Pulling away the curtain, revealing another curtain

You left a message on my phone that said I wasn’t allowed to write about you anymore. Or maybe your mother did. I didn’t actually check my messages or look at the caller ID or actually have a phone connected anymore. But I like to think that’s what happened while I scribbled on blank pages, the backs of envelopes, an old eviction notice.

Because look at what I was doing. I was incarnating and incarcerating you again and again. Shackled in words of my choosing. A homunculus of every bad feeling. You bled out onto the page, merged with people I’ve known and still know, written down how I wanted, crucifixion as creative nonfiction.

Look, I have exhausted you, and I wish I could say I was sorry. I put you on like an old sweater and I wore you out, which I mean that two ways. I feel like I should be ashamed. I feel like people should be calling me up to chide me. But it’s just praise and praise and praise. Oh he’s so honest, oh his pain it must be real, oh he really resonates. No one said how dare you. No one said I’m draining the blood from a good woman. No one said you are a liar for saying any of this is the truth and you are a liar for saying any of it isn’t. No one said anything at all while I stood up there and read these things I have written, these words I have shored up against my own sense of failure. It’s not like an apology would be anything but hollow anyway.

Occam was a friend of mine, but one day Occam died

I thought she looked best over breakfast, our tired old cartoon strip mugs filled with coffee and too much sugar, overcooked eggs on a plate with too much salt. She was a girl who took well to being disheveled is what, the way her hair goes back to the curls that she always fights against and the little bit of makeup she forgot to wash off is still smudgy around her eyes, but she caught me looking and stared down into her plate, pushed her eggs around with her fork and gave a plaintive quit it.

But I didn’t quit it. I thought I could look enough to catch something more if I only tried. Her covering her mouth while she chewed. Her staring into the middle distance in thought. Her wrapping her feet around the chair legs. I thought these things kept a secret.

Which isn’t that always the tragedy anyway? She could bear the weight of it, maybe, or she couldn’t. Each second I tried to give her a meaning grander than just being her was an assault. It was tyranny. It was my own failure to comprehend and accept reality as something worth believing in. No, I had to have magic at breakfast, magic at every meal, I wanted to be sick to my stomach stuffed with it. And I saw myself looking back at this moment from years later and wondering what had happened, never suspecting the easy, the obvious, the inevitable answer. What had happened was me.

The jihad of hands on sleeping hips

The heat of her back pressed against me was enough to keep me up at night, which what kind of person is it that would call this a denial of the way a life should go. It’s one of those things you have to hate about yourself after awhile, the way being happy felt something like an old and rusty anchor. I put an arm around her and scooted closer, got the smell of her skin by pressing my face into her shoulder and kissing it a little here and there. She didn’t stir.

What was I even at war with all the time? The self-assurance of chemical reactions and neurons firing all over the place, maybe. The things whispered back and forth, axon to axon. This is what you deserve. This is your identity. The mitochondrial masses cast their vote, the democracy of feeling lousy for no good reason.

I got out of bed and paced around, got a glass of water, stood in the unlit kitchen drinking it and staring at the one glow-in-the-dark magnet from our trip out to that cave system, how it was so wet and muggy underground. This is the reality of being alive. All that storytelling, all those moments that can be shaped into some kind of meaning, and then there’s this one. Narrative from a junk drawer life.

She called my name from the bedroom, and I set my glass down and went back in there. She half-asked what I was doing, and I said nothing, just awake for no good reason. She smiled and reached up to touch my arm. I put my hand on her hair. It made me feel like maybe I would make it through.

At the end of our mercenary summer

There’s rain, and then there’s drinking gin in the rain, the way the pine taste of it on your tongue takes you back to the Northwest and kills your brain cells for you so you don’t have to bother holding your breath for an extremely long time or sniffing glue. Which we were not depressed. That much must be said. No, we were drunks in the rain, and that’s quite different.

We passed the bottle between us, and yeah, we danced maybe I guess, and to be honest I hated the taste of gin but she didn’t and there it was. The back yard was starting in on being puddly, revealing how uneven all of it really was. Her hair was plastered over her eyes and dripping while she smiled with the bottle thrust up in the air like she was presenting it to god. It made her bellybutton show.

We grabbed at each other and spun around and fell over. Did you ever do that? It feels pretty good. In heaps is what. We lay there letting the drops hit our faces and force our eyes closed tight, and then we got cold, and then we went inside, and then we didn’t speak for an afternoon for fear of breaking the spell.

Christmas cards, ransom notes

The picture shows the two of us in matching shirts, terrible Norman Rockwell cheese. Ironically unironic. It’s from last year maybe but that’s basically okay for the purpose. I dump a bunch of them in the mail, some with addresses, some not. Some with directions as best I could remember. He lives on that one street with all the cars. She used to live with her sister but now I’m not so sure. Her sister is the one that had one of those looks she’d give from across the bar where she would just smolder and smolder but you never knew what it meant.

The girl in the picture who was you is smiling. The girl in the picture who was you has a big cheesy eggnog smile. The girl in the picture who was you knows exactly what that means. I throw some out the car window and wish the wind well. Wish the wind a merry Christmas.

I am drunk and I am driving and I am in the present tense. What has happened to consistency of voice is a reasonable question to ask. Cards go out the window and into the dampness of the ditch. The song on the radio is of a band I used to like before it was on the radio. I am that kind of person. I thought the girl in the picture who was you was aware, but she was not.

Many more moments like this one

I sat down drunk on the pavement near the bus stop, pulled a knit cap down over my ears, and waited in that dead part of the downtown night. After a few minutes I crossed the street to buy a sandwich and a six-pack of cheap beer before it was too late. A bus went by in the meantime.

I sat back down and ate my sandwich, washed it down with one of the beers. That’s when I saw her watching me from the benches. The bus stops in this part of town were lit up and plexiglass like they were from the future, and the light cast harsh long shadows down her face. I said what, and it came out maybe a little too hard, so I offered her a beer. She asked me if I was homeless. I said no, I’m just a degenerate of some kind or other. She looked around, slid off the bench to the pavement, and took me up on my offer.

We did the whole small talk thing there in the stone heart of the city while civilization’s stragglers walked by or took up the seats we’d abandoned, me a long time ago, her just that moment. I told her that sitting on the ground felt better because it got at the truth of what we’d done in all this building of things. There was beauty in it somewhere is what I said.

Suddenly I got this idea to head over to this unlocked fire escape I knew about so we could see the sun come up from the rooftop of some lousy hotel. I told her so. She agreed to follow.

When we got there they’d padlocked the thing shut again. We stood at it and had another beer each, worked through the different ways we might get it open or get enough height to reach the second floor landing. I asked her name. I could see the way the light would come in, first as a whisper, then staccato bursts between the different buildings, finally the sun coming over and around the edges and warning off another night containing another million possibilities. By this age, though, you’re pretty well locked in. Finally I said well goodnight, Claire, which I realized later wasn’t the name she’d told me.

Between the absence and the presence is the thing

There were the deadnerve days, an apartment littered with yesterday’s yesterday’s cups of coffee. I pressed my hand against the window just to feel, how cold the glass, walked around with most of my bed around my shoulders. I didn’t turn on the heat on account of how it dried out my nose and I didn’t like the smell. And also there was the money.

Then there were her days, the ones where the bathroom echoed forth a voice singing snotty old Alanis Morrisette songs, you know the ones about Joey Gladstone. She got embarrassed when I said I’d heard while light cut through the slats in the blinds. We would make love, and it would be about how long we could hold onto a conversation before losing the gasping thread.

There were probably other kinds of days, but really I’m talking about those two, which was which, which was true. My brain told me all the time how I wanted to die. It made compelling arguments. I did what I could to not listen. Every now and then she would touch my face or say something, I don’t know, it felt like a refutation or a spell. Two types of day. That’s what I’m saying. I knew then that one was doomed.

