She’s got it all together now

Together was one of the words on a very early spelling test in my life. I don’t remember the year, or exactly how old I was, but do remember I was quite nervous about passing the assessment in which we’d be drilled on multi-syllabled words.

And, so even after being sent to bed, I pulled the covers up over my head, slowly clicked the red-spongy on my Dad’s heavy black flashlight so I wouldn’t wake my brothers in the bunk across the room. With light, went over my carefully penciled words on Pacon-white, skip a line, dotted and ruled, pink and blue lined newsprint. Sheets, the teacher perhaps, had cut into long halves.

For whatever reason, it donned on me that night I could divide the syllables and see what words come together in order to form the next meaning, in order to always remember, To—get—her. I would never again read the word together any differently, simply stated, being together meant going to get her.

I had a boyfriend who often wrote in notes that we were TWOgether, or Two-gather, the two of us, gathering, a LOVE effort of winding importance. Vines growing and coming together around a milky crescent moon hanging low in the sky over the bark-moist air of Black Lake, he pulling me in and whispering we are Twogether and though the word was not scrawled on paper, I knew how he was spelling us in his Morton capped head.

Where is this girl swimming in the creamy dreams? Signaling which action with her penned and spoken incantations, her bridging of gnarled roots, her diving under and rising with symbols, alphabet held like treasures high above her thirsty-for-air head, the written language like water rolling off the feathered backs of sleeping white swans.