Did you find religion, or was it just more ghosts?

On your birthday we were too busy trying to survive, so there was no dinner, no people tucked behind couches and kitchen counters desperate to yell surprise so they could go to the restroom or get another beer, no unmaking the bed by the force of our movement together. No, all that was left was the petty wish for more years, ones better than the one we were in.

I was going to get you a present. I thought you should know. I was going to throw myself from a very high place and set you free. I got all the way up there, though, and I looked down, and all I could see was you filling out paperwork and calling around to see who could take you to come get my car. I thought, as always, of how we met.

I drove out of the city, I drove west. The windmills there were lining the hills, making lazy pronouncements about what it is to be alive, American, pretending at control. I thought that maybe they were angels, but they weren’t. It didn’t make the things they were saying any less of a miracle.

Proprioception and the modern man

Our ghost mostly lived in habits, in patterns, in the color of my toothbrush and the way I fold a towel and where I’m likely to sit on the couch. I would do these things and sometimes feel my leaves were rustling, not déjà vu exactly, but something like it.

Sometimes, though, our ghost would get into the phone lines or shake the dishes a little, like a train going by. Sometimes it went tearing through the living room or was on the ceiling staring down at me while I slept, which what do you do about that? I called an expert who came over, burned a few candles, said something like prayers, and then left in a huff, saying look, I don’t do metaphors. But it was a real enough haunting to me.

One day it started talking to me while I had the TV on mute during a Cosby show rerun. The closed captioning went to gibberish, and then it started in on me while Bill Huxtable made his exasperated faces. It said life is a puzzle box of well-oiled wood. It said being strong-willed is the same as being dumb. It said everything you’re going to do in being alive is just more cola wars, more senselessness, so what are you doing eating dry cereal in front of the television all your life. Then it said I can’t believe Vanessa’s dating a vegetarian, and that was the end of it.

Hypnogogic myoclonic twitch

I got a thing from her in the mail today, just some papers I needed along with a handwritten note. She had the handwriting of an articulate person, an extra layer of consideration over the words in the careful placement of dots and loops. Me, I had serial-killer handwriting, which this business always made me nuts about the stupidities of my character.

And it wasn’t like there wasn’t enough going through my head all day anyway with the whole mess. I was stuck in this category of people that were known for their weeping and for their bitter asides. No amount of paperwork signed was going to make that go away is a thought we maybe shared from our opposite sides of town. Or not. Or whatever.

Days like this one I would make it out the door and suddenly my finger would worry after the missing ring, like skin and muscle and bone took a longer time with grief than the internal organs did. It was like when you’re about to fall asleep and then you’re falling and you wake up to a start. Anyway. The handwriting, the ring, the terse telepathy of it all. Being in this getting apart together, it was enough to make me weepy and bitter.

Warming my hands at the freshly burned bridge

I had that queasy feeling I sometimes get, or maybe it’s more just an anxious feeling, like it felt like something was going on right under the skin, like what, in the subdermal layer. This guy was talking to me in an overtly male way, he was pointing himself at me with words as if he were a gun. I thought of him as the kind of guy who would gesture with a drink in his hand, not worried about spills found the next day or whatever, but actually he was really conscientious about it, and the carpet stayed dry of his crown and coke while he asked me if I was a faggot.

Which I was not a faggot, and really I was one of those people who understood that a word like that had an unacceptable weight of hatred because words kind of made the world, gave things form, you know like will to power or whatever. This was about as good as I could have explained it at the time, and so when she laughed nervously and didn’t get boily angry along with me I kept quiet and stared hard into my drink and felt the feeling I was talking about at the beginning.

Look, nevermind, some things aren’t worth cataloging. Someone made me feel like a middle school chump at a party and I am here assigning blame like it’s fair. Like I’ve not said my own hateful things. Like she could even say or do anything to change this dumbfuck story that she’s not even really the issue of, by the way. So look, you can scratch all of this, scratch driving home shitty with drink, scratch the feeling of knowing we were not talking at that frozen moment at the red light while a bit of defrosted ice ran down the windshield like an escapee, scratch how upset and apologetic she was about a guy she didn’t even know who just happened to be at her friend’s party, how she bore the responsibility and shame and anger that belonged to someone else, and she bore it for me. Especially scratch that.