Life is sad. Here is someone.

The water was running along the eaves and dripping, raindrops as racecars. I stood there under the shelter looking up at them, how there are tiny dramas going on all around us that we fail to notice. I’m sure I looked pretty dumb to the other people coming out of baggage claim and looking around for old friends.

She pulled up in her fading Volvo and I fast walked over, taking a long step off the curb but still hitting the outside edge of a deep puddle. I got in and gave her one of those awkward getting-into-the-car-after-not-seeing-each-other-for-a-week-and-missing-each-other-even-though-all-we-did-these-days-was-fight-all-the-time hugs. The windshield wipers clacked out the passage of time, and I bit the inside of my cheek.

The way she drove was squirrelly with hard manual shifts that were fun for her, how she pretended at the precision of a machine, but caused me to tense my legs against the glove compartment. She said she was feeling drab and kind of sleepy, so I should talk, just say whatever came up.

I thought for a second and then said I like that poem by Tao Lin, the one about stealing from Lorrie Moore. I said I could relate as a writer. She said I was so full of shit sometimes with the self-involved writer stuff, which was said lightheartedly. I didn’t take it that way. A minute went by and I said sometimes I felt like I was dying faster than everybody else, and she laughed. She slammed on the brakes because the people in front of us had all slammed on their brakes. The wipers clacked at each end of their circuit.

Right then I almost told her about staring out the window of the plane watching the diorama landscape unfold, clouds over land, and realizing that there was nothing much for me these days, how maybe love was a finite supply of civility and trust and tensed knees in car rides. That all we had left was empty companionship and someone to pick us up from the airport. Instead, I asked her how work was going, and I listened.

Delivering all the dead letters

She was suddenly full of words all the time, like there was a pressure on her sternum pushing them bubbling out of her mouth. A happy plague of sentences is what. It lasted for three weeks or so before slowly dying off as she came to realize that the things she talked about didn’t have any weight, which they didn’t, but they did.

But those three weeks. At first it was a kind of miracle, the way we suddenly found ourselves awash in things to talk about after months of dry land. She told childhood stories, ones I’d never heard, like the one about the inflatable pool or the one about her dog eating a whole turkey and throwing up in her bed or the one about her uncle hanging her over the banister by her ankles and talking like he was Hans Gruber, which these were warm and film-grained memories that filled in the darkened places. She told about her dreams and her fears and how some of them were the same thing. She told little things, white truths, honey-thick and without fear of judgment or the pain of human loneliness.

You would think that after all those silent clinking dinners that I would have fallen in love all over again, that what would have happened would have been a soft slipping away of all the barbs and resentment. But come on. By week two I was on the couch watching TV asking her to wait for the commercial, but wait, have you seen this commercial? I was staying late at work, which I didn’t even have the excuse that it was my career. Week three saw the birth of mocking uh-huhs and rolled eyes. It’s funny the way we commit these tiny assassinations again and again. Actually I guess it’s not funny. But it happened.

I will be taking Thanksgiving week off so I can head to Las Cruces and celebrate genocide and imperialism and how great it is to be a white male with two of my best friends.  Updates resume on the 1st of December.  In the meantime, maybe you could tell some people you know about me and my writing?  It would help satisfy my constant need for attention and praise.

Come on and wave the damn torches already

She was always saying that we didn’t do enough things together, like maybe if we played more putt-putt or bowled under every blacklight and disco ball in town our problems would finally go away. It was autumn, and yeah, leaves were falling, and yeah, daylight savings time wasn’t doing us any favors, which maybe we could blame the sun going down so early every night for us looking at each other across the kitchen table and knowing we had the same idea.

The first time it was almost as a joke, but we got good at killing ourselves after awhile. Made an art of it. We would devote a whole evening, taking great fistfuls of pills and doing slow dances on the roof. Every morning, though, we’d wake up sweat-drenched in the noonday sun.

After we ran through our medicine cabinet we sat fidgeting on the couch watching the clock tick down the hours left in the three-day waiting period. His and hers handguns, hold in each breath, exhale and squeeze. The noise was something that we kept marveling at to each other. Did you feel it like it was inside your head like I did? Are your ears still hurting? God damn it was so amazingly loud. But we were among the living just the same. We tried a bunch of other ways, and then we started wondering if something was wrong.

We stumbled to the doctor’s office, sat in the waiting room holding hands and maybe a little happy again while impatient patients sat aghast. We didn’t blame them. We were covered in scars, rope burned necks, pockmarked livers, great sucking wounds in our chests. That last one’s a metaphor, but yeah, it felt good to be a team again.

And across town the abandoned grocery store is being broken into

She liked to give out awards in the way she pronounced and inflected her words, sentences as Nobel prizes. There was a warmth that spilled out around the edge of conversation that she didn’t bother to hide. I wanted to know her better, to be blanketed by her voice telling of the tattoos she was going to get, what she liked to eat for breakfast, how she had trouble opening up to people except to tell them she had trouble opening up. She bloomed in my brain like I imagine an artichoke would, though I’d never seen it happen and maybe it doesn’t really.

And this was us sprawled across the unvacuumed floor of my apartment, our clothes picking up crumbs and hair and bits of the previous tenant’s life. I wondered at what she would be leaving behind as we talked, would it just be microscopic cells or would it be hair in the drain and her mother’s recipes on my tongue and an extra toothbrush next to mine. I’ve always been one to overthink a thing that hadn’t even started, tracing the future of every moment to its possible endpoints. I thought about saying this while I looked at the constellation of brushed-off bits forming slowly on her shirt.

I was calling myself a writer by then, which mostly meant that I was the kind of person who couldn’t tolerate a job and who was most happy when he wasn’t. I spent most of my time staring over a great yawning gulf and trying not to slip into it, but I felt like ground was giving all the time and I was headed back to double-whiskey places. Traps traps traps. There I was, though, child-like and simple on the floor, hearing her talk, glad to hear her talk, aching for it maybe. I put aside who I was for awhile and listened.

Pull the cord to stop

She had a detachable nose. Or at least I suspected. The way it stood out from her face and kind of dominated you would think it was a design choice, like maybe she had a whole collection of them and today felt like a day for being striking.

I thought about saying this to her while she sat on a plastic bus seat reading one of those plain little books that had been re-bound by the library with each passing decade, but I’d learned a long time ago that I wasn’t that great at things I thought were maybe compliments. She would probably just had said Oh and gone blade-eyed back to her book.

I wanted her to be interested, though, to see that having something weird was better than being regular. I wanted her to have something to say about me that would be unintentionally cutting. How my hair looks like it’s trying to start a band. How I probably think my lips are closed but really there is a slight gap in the center. How I look like the kind of person who would be dressed better. I was itchy is what, not for a fight exactly, not for conversation exactly, not for love exactly, but for something.

Whitman sees ships at dock

I was sitting on a brick planter outside of her downtown office complex, that time of day when afternoon and evening depend on your relation to the hard-edge shadows of the buildings. The day had gone cold here in the shade, and I clutched at my elbows and kept my jaw tight against chattering. I hadn’t really planned on being here except that I was forced to drive into town for an unpaid parking ticket.

But that’s a lie, isn’t it? I knew my day would end up here from the moment I got the summons or the warrant or whatever it’s called when you owe the county a hundred and forty three dollars. Maybe it was low impulse control, maybe it was fate. I guess it depended on who you asked. Mostly I was looking for a justice in the world, for her to say or for me to say what we’d spent so many months in mutual nonexistence not saying. I sat there, tapping both my feet with hands thrust deep into jacket pockets, trying to keep my extremities feeling alive.

People started coming out of the building in spurts, like each elevator load was a pump of blood. These people probably hadn’t been smiling on the way in, but now some were, and I wondered how they lived their lives when so much time was spent in the thing they dreaded.

