Take the inside out

They had the kind of love that didn’t burst into flames and end dramatically. It didn’t belch toxic gas or rumble along fault lines, a thousand tiny earthquakes to warn of one final eruption. Something large enough to make life extinct for a while.

Their love was nothing like that. It was the kind of love that died just a little every day. Something closer to the sulfur pits at Solfatara

If I was a mother goddess

Is it ever easy to be two? I guess we spend our whole lives being more than one, but there is something safe in the idea of one. One is self-contained and whole. It is like a nucleus, a mechanistic loop in the body. In the idea of one, we are sheltered from the notion that other ones brush up against us and we against them and that this brushing against one another creates friction and heat. Creates, solidifies, stabilizes concepts of cause and effect. My cause, your effect. Or is it the other way around?

The animals amazed me, down to the bird hopping through the threads of grass together and those two doves waiting out the storm together.

The sky thickened with memories and stories. Wind blew in off the sea and traveled miles inland. It rushed in the cracks of the windows and howled like a horror novel or a 19th century ghost story. Where the doors creaked incessantly. The first day of the storm was all wind and creaking doors.

I didn’t know that was normal and got up to inspect the house, thinking robbers the whole time.

The wind curled its fingers around the iron rungs of the balcony balustrade and shook it to an unearthly sound. No wonder Gaea and Chronos and Cyclops. No wonder Apollo and Poseidon and Zeus. This land made for epic stories.

And the burning fields and mountains made overnight.

Solfatara and Lago D’Averno fascinated us both. But for different reasons. I was entranced by the thought of going to Dante’s hell, of seeing the circles spiral downward towards the core and seeing flailing limbs struggling against the gravity of their misdeeds.

I was disappointed when we found a half living crater with mature trees and bushes blooming with Virgil’s Strawberries. Even they hung together in pairs at least. Seeming more comfortable in groups of four. The ones that were alone were more yellow than red and sat next to a barren stem stripped of its pulp.

We stepped out of the small forest suddenly. The trees drew a hard and definite boundary between the two worlds. I sighed and relaxed my shoulders that always bunched up around my ears when I was unhappy.

It was 10 degrees hotter on the Fahrenheit scale. The porous brittle dirt crunched under my shoes like breakfast cereal. The color drew me in.

I had pictured hell in fiery red, in flames, something closer to lava. Saturated. Bright and dismal. But once we stepped into the heated nothing, surrounded by shale grey tinted with traces of yellow and, near the vents that steamed, shards of brighter yellow and orange, I knew hell would be better in these dank tones. Closer to lifeless. The temptation of the sky, blue, and the trees, green, made the pits seem all the more lifeless.

You were excited and had arranged to look through sheets of data with one of the scientists working here. You waved me away the same as you do with gnats. “Go on, honey,” you said. “Have a good time.”

Then you disappeared inside a hut with the dark headed slightly pale Italian. The Neapolitans had big almond eyes and thin mouths. They had hard looks that crumbled as soon as yours didn’t. He looked at me with his endless eyes and bowed slightly before shutting the door.

I kicked some dirt and lugged my body over to the more active steam vents. The crystallizing sulfur stacked in shards. I thought about the door shutting.