my heartbeat again, growing faster. Catching up with the rhythm of our steps.

5. In the sky, so much light (a galaxy):  5 PM and I drive by the village of Recanati where hills fill the horizon, cut up and unfolded into origami towns. The fog is gone now. The sun glows halfheartedly, as if we know the day is done. At one turn on the dirt road toward home, the dandelions throw up their seeds and they stay there, suspended, entire constellations across my windshield. The dream of the night before comes back to me, like confetti at a wedding. I had forgotten for a moment—for most of the day—but now my mother is here. A breath, a beat, and I am young again—throwing seeds like stardust into the air in our backyard. Riding a bicycle on Indiana avenues, up the gravel alleyways. At night, catching fireflies. Sitting at the dining room table for scrabble with grandma. Eating Baskin Robbins in big peppermint bites. Holding my mother's outstretched hand—up the church steps, past the city market, through the streets downtown, brick upon brick, tagging along and we are small and perfect and rosy cheeked and (oh, for once!) we have everything. We are together and we do not know what life has in store. Don't tell us, please, how lost we are. How lost we will be. Hush. Let the seeds fall softly and let us believe, just for now, that there are no puzzles to solve. Don't wake us from the dream. Don’t break, not even for a moment, what is left of this evening spell.

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Jacqueline Goyette is a writer from Indianapolis, Indiana. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, and Best Microfiction and has appeared in both print and online journals, including JMWW, trampset, Phoebe Journal, Stanchion, Gone Lawn, The Citron Review, The Forge Literary Magazine and Centaur Lit. She currently lives in the town of Macerata, Italy with her husband Antonello and her cat Cardamom.