Then it was her, talking to a girl I met at a party once where I had kept my mouth shut and took awkward sips of beer. She was beautiful still—I don’t mean the girl from the party—she still walked with that bounce that worked against the sunken slump of her shoulders, how she never really wore makeup anyway and how her hair was blowing all over and how her nose was starting to go a little pink already from the cold. I didn’t want to be here then, I didn’t have the right. The silence between us had been the justice I deserved. She saw me and froze, not smiling, not frowning, just blank-faced recognition, maybe with her head going through how sadly I was presenting myself these days, how goddamn pathetic to be sitting on a brick planter unshaven wearing an old jacket and trying to work up the nerve to look away. This was just what I wanted, and it felt awful.

What epiphany looks like

She had painted a teenage boy at a piano all in Technicolor, he looked like a Von Trapp or something, and she wanted to know what I thought. I stared at the thing, which what do you say anyway? Every answer was wrong. The colors were good, but I was more interested in what was happening beyond the window on the back wall, it looked like something good was just out of reach. The boy’s dour face agreed. Maybe there’s the point.

I said I’m trying to understand your statement, but I’d like to know what you are trying for. She gave me this look and stalked into the bedroom all huffed. What else should she expect when she asked a question so loaded up with buckshot? That time I made the cake for her birthday, the one with the scrambled eggs in the middle from my inability to use a mixer, well when I asked her what she thought I hadn’t cried about the look on her face. And here she was painting more confusing scrambled eggs.

I went to the door and pressed hard into the jamb, which of course she was face down and rigid on the bed like an exclamation point. She said to go away, and I didn’t. I stood there, lonely, both of us trapped in our own understanding of the other, me slowly coming to realize that who I was and who she wanted me to be were different, her realizing it too, both of us waiting for me to apologize basically for not being an artist like her, to just say sorry for it. I found that even though I was, I couldn’t.

Depression era foods, like jello or meatloaf

She was looking in the bathroom mirror pushing the features of her face around with her fingertips. I asked her what she was doing and she said she was playing Picasso. She threw her arm behind her neck and let it dangle there at an odd angle with her eyes gone crossed, which I guess she was Guernica then.

I tried reaching around her for my toothbrush but she pushed me away with her hip. I tried again and she swatted at my hand the way you would a mosquito or a disobedient child. I walked out then, because she never realized how the things that were funny to her carried weight from time to time. Anyway my teeth could wait her out.

I went out to the balcony that of course faced out into the apartment complex parking lot. If I were on the other side of the building I could see the power lines running through an undeveloped plot of land that would be an office park before I got a promotion or went back to school or reached any personal milestone besides maybe a birthday. I realized then, and this was a typical thing to realize while alone on a muggy night with eleven dollars and three cigarettes that were all supposed to last until payday, I realized that I had gone nowhere throughout one third of my life and had no intent to make a go of it really. Then the living room light came on through the window, and then the television came on through the window, and I knew that she was sitting down on the couch waiting to put her feet underneath my legs for warmth, and all of it was okay.

Not an ending exactly but

If we have to talk about it, I found myself years later on a bar balcony overlooking a college campus, radio rap in the air from some car and used bookstore poetry spread out in front of me like a map of living places, which probably it was. If I had thought about it, I would be sad that I never much thought about it, but then that’s a paradox worth ignoring. I took a sip of my beer.

The traffic sounds, the chipped paint tables, the stale smell of smoke in my clothes, they felt good. The same with it being about to rain, being boxed in by dark dragging clouds coming from the north and west. It had been months since I’d seen a building taller than the corn factory with the raised letters in what I guess was the bad part of town, and that was another thing to feel good about.

The rain began, smudging the words I’d written about Elizabeth Bishop, who was as lovable as anybody I’d met. Life is like that sometimes. Life is a gentle lie replacing the ungentle ones. But that’s just sometimes.

Where was she? I didn’t know. Wasn’t my right to know. It didn’t much bother me. I gathered up my poetry and went inside. It was early afternoon, so the place was emptied out save for a guy and a girl playing foosball in the corner, concentrating on the game with cigarettes hanging from their mouths, laughing. They were vital and young. Her feet slid along the scuffed floor as she moved between the handles. He could reach them all without moving. They moved together, and the small wooden men moved with them, and the ball made sharp noises against the sides of the table. I guess I thought it was pretty beautiful.

Irresponsible with a heart is all

The worst part was there not being a worst part. Like how did we get here? I thought maybe if we got that dog then there would have been something to feel lousy about at least.

Look at it this way. I still couldn’t sleep at night, yeah, but I actually felt like getting out of bed sometimes. Looking at her across the table at that same damn coffee house as always she looked more beautiful, more alive, like I had taken something great and scuffed it like a sneaker. The question then is one of living with how the mistakes maybe weren’t mistakes, at least on a subconscious.

She asked if I had all the papers. We talked like old friends with a bitter lack of a future, ready to blame each other for things as a scholarly exercise. Every once in awhile she got those saran-wrapped eyes and didn’t talk for a second, looked out the window or picked at her fingernails painted blueberry dark and chipping. We both knew, though, that it was all reflex.

She said she had to go to the bathroom and could I get her a refill. I watched her go, looking for something new in her step or the way her body navigated chairs, and it wasn’t until she turned the corner that I realized I didn’t know her drink.

After all day at the beach

The room smelled of sea salt and so did we. It was patterned in blues and seashells, just that generic ephemera nautica. None of this is what I would have done, but that’s a time share.

Somewhere over the weekend we had been drunk and something happened, I don’t know, to make us more than just two friends getting away from the concrete and steel. If that had been the plan or what, again, I didn’t know, either for my account or hers. Maybe it was just remembering what skin smelled like on a day like this, the kind of thing I’d forgotten about somewhere and needed to be told again.

She was back in her bathing suit that set off her skin so she was all pink and brown, sucking on a hard candy from the restaurant that she had slipped into her jeans pocket without giving to the charity. She always did that small time larceny on the leukemia patient at the cash register because she said it was probably a hoax and someone else would cover her Jolly Rancher eventually out of guilt.

She rolled over and pressed up against me, her skin hot and I knew she was about to realize she was burnt, maybe send me off to find aloe now that things were different, but for now she kissed me with her green apple lips and we didn’t talk at all.

Thanks to everyone who came out to see me read with Joey and Mike.  We had a great time and no one died.

We're doing a second reading tonight at Pilot Books in Seattle at 7pm.  Should be not awful.

I wondered where I was worse off

I thought some things were easy that weren’t. I don’t mean like nuclear physics or putting together an entertainment center. I’m talking about how my perspective was you could slide out from under the emotional weight of a lie whenever you wanted and create another, lighter one. This is called callousness, I guess, or it isn’t. I don’t even know anymore.

It goes like this. I woke up next to her with one of those thoughts you can’t figure, like maybe I thought that the clock always goes still for a second or two before I opened my eyes to look at it, like maybe it waited on me to start up again. The kind of thing that seems true even when it isn’t, you know? I used to think I had control over just everything, like the only reason we didn’t have good weather most days was because it suited me. I thought I was goddamned Zeus or something. I was full of illogical thoughts and the illusion of control is all.

I was there in bed listening to her deep breathing and looking at that clock when I realized that the whole of my existence was a path I could not see. Every time I made a choice—the choice to get up, the choice to roll over and wrap her up in me between the sheets, the choice to keep still right there and let the whole bleak truth of life wash over me some more, well, they were all made blind. Even if I could be childish enough to believe that I had a thing like free will, it didn’t much matter overall.

But my problem with the lies and the emotional weight. I didn’t ever lie on purpose. It was only that words were never enough for the truth. Actions either. There’s too much truth to tell to even try to tell it. This is what I was thinking when the clock stopped ticking for four or five seconds. I counted in my head. I never felt more alone.
________________________

No update on Thursday.  Sorry.  I'm on a book tour.

