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In the most sublime moments of my life, when I am lying in bed with my husband holding me on one side and my son on the other, with the sun shining in through the curtains and the fan slowly turning, feeling the warmth and the breeze and the touch of those I love on my skin, when I am so happy that my pleasure obliterates the proofs of my shifting mind with pure burning light, one image remains—The Mall. The white carpet and the cavernous quiet of the department store. The fragrant leather bags, the watches in soft boxes, the gleaming escalator with its metal teeth meshing and meshing again, the cold pearlescent tile, the sting of a thousand perfumes. This is what appears to me when everything else has been burned away. As if it is heaven. As if it is the only true image. As if it is my soul itself.

When I was a child, the mall was the singular point of access to the infinite. There was no other place you could go to decide who you were because there was no other place to observe the field of human desire. The mall was where you could see women getting Glamour Shots who wanted to have big, hard hair and small, soft dogs. Women for whom adornment was beauty. And in the next moment you could see the women in Banana Republic with their slim, mysterious pants who thought that simplicity was beauty. And there were women who thought that skankiness was beauty, and women who wanted to look like Nancy Raegan, and women who wanted to look cool. My mom wanted to look cool, so I wanted to look cool, too, but for every other kind of woman I saw I reserved a bit of myself for that vision of beauty, in case I wanted to return to it later. And I have returned to them all.

In the mall, choosing to be a different kind of person than the one you had been before felt as simple as walking into a different store. Not that it was easy to walk into a different store–it was very hard, but the project was clear, and it was possible. I had the feeling that if I could go into Banana Republic, the quality of the air inside it, the stillness in there, the presence of the clothes so near to me, the sensation of touching them, would empty me out and prepare my mind to receive the elegant secret. I knew I wasn’t ready for it yet, but it was there, for me, for a version of me that was just out of view. In this manner I imagined that every way of being a woman was waiting for me–that they would not only be there if I needed them, but that they would someday demand that I give myself over to each of them. Even now, twenty years after graduating from high school and never having gone to prom, when I see the terrible, glittering prom dresses lined up in rows, I think, I’ll have to choose one eventually. 

In the mall, it’s not that anything can happen, it’s that everything must happen. It’s that everything has already happened. Time has folded in on itself in the shape of the mall, and it’s all there–our child selves, our future selves, the dead. They have always been there, but you can feel the ghosts even more now, since the malls have been abandoned by the living. When someone you deeply love dies, a new feeling overlays every other feeling of being alive–the feeling that you’re not just here, but still here. You’re still here. In this way the mall, now more than ever, is a friend and twin to those who grieve, and as our friend it offers us a place where remembering and imagining come without effort. Of course it takes something–I won’t call it a gift–to see the mall for what it is, to see what can be looked past. My dad, who hated the mall, could not see it. I remember how he was there, withdrawn into an interior world, distracted but mindlessly tender, a reminder that his tenderness with me needed no mind to instruct it–it was essential. Perhaps he would even be offended to be invoked here in this ode; if he is, I invite him now to take it up with me when we see each other again someday, at the mall.

When I was very young I had a friend to whom I would tell outrageous lies, and she would listen to my lies and tell me lies of her own. Our unspoken agreement was that we would  never acknowledge we were lying or accuse each other of lying. She would say the floors of her house were covered in thousands of dollars in cash, and I would say I had walked to McDonald’s in the middle of the night and everyone there was a skeleton. We only lied to each other this way at lunchtime, one of us taking her turn to lie while the other took her turn to eat. Our business was to tell and hear lies, and when lunch was over, our business was done.

With some people our business is as simple as a shoe on a foot, and with other people our business is to build a house with wet spaghetti noodles. Having complicated business with someone can make you feel, wrongly, that you are a bad person, and having simple business with someone can make you feel, wrongly, that you are a good person. Sometimes you have been in business with someone through so many lifetimes that there is almost nothing left for you to do together, and you can just sit down. 

It can be tempting to try to engage in business with people that is not your real business. You may try to harden your heart against someone who has made a mess of things and find that you are instead writing out a long thank you card and spraying it with perfume. With my father I found that my only business with him was to love him, and every other feeling God scattered on the wind like play money. 

It takes a certain refinement of the senses to know when your business with someone is complete. In the park today I observed a man and a woman with a dog approached by an unaccompanied dog who seemed to have emerged from the brush. The two dogs went into the grass to play together, and the couple stood watching them for several minutes until the man said suddenly, “Alright, beat it!” Hearing this, the man’s own dog ran away and the strange dog came to lie at his feet.

I’ve been listening to Van Morrison for hours every day since summer, listening to the same songs over and over and really feeling like I am communing, through the dementedness of repetition, with the eternal Van. Saying the Van rosary. My parents loved Van Morrison and played his songs on many long drives in the car, so his voice transports me to a specific past and also, because of its power, obliterates time and space. Like being in love, listening to Van’s songs leads me, slowly, as if going a great distance, to a place of restoration, only to show me that the place is inside my own self, invisible to me only because I am God’s beloved idiot. Listening to Van’s love songs, I’ve tried to imagine what Van was like in love, and what it was like to be in love with him. I’ve tried to imagine whether I could have fallen in love with Van Morrison if I’d had the chance to. 

