Catalina Irigoyen

Lovers on the Mississippi, Kaleidoscopically Speaking

I caress the sky: lilac and sea-green fuzzy socks that I am convinced I owned in my childhood hang overhead, a stretched canvas that encloses comfort makes me feel like conversations with your mother do. Fluorite tones tinge the horizon / we grab fistfuls off the tablecloth and force them into vials, trying to conserve the memory of this sky, this particular tincture of summer in the farmland, the dying sun swallowed whole by the Mississippi.

We are at the brink of something unfamiliar and standing at the border; Illinois lies beyond an outstretched palm, New York is somewhat further, we will soon be two lines in orbit that do not touch: switchgrass waltzing in the fields, minds that exist in synchronicity / inert bodies apart. Patches of earth bleed into each other, our memories seep into the riverbank, are swallowed whole, to be excavated by our children once we begin to gray and wrinkle—will they understand this disjunction is what allowed for them to be? 

I count the miles to the farm from here and malfunction, perhaps I should count in the months it takes me to return. November birthed you into a lake and raised you by the river / its veins run with the laughs we’ve cast onto its ripples, our love may surface halfway to Louisiana. From the car, it is spellbinding and I cannot tear my eyes away. On the bridge looking out onto the Hudson, I look for a mirror to cross into that night: a streak of indigo and the glint of flaxen downtown lights, to my right the Merrill (where I first became a wedding date), a quickening heartbeat, a barn owl windborne among tall grass, caught in the headlights on our drive back home. 

I have yet to see a silo in the Bronx, everything is arranged in cubelike clusters and I miss deserted crossroads, the feeling of endlessness in caressing your dry knuckles while they rest on the divider, a homecoming for hungry hands. As the overlook and its two inhabitants weep, the land collects a potion of salt and bodily water in an earthen basin, calling it melancholia. I tuck a vial into my back pocket for the days when I need to remember your thumb brushing my cheek, and close my eyes to see the stars while Journey plays on the car radio.

Catalina Irigoyen is a New York-based nonfiction writer and Writing MFA candidate at Sarah Lawrence College. She left her native Argentina at age four and has since resided in five other countries, which has resulted in the crafting of many pieces about home and belonging. On any given day, you can find her gulping down an endless stream of Irish breakfast tea and listening to a variety of bops. Instagram + Twitter @cxtalinaa