BOOK TOUR

Alright, here's the story: tomorrow I'm leaving for west coast leg of The Loose Teeth Press Fall Reading Tour. I'll be hitting up the following dates with the excellent writer (and my future hugmate ) Joey Comeau and notorious publisher/drunk Mike Lecky:
SEATTLE, WA STOP
Tuesday, Oct 13th, 3:00pm
Pilot Books
219 Broaway E
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=138688946286&index=1

PORTLAND, OR STOP
Thursday, Oct 15th, 7:00pm
Reading Frenzy
921 SW Oak St
(I have heard a rumor about free beer at this reading)
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=112788939398&index=1

ALTERNATIVE PRESS EXPO
Oct 17th and 18th
San Francisco, CA
(we'll be hanging out mostly with the Topatoco people)

SAN FRANCISCO, CA STOP:
Sunday, Oct 18th, 4:30pm
Booksmith
1644 Haight St
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=271357790552&index=1

After that, I'll be heading back to my real life at doctoral school, but Mike and Joey will continue on to Los Angeles (and probably Tijuana if we're being honest). They don't have a venue for their LA reading yet, so if you have a place it would be cool if you emailed us.

I hope to see you guys there! Joey's going to read from Overqualified or from Lockpick Pornography or from It's Too Late to Say I'm Sorry, and I'll be reading from my novel Apathy and Paying Rent and a few vignettes here and there. It will be pretty great, probably.

Flip a switch and wait

We bonded most easily over hatred. We hated Becky, we hated anything to do with the word fusion, we hated the government, we hated ourselves. It was like junior high all over again, just the music was a little better and we drank coffee instead of Mountain Dew.

We would walk through parking lots with retro sunglasses on and just bitch and bitch until we got to the car. We weren’t fit for the world, it hated us as a matter of course, and we were going to kick with earnest futility at all the spiderwebs. This is how we justified making the faces our boss might make during sex. How we had a whole routine of noises to go along. Meanness suits the misfits.

One day while we were sitting on a coffee shop patio talking about reality television, which we only watched it so we could expend most of our mental capacity in complaining about it, I saw two birds hopping around a scrap of bagel, taking turns picking at the thing, you know how finches or whatever do with the bright and curious tweaks of the head. Something about those two dumb birds got right in under my skin and lived for a little bit. I told her I thought it was a pretty good scene, and she looked over her shoulder to see. She agreed, but she didn’t feel it violently like I did, and that got me full of wondering about what her love was like, if it was tender or subdued or an ocean or firecrackers or dying. I painfully wanted to know.

She had these great and happy eyes

What I did first was I took a scalpel and made a y-incision that ran along her collarbone and then down her chest to the groin, all of which had lost the pull of sexuality they'd had in life. You have to yank harder than is polite, cutting in under the skin as you go.

Her face under those bright lights was unfair, which I meant without justice. Her skin had lost its color and was fair, like it's startling how blood is subject to the laws of gravity even before it's spilled. She looked like an old computer on the inside, full of vacuum tubes and thick wires. I said this is who you were to no one in particular as I revealed the contents of her that she never shared in life.

I use garden tools, sometimes, like on the ribs. Power tools for the skull. I slice the organs down finger-thick, place it all in trays of offering. I find out why. I find the tiny surprises, sometimes. I say I'm just doing a job. It's such a selfish thing to do, though, taking people apart. Enjoying it. If I weren't such a coward I would cut myself open too.

Like a love letter left in a tip jar

She said tell me how we met. She was always asking me questions like this, the ones she knew the answer to, probing my recollection. I wondered if she was hoping to find some seam to pull away, exposing baseboards or rotting out foundation or what. I said you tell me.

And the story she told while we drove in the midnight rain weary from all day in the car and neither of us bothering to change the music when it ended, well, that story was one worth telling, it had a beginning and a middle and no end. It was about youth and love and tripping over honesty unexpectedly. All these little details. She had liked my shirt. She had thought it was funny when I had dropped my keys while trying to put them in my pocket, but she hadn’t said it. She had thought I seemed warm when I laughed but that it was somehow hard for me to do.

Lightning spread out from the clouds, leaving us both momentarily lost in the pattern fading out into that closed-in darkness. She stopped talking long enough for me to consider what I would have said. It was lousy. That much I knew. It would be blunt and factual without any truth. She hummed a few notes from the song that had ended half an hour before. Then she started in again, and in between her sleepy words there were seams, and if I pulled at the seams, I would see what it was to be good and human and happy.

The things Truman said

You peel back enough layers of a person, I’m talking the fine hairs and the outer skin and then subcutaneous tissue, muscle to bone, you expose enough of that hollow cavity below the sternum to the atmosphere and you find some ugly truth, some thing that has gone unforgiven or that you can’t reconcile. That’s where we were, me standing with my wallet in hand with one shoe untied waiting for her to say don’t go from the couch. What kind of people were we is what I was thinking to myself, what kind of people need these theatrics to get by?

We stayed that way for a long time, long enough that there’s no point advancing the moment, both of us grown stubborn in the face of our own selfishness, which I guess let’s call that self-preservation. I got the feeling that this is the snapping off point, that whenever time started up again I would do something with some resonance.

In my head I ran through the reasons each of us was to blame. It came out about how I expected. Fruit flies traced lazy arcs around the sink. She said don’t you dare think I’ll chase you with a hard edge, the voice she reserved for talking to the manager. I tensed my hand around my car key, ready for nuclear war.

There's always new art on the overpass

We drove for like ten minutes in silence, both of us expectant for something to happen that would break one or both of our resolves. Our arguments these days were like Morse code with spotlights in a dead dark sea, detached and full of pregnant pauses that did most of the meaning for us. What I’m saying is the words were basically a terse afterthought when neither of us had much desire to mount a rescue.

She said you always go too far with a metaphor, like figures of speech actually are worth saying. I said they’re not, and I said it as a question, and she said good God you really think imagery is the same as honesty don’t you. I told her she could pick up her own dry cleaning in the morning but didn’t much mean it. She looked out her window and I checked my mirrors.

She leaned back and put her feet on the dash, which I know she knew it made me nervous but maybe she just forgot. There’s a part on the freeway where you just suddenly notice you’re downtown, almost like it’s a magic trick of city planning, mirrors everywhere to hide the fifty story buildings until the moment you pass the signs for the zoo and the aquarium and that one lawyer’s billboard, the one who wears the golf cap and hablas espanol. Even though the buildings rose up out of meanness and fulfilled the promise of decades, even though this place once made us feel so small but still alive, even though there were a million things worth noticing in every instant and every foot of pavement, we didn’t.

Take a thing and break it and call it art already

Sometimes you do a thing and later realize just how deadly. Like the old chop-socky kung fu move, I took about a hundred thousand steps after the blow and then my heart exploded, not like into shards like you visualize a heart breaking but expanding outward suddenly and tearing the muscle. Of course it was a metaphor, but it’s also exactly what happened.

So I stood there in the grocery store on that rainy Sunday morning looking at a box of brown sugar instant oatmeal, and it was a full-stop pop that I felt in my whole body like I was nothing but a rubber band and a pair of scissors, which considering how violently I loved and hated the memory of my old life always there just beneath the surface of errand running and paydays it was no surprise that this kind of thing would happen eventually.

I thought how did I get here, one of these shuffling shoppers alone with his list. What was I hoping to accomplish? I’m talking, as always, about her, the one I thought I’d be willing to die for. It turned out, though, as I took my last undignified breaths with a distended heart and dropped that box of oatmeal that what I died for, what I was always going to die for, was my foolish need to be a lonely and unsung tragedy.

After that it rained for years

It was a year of conversation, a year of dragged-out lousy days, afternoon suns and bad coffee. I felt bad all the time, I felt bad about feeling so bad around her, I felt bad like it was the answer to something. I guess it was.

