Otherplace: Boone - Telegraph Code
from: Boone Novak
to: Tina Salisbury
subject: telegraph code
Did you know that you pop when you sleep? It’s true. Every time you inhale, the tip of your tongue presses against the roof of your mouth, and when you breathe out, it makes, just barely audible, the slightest pop as it drops down again.
Did you also know that you can see your hair tying itself into little knots as it slides between your pillow and your cheek? You press your face against the cotton and dig against it, like you’re trying to make yourself a hole inside it, and I can see the knots form as though woven by the hands of an invisible fisherman: a figure-eight, a hunter’s bend, a half-hitch.
It’s funny the things that can endear you to someone.
I stopped for coffee on the way to work today, and there was an old man sitting alone at a table, dressed in the ancient uniform of a foreign army, perhaps from a country that doesn’t even exist any longer. He had a muffin on a plate on the table in front of him, and while I waited in line, I watched him. He was breaking off pieces of the muffin and dipping them into his coffee, which he would pop into his mouth without shaking off the excess liquid. Drops of coffee were trapped in the hairs of his beard, which was thick and gray like the ash-covered forest at the end of a fire. When he’d finished his breakfast, he dabbed at his rheumy eyes with a napkin, but used the sleeve of his old uniform to wipe his beard clean.
Are you going to be at the house still when I come back from my shift? Will you be on the sofa, reading a melancholy book about English sailors lost at sea in a small wooden boat? Will you be sitting at the kitchen table, drawing currents in a winter cloud of spilled sugar? Will you be napping in the bed, with your hair in knots and your tongue pressing a telegraph code against the roof of your mouth?
I don’t know why I’m telling you this, but I needed to say something to you other than I like to watch you sleep.
But I do very much like that anyway.
Latest 3 posts