A deferral worse than denial

I had the soapy aftertaste of bad coffee on my tongue, which seemed somehow relevant. My mind was always on these trivial disappointments, the low hum of the adult male’s disgust at himself and his lot in life drowning out anything truly devastating. Isn’t that just the way of everything.

Sometimes I liked to pretend that I didn’t have a body. Like what was I, like was I a ghost on the edge of the bed. I smoothed down a corner of the sheet, leaned forward, flicked my tie over and again so that it did a little pendulum arc out away from my body.

I stayed that way for centuries, my tie moving close and away, uncomfortable in my dad’s old suit. Dust settled thick and feathery on my shoulders. The bed rotted until it was a metal frame and rusty springs. Eventually the building sort of fell down into itself. But I stayed. She stayed, too, standing in the doorway, waiting for the answer to a question she’d never before been brave enough to ask. I’m sure she deserved an answer. I’m sure of it.



____________________

For the next few months I'm only going to be updating on Thursdays.  My PhD work is heating up, and I'm also working on short stories, so I've got to make some breathing room.

Let's make a meal of the memory

We were walking past the hard-packed husks of snowmen, sad little gumdrop lumps in the grass reminding us of the weekend’s tromping around ankle deep in our pajama pants and winter coats. Now it was sunshine and more sunshine, the kind a weatherman would smile about with big teeth and a tan wizened face pretending at youth. Well, let him smile, then. I cast my lot with the snowmen.

Oh you’re such a dramatic was what she said while we walked, her breath showing, as if the words were drifting off behind us. The beautiful thing about all of this is how the barriers between word and thought and the insides of each of us kind of broke down after awhile. How I didn’t have to say things out loud. The grass looked especial in its greenness. She said special worked just as well and was half as pretentious. She said think about what you’re typing as you type it, because you tend to overwrite.

I thought of a picture I’d seen once, a girl spitting a glass of water out in front of her toward the camera like a sprinkler in the late-day sun, colorful and strange and great. I wondered what it would be like to make a rainbow on command like that, whenever you wanted. She opened her mouth to talk and there it was, light refracting all around us in a million billion directions, ROYGBIV all over the place. I couldn’t help but smile.

Dye packs, radio transmitters, and other tools of unrequiting

When you crossed the state line I was sitting on the couch and weeping, reading the note your kidnappers had left over and over. It said that I may already have won, and then it listed a bunch of contest rules and exceptions. It all looked very official. I fell over sideways and pressed the paper against my face. It came away tear-stained in one of those patterns you could find a miracle in if you were the type.

But I was not the type. Days went by and there were no calls, no deep voices with lists of demands and snot-choked crying in the background. I would forget and pour two mugs of coffee, which that would set me off all over again. All my money was in a suitcase by the front door. I lived in the act of springing into action, every day the same panel of the same faded comic book.

The police all knew me by name. Some days they would take me out for coffee. As the weeks turned to months, though, they became curt and annoyed as I sat for hours in the lobby. The grief counselor I was seeing kept wanting to see the letter, in truth he was kind of a dick about it. He said things like look you have to realize and filtering your existence through a lens of denial and unhealthy unhealthy unhealthy all the time.

There you were, then, at the bank in line behind me trying not to be noticed, three years gone by, me with a suitcase and a deposit slip, you with just a deposit slip. My little Patty Hearst. I hung around and waited, watched everyone else in line to see your accomplices, your tormentors, but you just deposited your check and walked off, as if Dr. Gary were right. As if it was all just mythmaking. You’ll forgive me, I hope, for jumping the counter and banging around for the silent alarm until a security guard pinned me writhing to the floor.

A simulacrum of a simulacrum

One morning, I decided to make myself out of papier-mâché. I mean like really. I mean like this is how I came into being. What I did was I tore pages out of what would become my favorite books, soaked them in gin and whiskey and this really good chicken soup that I would attribute to my mother, who I made later out of clay and put in a sort-of shoebox diorama, another one of my craft project people.

Still wet, I went downtown with pages dropping off here and there since I wasn’t yet glued. It was okay, though. I had more, and I knew one bookstore where you could get whole stacks of remaindered books on the right day of the month, just laying there stripped naked of their covers. Mostly they were carted off by the homeless for starting fires. What I did after that was I went to the racetrack and made a deal with an open-mouthed gaping jockey for his losing racehorse.

The smell of long-boiling hide was maybe the worst of it, but I can still hear the sound of the dumb beast bleeding out. I felt sorry for it anyway, but that’s the way of things. I have to say that I came out lumpy and smelly and weird, which most real things turn out that way. Later, though, I got it right. I made a person with words.

_______

Sorry for the missed update.  You know.  School.  Sleep.  Etc.

The rhythms, the notes, the fear

We moved through songs together, all of them about and containing us. We put them on like shedding skin in reverse, stealing layer on layer of mutual identity until we understood what it was to be thick as thieves.

That’s how we found ourselves on a yellow-black Kawasaki, riding into the Western sun and feeling like pirates. Or how I knew she was born with flowers in her eyes. Or us together on a piece of construction equipment with spray paint, a deck of cards, and a bottle of something while paper birds flew over our heads. These things, they were ours through the transitive property. That’s how songs are written.

How long can a thing like that keep up? We should have known. We should have been aware. You can’t flee forever in song, and we perhaps grew desperate as time went on. She became a gun street girl, I got lost in Ybor City. Or we just saw how we kidded ourselves. Now I sleep in headphones and wish it hadn’t happened this way, wanting that life back, the one we lived three minutes at a time.

Starve a cold, feed a fever

It was one of those days where the temperature took a header into an empty swimming pool, the weather outside practically screaming at summer to fuck off for nine months. We were at a party in one of those shabby old outskirts homes, a warm kind of sixth or seventh owner place that had a history that didn’t need to be known to be felt, sitting slouched on a slouching couch, both of us bored and looking over the filled bookshelves to see if the host was really worth talking to, which from the looks of it she was, and I suddenly said we missed out on getting the last snow cone of summer.

She said yeah, but it was an animatronic answer. The party around us was clumped into groups the way a party does until about four or five drinks. We weren’t sad exactly. We weren’t left out exactly, either. People would peal off and talk to us for a bit here and there. What it was, it was, it was, was we were a blank.

Which it’s the between moments that are hardest to articulate, I guess. Nothing was wrong save a poorness in the quality of the air that we breathed. The atmosphere stood in the middle of us is what. If either of us were to say it aloud it would be met with a hand on the shoulder and half-felt reassurance. Besides, you don’t give things a chance to collapse at a party. It’s bad etiquette.