We talked about things that didn’t matter, just to talk I guess, like at what point do you call a thing a tragedy. She wanted the word to have a concrete scope that suggested profound human loss. She said losing a thumb doesn’t count as tragic, for instance, and I said she only thought that because girls didn’t really need thumbs to explore their bodies. She worried the word would lose meaning, and I reminded her that insurance companies had itemized the term awhile ago already. We were complicit in all things, a crime spree of language left in our wake.

Every once in awhile some staggering truth would come out, like what happened to her in that bathroom or the circumstances of why I stopped sleeping at night. We said these things casually, just dropped in real quick when no one was looking. We had grown up great victims, and we found small pleasure in shocking each other here and there, which these things were multi-purposed and nuanced hand grenades of love and trust.

The thing about a conversation that lasts all year is that it’s dangerous, like how sometimes you start thinking about your breathing and then you have to keep thinking about your breathing until you become sufficiently distracted by a television set or another semi-autonomous process. What I’m saying is it becomes the focus of your existence, and then one day it’s gone, leaving you oxygen-deprived and wondering. The whole thing is a tragedy.

Mise en place

What I did was I chopped up an onion, some garlic, tomatoes. I went out to the porch and grabbed some fresh basil, tore it into little pieces while I chewed on the inside of my cheek and thought about what it would mean if heaven was just a synapse in your brain that fired off when you died. I guessed no one would really care either way before long. It would just be another test of faith or whatever.

The best part was the smells but I didn’t take notice. I said a little incantation over the pot, the kind of thing a body does that’s made for being alone. I cracked a knuckle against the side of my face, which I guess that’s an odd way to do it but it was my way and my other hand had a spoon in it.

Doing a thing yourself is better than doing it fast or particularly well, or at least that was my new thing since I’d tossed out all the jars in the cupboard and replaced them with a seminal kitchen full of vital raw materials. I got a beer from the fridge and opened it with my shirt while the water made headway on a boil.

What if eternity was just the last second of your life? I thought this was a good question for asking, and when she got home I would, no matter that it was one of those questions that might spotlight how unlike each other we were and make my homemade pasta bitter in our mouths. You have to do a thing if it’s worth doing.

An announcement made during a brief lull in the waves

Hey everyone.  Allow me to drop the blog posture for a second and make an announcement: I will be going on a west coast book tour for Apathy and Paying Rent from Oct 13th to Oct 20th with the always fantastic Joey Comeau and the always terrifyingly blackout drunk Mike Lecky of Loose Teeth Press.  We'll be stopping in Seattle, Portland, San Francisco (where we will be attending the Alternative Press Expo, probably sitting with the Topatoco people), and Los Angeles.  We will read from our respective books and then we will hang out with you and have awkward conversations.  Tell everyone you know.

www.looseteeth.ca/seattle
www.looseteeth.ca/portland
www.looseteeth.ca/sanfrancisco
www.looseteeth.ca/losangeles

This one takes some years off

I saw her again today. I was sitting in that same coffee shop, just kind of hung over and jobless making love to the free refill policy. This one barista thought I was shit, but most of them were friendly and I had headphones anyway for when he came around sweeping under my feet, which really who’s shit in this equation when I just want to be left alone with my bad day.

There was a guy outside smoking, one of those guys who wears glasses on purpose, you know? A turtleneck wearer. Anyway, he’s outside smoking like he’s waiting on someone, and then she’s there, just kind of appeared between sips or when I was staring at the oily surface of my coffee.

She smiled for him and they talked for a minute. The sun came in through the window like it might get violent, you know how it’s blinding at this time of the afternoon. It felt like a camera trick, one of those shots film students go on about.

They made to go inside and when he reached for the door, getting it open an inch or two, she pushed it shut in his face and tiptoed herself a kiss, which knocked his glasses off. She smiled up at him and he got all flustered and the sun came in all over the room and that asshole barista came by with a wet rag to wipe down the table I was still using, and that was that for whatever I felt about sunlight.

The astronaut's angry smile

Some things you’ve got to get some distance on, which I guess that’s what I told myself as I put books on shelves, filling holes, squeezing together the spaces where her art books would go or how there used to be two copies of Franny and Zooey, both worn out like old sweaters but one treated like a thing to hold on to.

I made coffee with the kitchen light off, which it was late already. I just stood there in the dark watching the orange light under the switch, gurgling sounds and me fighting this nervous feeling of now what. It was a stupid thing to do, now done, a hard-fought right to be left alone, and look at me so damn smart in the dark.

I’m sure someone once said that things that aren’t permanent are still worth doing, or that without change we wouldn’t be able to whatever, but that guy is probably full of shit. I stood in front of my books holding a dollar-store coffee mug in my hands saying out loud I’m gonna be an alphabetizer now, make some sense out of all this fiction. My hammer, my nails, my shelf. Everything in its proper place but me.

Wayfaring is just kidding ourselves

We took roads west like it was a thing, like there was some solution in the sore backs and truck stop coffee. We bought maps when we got there, slipping into those states that were cut into squares like brownies. New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, Utah, whichever ones came our way. If we liked the name of the town we went. That’s how we saw Ruidoso and Tuba City and Shipwreck and Zuzax, which some weren’t worth the trouble.

We ran up the mountains to be close to the sky. We ran down them again, rushing into valleys and canyons. We ran from the city, and the further from it we were the more lost and alone we felt. We didn’t say it to each other. I didn’t even know what she thought, really, I just liked thinking that I could speak for us this way, like we had some shared poetry in our hearts.

We drove through new suburbs raised out of the scrub, houses like the ones back east, unacceptable to nature for not being worn out and beaten by the wind. We drove through the self-imposed mockery of Native America. We drove through national parks. We drove through all these places while the shadows played like children on the hills.

What does your breakfast cereal say about you?

The coffee tasted like garbage here, but the room was mostly blank space, a disaffected gray tone of light jazz and chairs selected from a corporate catalog. And that's what I wanted anyway. It's part of the allure of a place like this, just how nothing can you be.

I wanted to be part of the problem now, which maybe that wasn't true but I'm saying it is. I wanted to be all the things she couldn't stand. Self portraits in the bathroom mirror, holding the camera off to the side like this. Lying to the customer service rep to get a well-deserved late fee waived. Black and Mild cigarettes. Mousy french girls playing ukelele on the internet and the people who love them. Corporate coffee. These were my new religion.

Because who knows better than the zeitgeist how I need to be loved? What were we doing anyway hiding out from the things like that, the ones we liked or the ones we were told to like so we liked. I could listen to vinyl if I wanted, buy a fixed gear bike. I could buy my vintage clothes new. That wouldn't be any more false than eating strawberries in the park while the wind blew leaves to the ground.

You strip away enough layers and all you've got left is peer pressure and cross-referenced marketing graphs, but still there's a security in making sure we're all paying attention to each other up and down the line. I couldn't say the same about the way my hand felt on the small of her back, since what's the value in a thing that's gone. I looked down at the table where somebody had scratched the words comforts are just denial, which I don't remember writing that but it was probably me.

She got what was coming for not going

I had a mouth full of mistakes that I was going to drop over our conversation like a sad and reckless payload, landing wherever they may. Maybe it was a mark of who I am or maybe it was just gender patterns that I thought in war metaphors a lot of the time, but at any rate it didn’t much help me being drunk and more than a little bitter.

I thought the central problem of the human condition is everybody gets raised all fucking wrong, one way or another. I thought it while I sat on the bathroom tile leaning against the tub with her standing over me, I thought we’re all miserable, we all hurt and hurt and hurt, which I meant that as transitive and intransitive both. It was a goddamn reflex for me to say what I was about to say, and then all the things that eventually came after, like what was I but one of those sea anemones, if those are the ones that just react to the current all the time and jerk their tendrils in at the sign of danger. I’m no zoologist.

