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.