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.