But let’s watch this how it played out through the way my brain saw everything as growing constantly like an optical illusion and my words slurred a little and I stopped mid-sentence to consider if I was or was not saying something I wanted to say. I didn’t look at her face was all, I was brave enough to say the stupid thing but not enough to see what it did. I didn’t see the way her concern for me that had held fast all the way home from the party, through the half-conscious singing of songs that weren’t on the radio and pulling her hair by mistake, I didn’t see that become a deep and shriveling pain when I said the only reason anybody would talk about your paintings is because you look like a go-to-the-back-bedroom-and-give-a-blowjob kind of girl, so don’t expect that guy to actually call his gallery friend. And then I was in the bathroom alone, head lolled back on a loose neck thinking about what it would feel like to throw up my whole vocabulary and never speak again.

The Baader-Meinhof phenomenon

I wrote I saw your face in the wood grain of my kitchen table, and then I crossed it out. The sentence I mean. I wanted to hit on something common but compelling, and I thought pareidolia was a good start, but there on the page it came off as a contrived and quotidian lie, which I wanted to seem artful and smart and maybe a little mysterious I guess. All week I'd been making a list of words that sounded impressive.

I was seeing her everywhere anyway. She was my barista, then she was at the grocery store buying ice cream while I did my weekly trip, then she was riding her bike past the the laundromat, plus it's true about the kitchen table. It was like suddenly she'd metastasized into the gaping commonplace wounds of my little life, or else she was always heading there in a peristaltic motion that brought us together slowly like heart beats. Serendipity.

Or else, and this is just too much for my self-concept and how much I'll trust my brain ever again, she was always there at the grocery store and the laundromat and the coffeehouse that always smelled acrid and burnt, which that drove away the youth groups at any rate. She was always there and I was blind to the knowledge until I'd lost my headphones and felt forced to make eye contact. That's the kind of thing that can make a man wonder what all he's never paid attention to. How to make it up to a girl like her. I thought she'd understand if I just knew what to call it.

Survival never goes out of style

I felt made from old plaster most days, some depressing building rubble poured into a wrinkled suit. I scrawled the words to songs in the margins of inter-office memos, sometimes on ones that weren’t mine. I came across her indignant in front of the coffeemaker, which it must have been her passive-aggressive note that I put the Jawbreaker lyric on.

She said things like what kind of an asshole would and who the hell do I work with that doesn’t and other things about coffee pot politics. She was talking like to her self, mostly, too fast for me to answer anyways, looking at her note taped to the cabinet. I poured myself a cup, the last of it, and walked off.

She followed me, which I was thinking what a fluorescent gray day I was having anyways, so when she started in on me not brewing more I almost had to smile. Her face was so intense, and it was just Maxwell House, you know? She was seething, blood turned her cheeks and throat red, and I thought that here’s one of those moments.

We walked together back into my office, me turned to look at her with her straight ahead and her voice all hard words. I sat down at my desk and took a sip of coffee, which tasted really good right then. She petered out and stood there, dazed, for like four seconds. When I didn’t say anything back she turned and stormed out, slamming the door, and I watched her angry hair flip-flop down the hall through my window, wondering what could have made her so bitter and lovely.

Mother's maiden name, high school mascot, first pet

I was sitting at my usual table chewing dumbly on the space between my left thumb and forefinger when she came in and started poking around in the different whole coffee beans they had for sale in these troughs that worked like automatic dog food bowls, which maybe me seeing them that way was a thesis statement but I doubt it. I spent every day getting my light and heat from ugly buzzing fluorescence instead of the sun, from the time that the morning was thick and black like an old television screen until the sun was being swallowed up by the shadows of the buildings downtown, so if I liked to come out here on my day off and sit by the window drinking black coffee and writing down things I wished I could afford to do with myself while a man played checkers in the corner with his grandson then the least she could do was never exist again ever.

Maybe God had done me that favor or maybe he just liked to watch my hands shake, which I can’t blame him. I wrote down see Tibet and find something like zen while she browsed. Our eyes didn’t exactly meet but I knew she saw me when she turned around because there was this flutter step of I don’t know.

What do you do? I wrote down take a lot more photographs with a nice camera while she placed her drink order. The backs of her arms and legs were a darker brown than I had ever known them to be, a rich and natural tan, and I wrote down fire a nuclear warhead at the sun. It was petty to feel betrayed by the employee who made her drink, but traitors come as they come.

I knew she wasn’t looking on purpose, and she either faked or made a phone call on her way out the door. That’s what the years and all that love and pain were worth to her. All that sharing of what we were, how we were experts on each other, the top minds in our field. She didn’t turn and look back but I waved out the window anyway, half-hearted and partway dead but a greeting for whatever that means.

Poor Richard pretended to be important

My job when we met and for a little bit after was I wrote maxims that were printed on the side of paper cups, which what more honest thing was there than decorating future garbage with empty wit. I took ironic pleasure in it, had pictures of Franklin and Rochefoucauld on my desk, thumbed through almanacks looking for a saying worth modernizing.

Like what, she said, an email in the inbox is worth two on the server? This while she cut up onions in my dank and cluttered downtown apartment with me making rice. Normally I would make fun of my work too, but on a fourth date cooking dinner together I didn’t much want to feel ridiculous about my worthless job and how I took such pride in it in secret. She said I’m sorry that was pretty bitchy wasn’t it, and I said no, I know I’m superfluous, a cheap appropriator.

She said she liked little touches in the day, the way it made a brain seem worth having. She sniffled from the onions and I pushed the button on the rice cooker, and then we were turned around and kissing, which the kitchen was small enough that we didn’t have to step towards each other to do it.

We kissed like that for a minute, her breath a little sour and mine probably too. I wondered what she was thinking there with her eyes closed and her tongue playful, whether she was thinking how she meant what she said or of how else she would have to patronize me or if she was even not thinking at all, like what if she was able to enjoy a thing for what it was, what if when she kissed she just thought about the kiss. I didn’t know what to do with someone like that.

The best kind of fairy tale

We did it all in one day. We got up early, both of us unable to sleep, and we added up all our credit and our savings. We arrived at a number, and we went about doing that which the number required.

At first it was easy. We went to a bookstore and spent hundreds, got a nice set of earrings for her. We promised no electronics but bought a new TV anyway. After that we had to get creative. We bought a palm tree that was sure to die since we didn’t have a place to plant it. We bought a half-dozen piñatas at the grocery store along with a case of chocolate bars and some frozen egg rolls I always wanted to try. We went over to the flea market and bought the suit of armor that had sat unsold for months outside and probably wasn’t for sale until the old woman in the straw hat saw our enthusiasm and joy. We gave her some chocolate just because.

We added up the receipts with a calculator, spent down to about the last penny except for seventeen cents that we found in our car’s console, which we threw that out the window.

We got home and put it all in the living room and kitchen, sat on the floor eating chocolate and Chinese takeout and our own egg rolls. She pointed at the pile with her chopsticks and said look at our net worth, and we laughed. Maybe in the morning we would get scared and return what we could, maybe we had just committed the gravest of errors in the history of man, maybe this all wasn’t funny, but we both bent over and laughed in the face of reality until we were flushed red and holding each other as bravely as we knew how.

This is every night

I woke up thinking someone was standing in the corner. She was asleep still, slowly edging me off the bed like usual. I thought it meant something that she was always filling any space I gave up, like I was dating Argon gas. The corner was empty, because what is this a horror story, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that the room should anyway be vacated.

I left her there with the doom of my imagination and walked into the bathroom, maybe quicker than was reasonable in the dark but what can you do. With the bathroom light on I felt weird about looking in the mirrors, and I checked behind the shower curtain, which it’s always these just awake moments where I get most irrational. I tried to tell myself that this indulgence would only be dumb until that one time I’m right.

I used the toilet and thought about waking her up, but then I’d be chastised for being silly or for not getting her out of there immediately, depending on how serious she took this particular dream. She was always back and forth on if they were real at all.

