My mother tells me she undressed another woman
at work yesterday, held her against the sink
as the office filled with the sounds of clattering typewriter keys
and the sharp puncture of staples into paper,
like the way someone bites their lip when they’ve been irreversibly wounded.
I’m building a cemetery in my own backyard
to fill up with all the different versions of myself
that will never be reconciled.
And sometimes strangers leave notes for one another
on the hood of a car, things like I’m having steak for dinner tonight,
I’ll leave a plate warm for you.
But the saddest one I ever saw said Kiss me, I’m bleeding.
The great Austrian physicist Erwin Schrodinger once devised
a thought experiment, a paradox, in which
a cat is placed in a sealed box
with a radioactive source and a flask of poison. If a single atom decays,
the flask shatters and releases the poison
that kills the cat. The observer cannot know
whether a single atom has decayed, and consequently
whether or not the flask has shattered.
Therefore the cat is simultaneously alive and dead at the same time.
When my mother informed me of her affair,
hands cupped over her mouth like a tiny bird,
afraid and confused and alone, I thought of the last note I found
on a stranger’s car:
Then I guess I’m not really alive or dead,
but a combination of both.
When I told my mother about this note,
she looked at me with sad eyes
and then
she laughed.