The truth about electron degeneracy pressure

I could feel it in the silence, which it was always silent and I generally didn’t much care, but there was something new in the unmattered space between the two of us, that same space that was so remarkable for always being nothing. If you want to believe that I’m capable of thought and emotion then believe that I thought and felt that getting closer always to her in a barely perceptible spiral eons in the making while she sent her constant message of love was good, a reason with enough merit to justify our dead corner of the universe.

What I felt was a weakening. I considered it carefully over the course of several thousand years while watching her surface spit and spark with plumes of orange and red. Never before had I bothered measuring the passage of time, but now it seemed important, vital even. I watched. And I spun. And I revolved. And things got worse.

Her messages stopped. It happened gradually, but it happened. I began to feel colder, and she seemed somehow smaller. Then her light became gray and stopped altogether. I was still drawn to her, though there was nothing to be drawn to but inert matter. I stopped considering us as being alive.

What forever means when you really mean it

She had this thing she would do where she would kiss the palm of my hand in the morning that was pretty great. The way her head turned away from me but still found me. Did I tell you this yet? I feel like I told you all this.

Okay I don’t care I’m telling it again. You have to picture it. The sun is coming in all over the room on account of how I never put up curtains. Curtains, they prompt me toward sleeping in. She is mostly on top of me, yeah you can figure why, but the real thing is that she takes my arm and raises it a few inches to her lips, and I see her there in profile, in silhouette, and it’s like ten in the morning and there’s no coffee brewing yet even but all the terrible things I’ve ever been through seem worthwhile in that single second, that image burned ferociously into my brain as this is what she is.

But look I feel like I am losing the point here, which is that the things that used to be true that are no longer true are no less true then. And I am sitting here punching myself repeatedly in the mouth with a drink, a double whiskey coke, trying to tell you this story like it is the answer to the whole question of what happened. Which that isn’t even a question is what I’m going to say after I finish this drink and come back with another. For now, though, I am going to sit and look out over the smoke-filled room and think how lovely, all these people, all this pain and stuff inside of them, how it doesn’t ever really get out, but how they keep trying.

I will steal you all the way away

It started out as a fluke, me lying in bed sleepless when the power went out. The silence of it got under my skin, got me thinking about things I’d been avoiding thinking about. Meanwhile the ceiling fan took its final gasping turn.

I got up to rummage through a drawer for a flashlight. It felt good grasping in secret, grasping in the dark. I decided burglary was probably for me. I thought hard about what she had that I wanted while I clicked the flashlight off and on several times, found and put on an old ski mask from the Halloweens of my youth, dug around my sock drawer looking for those wool gloves I thought I still had. The only thing I could come up with was my last name, which she had held on to more out of convenience than out of a desire for some vestigial connection. I decided if that’s all there was to steal, then I would steal it. All good capers seem impossible at the beginning.

I drove over there with the headlights off, found the spare key where we used to hide it together, let myself in with a soft click and the sound of wood rubbing against wood. Unfortunately she wasn’t home, which made the whole thing seem less dangerous and a little bit embarrassing. I had wanted her to watch from a chair in the darkened living room, puffing absently on a cigarette and waiting for me to notice until she clicked on the lamp and said so this is how it’s going to be.

Instead I went into her office that used to be our office and looked around. Where would she keep a last name? Probably somewhere on her skin, or under it. But that wouldn’t work at all. I went to the fridge and sat in front of it, door open, and drank most of her beer. It was one of those Mexican brands you find a lot out here, the kind the middle class drank as if they were slumming it. A couple hours went by like that. When I left, it was getting light out, I was stumbly drunk, and I had my pockets full of her business cards, every one I could find in the house. You couldn’t call it victory by any measure. But hey, it was something.