After that I watched television on the couch, some fake health show set up like a news interview so I would buy a supplement, just kind of lost in the rhythm of their back and forth sales pitch. I woke up to her nudging me and looking sad, like what is this about. It’s a new betrayal, sleeping alone, which that’s not what I’d meant at all.

Save me from the rest of my life

I said this hotel has a Reagonomic shower while I jammed a towel in my ear and watched her read Anna Karenina on that pastel paintbrush bedspread. She hummed a basal acknowledgement, which I don’t know what I expected when I thought that up in the shower but a realist would say that what I got was about right.

Earlier we had kissed in the ocean and later we would eat in view of the beach, but those things were relative to this moment. I scrubbed the towel over my head, thinking how hotel towels were always so worthless and it’s always which one of these is the bath mat or is there not one. She had her chin tucked into her chest, brows furrowed and eyes flicking across pages, one leg resting on the other, and I realized I should find something to do but didn’t want to.

I said we should have gone to Russia and she barely said the word why. I said you’d like me better in a bread line. She said I love you dummy, and I went into the bathroom without saying anything back. I wondered how many chapters I would be waiting out, which wasn’t fair at all because I liked to read too just not on vacation.

I was brushing my teeth when she started screaming oh shit oh shit like she was on fire. I hit my shoulder into the doorframe on the way out of the bathroom and lost my towel, got toothpaste down my chin. When I saw her she was in the same position, book open on her chest, but she was smiling into the pages. I had that shaky nervous feeling, like my body was ready to put a rapist’s eye out with a toothbrush, and I stood there dumb and naked watching her smiling face and waiting for her to look up at me. She did, but she didn’t look for long before she went back to her pages and said really quiet, she said do you love me, and the way she asked it was with a frailty I hadn’t known from her, and I knew I did and she did and that those photographed vacation moments weren’t at all worth remembering compared to this.

I hung up the phone and got mad, and for what

She took almost pornographic glee in this, the way I just fell on my face in front of anyone who held sway over me. There I was pinned down and squirming into a telephone with her jamming fingers into my ribs and making faces while I tried to talk to my boss’s boss’s boss.

He was saying spreadsheets and buzzwords and she had her hand clapped over her mouth with her face all gone red while I fought to be smart, which maybe I was but it never came across over the phone. It was like the warm hum of electromagnetism broke the language centers of my brain, leaving me backing into sentences and tripping over unneeded and unfunny asides.

I was thinking to myself good Lord just fire me already so I can get drunk and stop ironing shirts in the morning, but he wanted to know about sales indexes or something on a Saturday afternoon. I saw myself becoming this slowly, over a span of decades, with her laughing all around me and dancing from one foot to another. Her gray at the temples but tickling me on the phone, acknowledging how ridiculous I still felt after so many years to be taken as a serious adult. This was the kind of connection, her seeing what I couldn’t say out loud about myself, well I guess she understood me better and better.

Every day is the same exact day

Being a miserable person is easier when you have someone to share it with, but watch three or four Bill Murray movies in a row by yourself trying not to think about all your personal faults and you'll see too that it has an underneath effect, like hey it's slowly making notches in your bones that start to splinter and stick into the muscle. At least Peter Venkman was charming and funny on top of his thinly-veiled contempt. What redeems you with an audience is what I had to ask myself.

Every time I come home to bag out for awhile after the latest tragedy of being alive one of the dogs, name's Huxley, never knew me as a kid, well she follows me around all over. Right then she was pressed against the door to the spare bedroom whining accusations into the crack, and I thought how do you get an empty bottle of whiskey past her and everybody else and into the garbage without being put on suicide watch for secret drinking. I was full of questions, like what are you doing here anyways goddamn. People called, left messages about can I buy you some furniture at this yard sale. I'm sorry with a hint of I told you not to open a joint bank account. Stuff like that. I kept my phone off mostly.

You do a thing and then you keep doing a thing and then one day you find you can't do a thing anymore. You find you've compromised yourself one electron at a time, from the inside out, and now you're just an onion skin. That's the whole story, but you don't say a story like that aloud. Look I'm trying to write a warning here is what I put down on paper. I watched movies and I drank and I wrote things down, and I thought Steve Zissou, Frank Milo, Bob Harris, and Phil, they would understand. You don't say that aloud either.

Debtors' prison caught on fire

She had her back to me at the kitchen counter on purpose, which I could tell by the way her neck and back were arranged that this could go on and on. Her teeth were clenched or something and she grabbed the spatula and pulled it around the inside of the bowl with a violence that continued to make her point, that the cookies were enough of a Christmas gift and that was it.

I went outside and thought about smoking the joint in my front pocket that she didn’t know about, maybe let her have something worth really yelling for. There are things that are intractable anyway, and I didn’t much give a damn what she wanted our new holiday tradition to be when it drew so much attention to the fact that hey we’re Dickensian poor isn’t that adorable. If that’s pride then what.

My mind went around a million words while I stood there on the porch not smoking that joint and the clouds hanging over the city couldn’t figure between rain or sleet. I thought if I could get her to see, but the problem was I’d go back inside and say ten of those words, sputter and look away. So I stayed, and I thought about the plastic tree inside, cheaply made and shorter than I was but laden heavy with lights and plain ball ornaments and a few other ones, Santa playing tennis and Chewbacca and a dozen others, made special because they were given between us, how even the corniest of things could be the embodiment of love, so too with the cookies, and I went inside and I picked up that tree and threw it to the floor on my way into the bedroom.

January One

The way she kissed me was she leaned in real fast on that hotel bedroom, caught me by surprise. I had seen her at a booth in the bar downstairs in the smoking section. I watched her while I pretended to talk to my friends, and then we were here.

She didn’t take her dress off or anything, which this is the kind of thing I like. The mystery is more than good enough. She slapped at my chest, like counting time. Afterward she lay on me with her cheek on my lips, and I kissed it over and over. I didn’t know her last name, but I thought I could pick out every element of every atom of her.

We were like that, me kissing her cheek and her doing who knows what but breathing real soft, her hair spread over me like curtains, when the first fireworks went off. From the fourteenth floor we could see the whole city and those fireworks.

She shushed me, which I wasn’t talking by the way, and lifted herself. I followed her to the window. She put her right hand on the small of my back, the thing I was going to do. We could see the whole city and those fireworks, which was all we ever needed.

Who calls them stampies anyhow

She had this way of getting excited about the things I thought were mundane. We'd be in the art supply store and I would round a corner to see her on tiptoe and beaming, humming to herself looking at the different paper stock, just glad as hell to be alive when put me in the same position and I'd make a mockery of joy in the aisle. At home she'd put the paint in front of her nose before putting it on the palette, go on about how she loved the smell, which it was the way she had love for the smallest moments that made me love her in the smallest moments.

And don't think it was just the art stuff. Every errand we ran was done with deliberate, cheerful energy. She sang a song about writing the rent check while she wrote it, did a little dance with her shoulders. Here's the money for you, landlord, I hope you don't buy drugs with it. She wanted to hold hands and swing our arms like kids on the way to get toilet paper and cherry tomatoes, said tomatoes with an accent. These were folk music days, and our lives were simpler than the chords laid down on beaten old four-track machines and handed out for free at some coffeehouse down in the city.

A thing like that has got to end is a thing I like to think, and when I've had too much wine I might say it out loud to myself. No surprise, then, that we were walking out of the store with pens and a book of stamps and she's got tears in her eyes and I'm thinking to myself why the fuck do you have to criticize a thing you love? Is it just so everyone's as miserable as you? That's goddamn supervillainous thinking.

A second date that never ended until it did

She was wearing one of those floppy knit hats and a scarf, both baby blue but the scarf was yellowed a little like she used to smoke in it all the time. She leaned in real close, fogged up the driver-side window, and wrote “Hi.” I smiled, that real kind of smile that movie stars work on.