I love Van Morrison’s songs because they seem to be sung by a mean little goat being rocked by waves of transcendent beauty. This touches me because it’s how I often feel about myself as I move through life. 

Allow me to describe Van Morrison’s head and face: Van Morrison has a great big head like a toddler and weary, watery eyes overhung by heavy brows the color and luster of antique brass. In fact all of Van is shades of brass. As I’ve gotten older I’ve noticed myself becoming more appreciative of men who are different shades of brass. I had no interest in these men when I was younger. Now I find them very relaxing to look at, like static. There’s a kind of practicality and humility to being one color that means more to me now than it did when I was younger and had more energy to devote to the admiration of men. The most beautiful part of the movie Roadhouse, which I have watched many times, fast forwarding through the fighting scenes, is Patrick Swayze’s hayloft apartment and how his hair and body blend in perfectly with the light wood of the walls and floors, making him one with the apartment. When he is out in the world kicking the shit out of people, you must believe it is on behalf of the apartment, and find your peace there. I don’t mean to suggest a kinship between Van Morrison and Patrick Swayze. They have both given a lot to the world, and to my world in particular, but apart from the visual drone of low-contrast hair and body, what they have given is different. 

Trying to imagine whether I would fall in love with someone is an old habit of mine that has never left me despite its utility passing away. When I was young, there was a long period of time during which I was ugly and spent all my time with my mom and my brother. This was a very romantic time in my life because almost nothing had ever happened to me, and my imagination was undisturbed by experience. Thinking about whether I would fall in love with someone was a way of asking myself who I was and what kind of life I wanted when those questions seemed impossible to face straight on. At this time, my bedroom was bright orange and I kept a small poster of Van Morrison beside my mirror. On the poster Van is standing with his hands behind his back surrounded by tall trees. He’s wearing all white like a holy man and he has one of his most mysterious haircuts, a wavy bob cut just below the ears. I’ve always loved this era of his hair because it lays bare his unsuitability for life on earth. Van Morrison does not belong in this world and should not have to have hair, and this haircut is a witness to that. Back then, although I spent many nights listening to Astral Weeks on my headphones, Van was not the subject of my daydreams because he was not my type. But now that I have lived with my own taste in things for many years and guarded it stridently against its detractors I feel I have discharged my duty to it and can say with tenderness that I am a little tired of my taste, and it is a joy to remember that I am a little hunk of God playing at being a person named Shannon Burns and I can play at liking anything I want to including men who look like old, busted babies and are also assholes.

When I ask myself now whether I could have fallen in love with Van Morrison I am not asking myself who I am or what kind of life I want to have; I am saying a prayer of thanks for what is. If I am a woman containing a woman who might have fallen in love with Van Morrison, who in fact might have chosen someone like Van Morrison as the companion of my life, then the fact of what I have chosen instead is all the more strange and fragile, all the more to be protected and stood before in wonder, terror even. If I am a free blob of God who is trying on life, within whom there are resonances to match the resonances of any number of configurations of wise and dumbass choices, then the particular contour of  wise and dumbass choices I have made is something very very precious. It is like an elegant bird that is teeny tiny and also solid gold, a thing that has fought hard against stiff competition just to be, and is both haggard from the fight and resplendent in victory. Without meaning to, Van Morrison has placed the image of this bird in my deepest heart.

I’m trying to buy a donut from a mall kiosk called “We’re All Out of Donuts” that has many unusual donuts on display. The employees want me to buy a huge donut full of salad. They’re surprised I don’t want it; they think I’m a philistine. They show me a donut stuffed with larvae covered in iridescent blue sauce. They can’t believe I don’t want it. One of them says, “Well what do you want, then?” My dad appears, his hands in his pockets, cheerful. “Dad,” I say, “I’m not doing so good.”

To live you must send a part of yourself away to sit in a hot room alone in a gown and be sad forever. In this way you pay your debt, and you are free to find joy, to be a fool, to have a happy life. But when sadness creeps into your fool-life you are reunited with this exiled part of you and again you are your whole self: a calm, glistening toad at the edge of the water.

I had a dream once about Eyes Wide Shut, a very simple dream where in all the scenes with Tom Cruise walking briskly down the street in his long black coat there were movie posters for Eyes Wide Shut on the buildings behind him. It was such a boring dream that I remembered it as real—I remembered those scenes as really being in the movie. And it was natural to remember it that way because that movie feels to me not like a thing, discrete from other things, with definite characteristics, but like a place, a place to visit Tom Cruise’s face, where anything can happen. Tom Cruise’s face is beyond reproach because geology is beyond reproach, and Tom Cruise’s face is an enormous rock I found, that we all can find. Tom Cruise’s face is as useful and as good as a bowl. I propose that Tom Cruise’s face be added to the alphabet.

