Free Rough Likeness: Essays by Lia Purpura Page A

I could hardly remember my original creek, the one in my head, after seeing the real thing. Once a singular, clear image in mind, it was retrofitted by the smaller, actual one my friend showed me when I finally visited him after so many years. My creek, the one I imagined for him, was farther from town with a hill beyond it that looked out over the first knowledge of the West I stored up (with much help from Laura Ingalls Wilder.) There was a warmth and a fatness to my creek. It swelled easily in rain, was silvery-quick but not too fast, and you could jump it with a good, running start. As my creek rippled on, a warmth blew through the tall grass and up a small hill. And there, where the light sweetly scented the grass, my friend would sit, and I imagined, his wooden chair was weathered dove-brown and each year sunk more comfortably into itself. But at his creek, there’s no hill at all, not even a little swelling rise—just a few bends and he takes his own flimsy lawn chair along. And a beer at the end of the week. This creek offered no chance to gaze past it and refine one’s longing. No tall grasses with frogs singing to deepen the oncoming dark. There’s no actual loss here; I can always compose my original creek. It just takes a little longer now to call up. The sadness I’m talking about is way more forward, resourceful, inventive—ambitious in its identification of a site: there she is, the sadness says to itself, on her stomach on the lawn, idly considering a blade of grass . . . I’ll give her a minute, then let it rip: these once-bright greens, browning and dulling, these tender roots drying; a slow, stumbling bee near collapsing; scent of fall, torn bird’s nest nearby . . . knowing her , that’s all it’ll take.
    This next is awful—awful-ridiculous, but it has all the identifying characteristics of the sadness under review: that unexpected, swift arrival, and way of empatroning me. At the end of the far aisle at Party City (stay with me here), as I was leaving with my dozen birthday balloons—there was the Camp Rock Scrap Book and Journal . God-in-the-details and eternities-in-wildflowers, I swear this sadness was of the wrecking ball variety. Page 1: “Think of a person who has supported you and your dream to be a star. Write a letter to that person.” I considered buying the book for further study, but a talismanic fear arose—I cannot have this in my house—and I resisted. So I stayed and read more. I couldn’t help it. It went on and on with songwriting hints, inspirational sayings. The sadness was instant. It came in the shape of a soft, chubby girl, sitting alone (empty house, kitchen table), filling it all out, too shy to speak much, with a “pretty face” and “what a voice!” Sadness, that some kid with her stash of dreams would set about this task so dutifully. That she’d follow the steps with diligence and believe there’s a way, and Hey, I don’t know the way, kid! I kept thinking, and Let me tell you a secret: nobody does. That some adult was so well-meaning, so hoping to be helpful , so convinced of the wisdom of “writing it down as the first step in making it happen. . . .”
    As if writing it down will make anything happen.
    And here comes the woman who, outside Party City, stands in the median and begs at the stop light, holding a sign I can’t read at all . The words are too many, too small and bunched up.
    Yes, I have my glasses on.
    As if I don’t already know what it says. As if the story changes substantially from sign to sign, from begging spot to begging spot, or offers any real variation on “Homeless Please Help.” It’s that the sign’s impossible to read, and, in that way, useless in making her more real. It’s just one more reason things aren’t working. There she is, trying, and not knowing why even this is failing.
    The unhappy family I once lived next to should have made me sad, but didn’t. Because the parents and kids recycled a very small