It started snowing while we drove. A little bit of dark hair poked out from behind her ear, and I looked over at it and tried to memorize how her neck looked at that angle. It’s the kind of thing I’m not in on that often, but she saw me and smiled and pushed my face back to facing the road with her finger. It smelled like coconut. Her finger I mean.

The snow caught on the windshield and melted. We talked about a lot of things, I can’t remember. She pronounced awry wrong, like aw-ree, and then we talked about words you only really see in crossword puzzles. Oner. Aver. Stuff like that.

Her laugh was a little hoarse, and I wanted to hear it until it hurt her throat and she had to gasp at me to stop, it’s not funny being funny. Just a car ride turned gold by the light of sodium vapor lamps on a wet road, somewhere downtown where the old houses met the newer buildings, and the bars on the windows faded away forever.

A letter to a former me

The right words can travel through time, and it’s never the ones you want. I love you and you bring a joy to my life where there was none, those words stay put, inert in time and space. You look beautiful today is a dead sentence without legs beyond the moment. But oh, you don’t even know what’s going to come sprawling backwards from a future you couldn’t even fathom while you sat here with her drinking coffee on the couch thinking I’m going to kiss her now or in a minute.

You don’t know it, but there’s poison in the air, an infection. I never needed you is sitting between the two of you on that cerulean couch cushion. If I have to choose I choose swirls in the ochre of your chipped tiki mug. Time travelers! Invisible sentences! But there nonetheless, stretched out over the entire span of the two of you, filmy and rough to the touch, standing ready to make sure you don’t even have good memories left when you walk away, which that’s all you’re going to want. Just wait until the pictures develop.

Go on, lean in for that kiss. I could say be careful, but I know you won’t be careful. You’ll still be drunk today like I am with the sun coming up thinking of this moment and seeing plainly the words my problems fell away when I was with him stitched into her eyebrows furrowed while she stared at something, you didn’t know what. She was staring at the things that you are going to say. Try not to know that when you put your hand at the nape of her neck and draw her in.

My mother was a fish

The way the light played around with everything you would think I never quit being amazed, but that’s all you get down here is sunlight skewing off every which way. I’ve got bigger things to worry about, like sudden shadows.

It was just kind of rocking on the surface, a big rectangle shape that was almost always a boat, but this one had a piece cut out of the bottom that the sun shone through. I swam up to it to see, because I never get to see things that way.

She was there on the boat, twig-bodied with her arms crossed stretched out on the glass in a brown bikini. I swam under, one eye on her, and she just watched me. She brushed some hair out of her face. It’s dangerous to stay in one place long, but I made to go around the boat again.

I took a long arc away and then cut quick back, came all the way up to where the two skies met, skimmed the bottom of the boat. When I saw her again she jumped back a little, which maybe I was too close but it hurt just the same.

Reasons to not look away

She had this one smile that you couldn’t catch on camera, just as futile as ghost photography. It was a real one, which you could tell by the way her cheeks would squeeze up into her eyes while she was in the middle of saying something she really thought was good, like she’d take a little pause or maybe just between syllables drop it in there real quick. You really had to watch her face for it, and just now I got it and it was like enough for the whole day.

The first course came, tuna sashimi for her, California roll for me. She liked to hassle me about this, called it baby’s first sushi. She would try to sneak wasabi into my next bite when I wasn’t looking. She was always so playful here, like the chopsticks brought some hidden joy out. I fumbled with them, but come on you can’t retreat to the fork before the entrée.

Nobody ever came here except to sit at the part where they cooked the food in front of you, so we were in a booth in the abandoned corner and we could hear the music that was drowned out everywhere else by the sound of knives and spatulas hitting rhythms on stainless steel, which it was some pointless mix of bad jazz and that Japanese harp stuff. We laughed at this and everything else.

The days were hard. We didn’t sleep touching at night. The bill we couldn’t really afford was inherent in this moment. But that all didn’t matter.

The daydream girl

These kinds of things always seem to happen to me. A girl falls fourteen stories, yeah, she’s gonna land on my car. And there she is, all nestled in the hood that’s wrapped her up like warm blankets, kind of half-smiling but you know something’s off because her neck’s turned a little funny, but get this, eyes closed, no blood, just a beautiful, sad girl in a red sun dress asleep on my car. It’s enough to make a guy drop his latte. Really just a special moment.

I imagine it sounded like when you push on a cookie sheet and then it pops back into place, but deeper. I was on the wrong side of a plate-glass window at the time and didn’t hear anything. She just came into the frame and disappeared into my car the way a stone wrapped in a red flag would, say China’s. What I instead heard was the air being sucked out of the room by a dozen coffee-breathed mouths and one “Oh God.”

Everybody kind of stayed put, but I got up and walked over to the door and opened it. My car was honking that slow, plaintive alarm that comes factory-installed, not one of those aftermarket sirens that are only good for scaring cats away. I remembered I’d left my keys inside on the table. I thought the horn fit, anyway—I was just going to turn it off because that’s how we maintain social order.

I looked at her for a long time. She had nice skin, almost translucent. Her shoes looked expensive. I’d say she looked like a model, but her nose was too big for it. There’s always something. People were gathering around, watching out of windows, you know, the way a city does when it isn’t something they can do anything about and therefore don’t have to ignore.

I thought this would be a great love story, if only, and maybe I did fall in love with her a little bit. Anyhow I couldn’t stop studying her face. The girl with dark hair and a secret. I wished she could fly.

On a date with the ghost of Christmas past

I said idealism is just stupidity putting on a brave face. I said words are just the way a brain aborts a thought. I said there's no such thing as truth and we're so busy looking because we're cowards shirking blame. You put a beer in my hand and look how invincible. Of course I wouldn't say these things if I believed them. Somebody asked how I met her and I wondered which story I should tell.

This was me surrounded by friends in a backyard on the hottest day of the year, which yeah that record would get broken every day for a few weeks. She was against the fence with a few other women, like lined up against the wall in junior high outside the bathroom before the first bell of the day. Social strata and all that. We were all sweating out in the scorched-earth suburbs where the only shade was manufactured because nature wasn’t part of the development plan. It takes dedication and a certain stubborn denial to say that this is the way to live.

I said what. I said we were planets set loose from a dead star and drawn into each other’s gravity. I said we met at a bar. I said we were going to meet in five minutes when I got the nerve to go over to the fence. I said our lives moved in every direction, forwards and backwards and crosswise and that asking me to explain was a pretty dumb idea because I was trying to get drunk here. People cheered and held up their drinks and we toasted. I choked it down.

If you're explaining then you're failing

Hello, Imaginary Audience. Before anything happens, let me tell you what's happening.

For the last six months, I've been writing these vignettes. They're all interconnected, although at present there is no concrete narrative sense to be made of it. They tell the story of a boy and a girl who meet, fall in love, and then slowly destroy each other and themselves. You can't tell a story like that in a linear fashion and be fair or really get at the truth of anything--there's just too much. So all of this happened in the context of their life, and none of it did, and that's that.

What you're reading is one person's struggle to make sense of his life through constructing fiction. These started in earnest when two things happened: first, I bought a typewriter, and I realized that there was so much power in filling up the real space of a sheet of paper. Word processors change things because they're infinite. This blog post has the potential to go on forever. But if I can capture a moment on a single page, and really invest myself in it, and at the end say that it was worth writing, well...

The other thing that happened is my life started falling apart. I felt numb at home, I felt cheated by the world around me, I felt like a misfit. I thought a lot about suicide. My marriage suffered for it, and now it is over. The details are my own, but in the last few months I have basically lost everything I ever thought gave me worth. I needed some way to explain all of these things, and these vignettes were all I had.

In the end I was still alive, and that felt good, which I can't honestly say I've felt that way in at least a decade. Today I am twenty-eight years old. Today is a day to begin sharing.