For many years my brother and my mom and I did everything together. We lived together and ate our meals together, we went on extremely tedious errands together, and we traveled together. If my mom went to the tanning salon, we went with her and waited in the car. A vision sometimes comes to me now of the strip mall the tanning salon was in, which was mysteriously high off the ground, with a long staircase from the parking lot up to the shop-level walkway, making the people who went into the tanning salon look like they were about to do something momentous, like accept an award, or graduate from college. 

Just a few weeks after Jacob and I moved in together, I went with my brother and my mom to Mexico for her birthday, leaving Jacob alone in our barely furnished apartment. When we arrived we found the house we’d rented to be much larger and more beautiful than we had expected, and we spent most of our day just lying around in it and talking about it. It was a house with courtyards and terraces and a rooftop patio from which you could see other people’s rooftop patios, and if you lay on the edge of the bed in the bedroom I chose for myself you could see a sliver of sky through the ceiling. The room was painted yellow and I wanted it to smell like corn or something else yellow like a banana but instead it smelled like my mamaw, which made me think for the first time about what it was my mamaw had smelled like and I determined finally that it was fabric softener. I got used to the smell and I even began to see a way in which it was yellow. I was reading The Moviegoer and feeling very romantic in that particular way that only an asshole like Walker Percy can arouse. There was a small square interior window in my room that looked out onto the hallway, and when my brother walked by he would stand with his head and shoulders perfectly framed in the window and ask me where I was in The Moviegoer, which he had already read. My mom and my brother were both always very nosy about experiences that replicated their own and would both get mad at me if I didn’t like something they liked, so both of them already having read The Moviegoer was a dimension of drama added to my reading of it. The day I finished it we had lunch in a beautiful courtyard with huge, waxy green leaves hanging about and touching our faces as we got mad at each other about The Moviegoer. It was my mom’s birthday and on the way home we stopped at a bakery to buy a strawberry cheesecake. The cake had a bright red glaze and was very heavy, and I was chosen to carry it. Walking down the street holding the cheesecake I felt completely beyond reproach for the first time in my adult life. The next time I felt that way I was holding a baby.

When we got home from Mexico Jacob had bought me several pairs of earrings and displayed them in weird places in the apartment. Increasingly it began to seem that Jacob, and not my mom or my brother, was the figure in my life in relation to whom I was obliged to arrange myself. Jacob never went to the tanning salon and never expected me to accompany him on errands. At first this made me angry.

A few times since Junie died I’ve caught myself feeling proud of her again, of how beautiful she was, and how often she wanted to be alone. And I feel proud of us, too, Mom and Dakotah and me, because I think Junie would have lived with someone else, somehow, if she had wanted to. 

The afternoon after she died, I went home to spend a few hours with Jacob, who had been home alone so much that week. I was doing very bad. He had bought and wrapped three presents and put them under the Christmas tree. We lay on the bed and I cried big red daubs onto his pink shirt. He made dinner. We listened to the radio and drew pictures of Junie. Then when I was putting my coat on to go back to Mom’s, when I expected him to say “drive carefully,” or “call you in the morning,” he said instead, “You are my life.”

When I see my own name it feels like seeing a shoe: something with a simple job that is doing it. I feel moved to say that it is also like seeing a shoe that I love. This is one way into loving oneself when no other ones seem to be available. If you’re in the right mood for it, the fact that other people have names can also be a way into loving them, but if I’m in that mood I know it’s my bedtime. 

Ben 

Ben belongs to a category of men I’m attracted to who look like those dried apple-head dolls. John Goodman is another one. Harrison Ford is almost there. Something I love about men is how they can look like hot dried apple-head dolls. Actually I want to say something else: Something I love about women is how we can find it hot for people to look like dried apple-head dolls. In the beginning Ben just seems like a shithead who’s sort of cute, grinning stupidly, touching his hair, shuffling, hands in his pockets, plaid shirt, that kind of thing. Fine. But he changes, slowly—at first you’re barely noticing, and you still think he sucks, and you don’t give a shit what’s going on in his storylines, and you’re bored. And while you’re bored something is happening—his hair is getting blonder and fluffier and beginning to blend in with his face and body. He’s becoming a hay bale. He’s bad at school and his dad is an asshole and he hates himself and he’s becoming a hay bale. He buzzes his hair and it comes back looking like it’s been blow-dried with a round brush. He’s getting older. He’s learning from his mistakes and he’s less afraid. His whole head looks like soft serve now. You love him. He’s still a fool, of course, like we all are. Absolute fools. It’s laughable how foolish we are, really, and it’s easy now to imagine yourself laughing about it in a patch of sun on a grassy hill with Ben beside you, wind-whipped and golden, shining like a mystical tree. 

Noel

How do we feel about pathetic men?  A psychic told me once that I have a weakness for pathetic men, but I think everyone is pathetic once you get to know them. How could you be anything other than pathetic? That said, some people are more pathetic than others and one of them is Noel. Noel is beautiful—more beautiful than Ben, in fact—tall and handsome, with big creature-eyes and a pleasantly stupid mouth, pendulous brown hair. But his particular physical beauty only emphasizes the fact that he’s Felicity’s pet horse. That’s all I have to say about Noel right now.